She patted the bench with a fragile hand. 'Here, sit down beside me and let us talk awhile. Jed has chores to do and Alice will have to cook the supper. But I am old and lazy and I only sit and talk.'
Now that she talked, her eyes were brighter, but the calmness was still in them.
'We knew you would come someday,' she said. 'We knew someone would come. For surely those who are outside would hunt their mutant kin.'
'We found you,' David said, 'quite by accident.' 'We? There are others of you?'
'The others went away. They were not human and they were not interested.'
'But you stayed,' she said. 'You thought there would be things to find. Great secrets to he learned.'
'I stayed,' said David, 'because I had to stay.'
'But the secrets? The glory and the power?'
David shook his head. 'I don't think I thought of that. Not of power and glory. But there must be something else. You sense it walking in the village and looking at the homes. You sense a certain truth.' 'Truth,' the old lady said. 'Yes, we found the Truth.' And the way she said it Truth was capitalized.
He looked quickly at her and she sensed the unspoken, unguarded question that flicked across his mind.
'No,' she told him, 'not religion. Just Truth. The plain and simple Truth.'
He almost believed her, for there was a quiet conviction in the way she said it, a deep and solid surety.
'The truth of what?' he asked.
'Why, Truth,' the old lady said. 'Just Truth.'
III
It would be, of course, something more than a simple truth. It would have nothing to do with machines, and it would concern neither power nor glory. It would be an inner truth, a mental or a spiritual or a psychological truth that would have a deep and abiding meaning, the sort of truth that men had followed for years and even followed yet in the wish-worlds of their own creation.
The Human lay in the bed close beneath the roof and listened to the night wind that blew itself a lullaby along the eaves and shingles. The house was quiet and the world was quiet except for the singing wind. The world was quiet, and David Grahame could imagine, lying there, how the galaxy would gradually grow quiet under the magic and the spell of what these human-folk had found.
It must be great, he thought, this truth of theirs. It must be powerful and imagination-snaring and all- answering to send them back like this, to separate them from the striving of the galaxy and send them back to this pastoral life of achieved tranquillity in this alien valley, to make them grub the soil for food and cut the trees for warmth, to make them content with the little that they have.
To get along with that little, they must have much of something else, some deep inner conviction, some mystic inner knowledge that has spelled out to them a meaning to their lives, to the mere fact and living of their lives, that no one else can have.
He lay on the bed and pulled the covers up more comfortably about him and hugged himself with inner satisfaction.
Man cowered in one corner of the galactic empire, a maker of gadgets, tolerated only because he was a maker of gadgets and because the other races never could be sure what he might come up with next; so they tolerated him and threw him crumbs enough to keep him friendly but wasted scant courtesy upon him.
Now, finally, Man had something that would win him a place in the respect and the dignity of the galaxy. For a truth is a thing to be respected.
Peace came to him and he would not let it in but fought against it so that he could think, so that he could speculate, imagining first that this must be the truth that the mutant race had found, then abandoning that idea for one that was even better.
Finally the lullabying wind and the sense of peace and the tiredness of his body prevailed against him and he slept.
The last thought that he had was, I must ask them. I must find out.
But it was days before he asked them, for he sensed that they were watching, and he knew that they wondered if he could be trusted with the truth and if he was worthy of it.
He wished to stay; but for politeness' sake he said that he must go and raised no great objection when they said that he must stay. It was as if each one of them knew this was a racial ritual that must be observed, and all were glad, once it was over and done with.
He worked in the fields with Jed and got to know the neighbors up and down the valley; he sat long evenings talking with Jed and his mother and the daughter and with the other valley folk who dropped in to pass a word or two.
He had expected that they would ask him questions, but they did not; it was almost as if they didn't care, as if they so loved this valley where they lived that they did not even think about the teeming galaxy their far ancestors had left behind to seek here on this world a destiny that was better than common human destiny.
He did not ask them questions, either, for he felt them watching him, and he was afraid that questions would send them fleeing from the strangeness of him.
But he was not a stranger. It took him only a day or two to know that he could be one of them, and so he made himself become one of them and sat for long hours and talked of common gossip that ran up and down the valley, and it was all kindly gossip. He learned many things-that there were other valleys where other people lived, that the silent, deserted village was something they did not fret about, although each of them seemed to know exactly what it was, that they had no ambition and no hope beyond this life of theirs, and all were well content.
He grew content himself, content with the rose-gray mornings, with the dignity of labor, with the pride of growing things. But even as he grew content, he knew he could not be content, that he must find the truth they had found and must carry that truth back to the wait- ing galaxy. Before long a ship would be coming out to explore the village and to study it and before the ship arrived he must know the answer; when the ship arrived he must be standing on the ridge above the village to tell them what he'd found.
One day Jed asked him, 'You will be staying with us?'
David shook his head. 'I have to go back, Jed. I would like to stay, but I must go back.'
Jed spoke slowly, calmly. 'You want the Truth? That's it?' 'If you will give it to me,' David said.
'It is yours to have,' said Jed. 'You will not take it back.'
That night Jed said to his daughter, 'Alice, teach David how to read our writing. It is time he knew.'
In the corner by the fireplace the old lady sat rocking in her chair. 'Aye,' she said. 'It is time he read the Truth.'
IV
The key had come by special messenger from its custodian five valleys distant, and now Jed held it in his hand and slid it into the lock of the door in the building that stood in the center of the old, quiet, long-deserted village.
'This is the first time,' Jed said, 'that the door has been opened except for the ritualistic reading. Each hundred years the door is opened and the Truth is read so that those who are then living may know that it is so.'
He turned the key and David heard the click of the tumblers turning in the lock.
'That way,' said Jed, 'we keep it actual fact. We do not allow it to become a myth.
'It is,' he said, 'too important a thing to become a myth.'
Jed turned the latch and the door swung open just an inch or two.
'I said ritualistic reading,' he said, 'and perhaps that is not quite right. There is no ritual to it. Three persons are chosen and they come here on the appointed day and each of them reads the Truth and then they go back as
