tongue and grunted a laugh at myself. I caught my breath, then relaxed.
“Okay, Davy,” I said, “what are you doing out so early?”
“I haven’t been to bed,” Davy said. drifting out of the shadows. “Dad said I could try my scriber tonight. I just got it finished.”
“That thing?” I laughed up at him. “What could you scribe at night?”
“Well-” Davy sat down in the air above my blanket, rubbing his thumbs on the tiny box he was holding. “I thought it might be able to scribe dreams, but it won’t. Not enough verbalizing in them. I checked my whole family and used up half my scribe tape. Gotta make some more today!”
“Nasty break,” I said. “Back to the drawing boards, boy.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Davy said. “I tried it on your dreams-” He flipped up out of my casual swipe at him. “But I couldn’t get anything. So I ran a chill down your spine-“
“You rat,” I said, too lazy to resent it very much. “That’s why I woke up so hard and quick.”
“Yup,” he said, drifting back over me. “So I tried it on you awake. More concentrated thought patterns.”
“Hey!” I sat up slowly. “Concentrated thought?”
“Take this last part.” Davy drifted up again. There was a quacking gabble. “Ope!” he said. “Forgot the slowdown. Thoughts are fast. Now-“
And clearly and minutely, the way a voice sometimes sounds from a telephone receiver, I heard myself yelling, “Let’s leave, let’s get out of this crummy joint-“
“Davy!” ! yelled, hunching myself upward, encumbered as I was with blankets.
“Watch it! Watch it!” he cried, holding the scriber away from me as we tumbled in the air. “Group interest! I claim Group interest! With the ship here now-“
“Group interest, nothing!” I said as I finally got my hands on the scriber. “You’re forgetting privacy of thought- and the penalty for violation thereof.” I caught his flying thought and pushed the right area on the box to erase the record.
Dagnab!” said Davy, disgruntled. “My first invention and you erase my first recording on it.”
“Nasty break!” I said. Then I tossed the box to him. “But say!” I reached up and pulled him down to me. “Obla! Think about Obla and this screwy gadget!”
“Yeah!” His face lighted up, then blanked as he was snatched along by the train of thought. “Yeah! Obla-no audible voice
-” He had already forgotten me before the trees received him.
It wasn’t that I had been ashamed of my thoughts. It was only that they sounded so-so naked, made audible. I stood there, my hands flattened against the beautiful ship and felt my conviction solidify. “Let’s go. Let’s leave. If there isn’t room for us on this ship we can build others. Let’s find a real Home somewhere. Either find one or build one.”
I think it was at that moment that I began to say good-by to Earth, almost subconsciously beginning to sever the ties that bound me to it. Like the slow out-fanning of a lifting wing, the direction of my thoughts turned skyward. I lifted my eyes.
“This time next year,” I thought, “I won’t be watching morning lighting up Old Baldy.”
By midmorning the whole of the Group, including the whole Group from Bendo, which had been notified, was waiting on the hillside near the ship. There was very little audible speech and not much gaiety. The ship brought back too much of the past, and the dark streams of memory were coursing through the Group. I latched onto one stream and found only the shadows of the Crossing in it. “But the Home,” I interjected, “the Home before!”
Just then a glitter against the bulk of the ship drew our attention. The door was opening. There was a pause, and then there were the four of them, Salla and her parents and another older fellow. The slight glintings of their personal shields were securely about them, and, as they winced against the downpouring sun, their shields thickened above their heads and took on a deep blue tint.
The Oldest, his blind face turned to the ship, spoke on a Group stream.
“Welcome to the Group.” His thought was organ-toned and cordial “Thrice welcome among us. You are the first from the Home to follow us to Earth. We are eager for the news of our friends.”
There was a sudden babble of thoughts. “Is Anna with you? Is Mark? Is Santhy? Is Bediah?”
“Wait, wait-” The Father lifted his arms imploringly. “I cannot answer all of you at once except by saying-there are only the four of us in the ship.”
“Four!” The astonished thought almost lifted an echo from Baldy.
“Why, yes,” answered-he gave us his name-Shua. “My family and I and our Motiver here, Laam.”
“Then all the rest-?” Several of us slipped to our knees with the Sign trembling on our fingers.
“Oh no! No!” Shun was shocked. “No, we fared very well in our new Home. Almost all your friends await you eagerly. As you remember, ours was the group living adjacent to yours on the Home. Our Group and two others reached our new Home. Why, we brought this ship empty so we could take you all Home!”
“Home?” For a stunned moment the word hung almost visibly in the air above us.
Then, “Home!” The cry rose and swelled and broke to audibility as the whole Group took to the sky as one. It was such a jubilant ecstatic cry that it shook an echo sufficient to frighten a pair of blue jays from a clump of pines on the flat.
“Why they must all think the way I do!” I thought, astonished, as I joined in the upsurge and the jubilant chorus of the wordless Homeward song. Then I flatted a little as I wondered if any of them shared with me the sudden pang I had felt before. I tucked it quickly away, deep enough so that only a Sorter would be able to find it, and
