caught Chip's eye. He moved a chair to get a full view of it. The boulder, a mountain almost, floated above the earth in blue sky, meticulously painted and jarring to the senses. 'What an odd picture,' he said. 'A lot of them are odd,' Leopard said.
'The ones of Christ,' Hush said, 'show him with a light around his head, and he doesn't look human at all.'
'I've seen those,' Chip said, looking at the boulder, 'but I've never seen anything like this. It's fascinating; real and unreal at the same time.'
'You can't take it,' Snowflake said. 'We can't take anything that might be missed.'
Chip said, 'There's no place I could put it anyway.'
'How do you like being undertreated?' Sparrow asked.
Chip turned. Sparrow looked away, at her hands holding a roll of leaves and a knife. Hush was at the same task, chopping rapidly at a roll of leaves, cutting it into thin shreds that piled before her knife. Snowflake was sitting with a pipe in her mouth; Leopard was holding the heat coil in the bowl of it. 'It's wonderful,' Chip said. 'Literally. Full of wonders. More of them every day. I'm grateful to all of you.'
'We only did what we're told to,' Leopard said, smiling. 'We helped a brother.'
'Not exactly in the approved way,' Chip said.
Snowflake offered him her pipe. 'Are you ready to try a puff?' she asked.
He went to her and took it. The bowl of it was warm, the tobacco in it gray and smoking. He hesitated for a moment, smiled at them watching him, and put the stem to his lips. He sucked briefly at it and blew out smoke. The taste was strong but pleasant, surprisingly so. 'Not bad,' he said. He did it again with more assurance. Some of the smoke went into his throat and he coughed.
Leopard, going smiling to the doorway, said, 'I'll get you one of your own,' and went out.
Chip returned the pipe to Snowflake and, clearing his throat, sat down on a bench of dark worn wood. He watched Hush and Sparrow cutting the tobacco. Hush smiled at him. He said, 'Where do you get the seeds?'
'From the plants themselves,' she said.
'Where did you get the ones you started with?'
'King had them.'
'What did I have?' King asked, coming in, tall and lean and bright-eyed, a gold medallion chain-hung on his coveralled chest. He had Lilac behind him, his hand holding hers. Chip stood up. She looked at him, unusual, dark, beautiful, young.
'The tobacco seeds,' Hush said.
King offered his hand to Chip, smiling warmly. 'It's good to see you here,' he said. Chip shook his hand; its grip was firm and hearty. 'Really good to see a new face in the group,' King said. 'Especially a male one, to help me keep these pre-U women in their proper place!'
'Huh,' Snowflake said.
'It's good to be here,' Chip said, pleased by King's friendliness. His coldness when Chip left his office must have been only a pretense, for the sake, of course, of the onlooking doctors. 'Thank you,' Chip said. 'For everything. Both of you.'
Lilac said, 'I'm very glad, Chip.' Her hand was still held by King's. She was darker than normal, a lovely near-brown touched with rose. Her eyes were large and almost level, her lips pink and soft-looking. She turned away and said, 'Hello, Snowflake.' She drew her hand from King's and went to Snow-flake and kissed her cheek.
She was twenty or twenty-one, no more. The upper pockets of her coveralls had something in them, giving her the breasted look of the women Karl had drawn. It was a strange, mysteriously alluring look.
'Are you beginning to feel different now, Chip?' King asked. He was at the table, bending and putting tobacco into the bowl of a pipe.
'Yes, enormously,' Chip said. 'It's everything you said it would be.'
Leopard came in and said, 'Here you are, Chip.' He gave him a yellow thick-bowled pipe with an amber stem. Chip thanked him and tried the feel of it; it was comfortable in his hand and comfortable to his lips. He took it to the table, and King, his gold medallion swinging, showed him the right way to fill it.
Leopard took him through the staff section of the museum, showing him other storerooms, the conference room, and various offices and workrooms. 'It's a good idea,' he said, 'for someone to keep rough track of who goes where during these get-togethers, and then check around later and make sure nothing is conspicuously out of place. The girls could be a little more careful than they are. I generally do it, and when I'm gone perhaps you'll take over the job. Normals aren't quite as unobservant as we'd like them to be.'
'Are you being transferred?' Chip asked.
'Oh no,' Leopard said. 'I'll be dying soon. I'm over sixty-two now, by almost three months. So is Hush.'
'I'm sorry,' Chip said.
'So are we,' Leopard said, 'but nobody lives forever. Tobacco ashes are a danger, of course, but everyone's good about that. You don't have to worry about the smell; the air conditioning goes on at seven-forty and whips it right out; I stayed one morning and made sure. Sparrow's going to take over the tobacco growing. We dry the leaves right here, in back of the hot-water tank; I'll show you.'
When they got back to the storeroom, King and Snowflake were sitting opposite each other astride a bench, playing intently at a mechanical game of some kind that lay between them. Hush was dozing in her chair and Lilac was crouched at the verge of the mass of relics, taking books one at a time from a carton, looking at them, and putting them in a pile on the floor. Sparrow wasn't there. 'What's that?' Leopard asked.
'New game that came in,' Snowflake said, not looking up.
There were levers that they pressed and released, one for each hand, making little paddles hit a rusted ball back and forth on a rimmed metal board. The paddles, some of them broken, squeaked as they swung. The ball bounded this way and that and came to a stop in a depression at King's end of the board. 'Five!' Snowflake cried. 'There you are, brother!'
Hush opened her eyes, looked at them, and closed them again. 'Losing's the same as winning,' King said, lighting his pipe with a metal lighter. 'Like hate it is,' Snowflake said. 'Chip? Come on, you're next.'
'No, I'll watch,' he said, smiling.
Leopard declined to play too, and King and Snowflake began another match. At a break in the play, when King had scored a point against Snowflake, Chip said, 'May I see the lighter?' and King gave it to him. A bird in flight was painted on the side of it; a duck, Chip thought. He had seen lighters in museums but had never worked one. He opened the hinged top and pushed his thumb against the ridged wheel. On the second try the wick flamed. He closed the lighter, looked at it all over, and at the next break handed it back to King.
He watched them play for another few moments and then moved away. He went over to the mass of relics and looked at it, and then moved nearer to Lilac. She looked up at him and smiled, putting a book on one of several piles beside her. 'I keep hoping to find one in the language,' she said, 'but they're always in the old ones.' He crouched and picked up the book she had just put down. On the spine of it were small letters: Bddda for dod. 'Hmm,' he said, shaking his head. He glanced through the old brown pages, at strange words and phrases: allvarlig, logmrska, dok tier pd brickorna. The double dots and little circles were over many of the letters. 'Some of them are enough like the language so that you can understand a word or two,' she said, 'but some of them are-well look at this one.' She showed him a book on which backward N's and rectangular open-bottomed characters were mixed in with ordinary P's and E's and O's. 'Now what does that mean?' she said, putting it down. 'It would be interesting to find one we could read,' he said, looking at her cheek's rose-brown smoothness. 'Yes, it would,' she said, 'but I think they were screened before they were sent here and that's why we can't.'
'You think they were screened?'
'There ought to be lots of them in the language,' she said. 'How could it have become the language if it wasn't the one most widely used?'
'Yes, of course,' he said. 'You're right.'
'I keep hoping, though,' she said, 'that there was a slip in the screening.' She frowned at a book and put it on a pile. Her filled pockets stirred with her movements, and suddenly they looked to Chip like empty pockets lying against round breasts, breasts like the ones Karl had drawn; the breasts, almost, of a pre-U woman. It was possible, considering her abnormal darkness and the various physical abnormalities of the lot of them. He looked at her face again, so as not to embarrass her if she really had them.
