fire, flopping down on his side, with his belly toward the heat of it. His eyes watched Merry and Jeebee sleepily.
“Will he stay now?” Merry asked. There was a gentle look on her face that Jeebee had never seen there before.
“Overnight, probably,” said Jeebee.
They settled down again to their talking by the fire.
It was astonishing, thought Jeebee, how much there was to know about her. How much he wanted to know about her. He had not talked at extended lengths like this for a long, long time. He had had long discussions back at the study group, but they had not been like what was going on here and now, a close, warm thing. Not only intellectually, but emotionally, he wanted it to go on forever. Somewhere along in the talk, Jeebee looked over and saw there were only the two of them here now. The fire had died down and darkness now hid the location of the horses.
“Wolf’s gone,” he said, reaching for a torch made of dry twigs bound together. “We’d better check the packs. We don’t want him tearing them apart.”
“Are you sure he’d do that?” Merry asked.
Jeebee nodded. “I think it’s instinctive for him to chew things up. That’s something else those wolf books might be able to tell me.”
He pushed the far end of his torch into the glowing coals of the fire and they blazed up almost immediately. By its light they went back together to examine the packs and horses. The horses were alert and all facing in another direction. But nothing seemed to have been touched.
They were about halfway back to the fire when Jeebee’s torch reached the water-soaked end that made its handle and burned itself out. Merry stumbled in the abrupt darkness and blundered against Jeebee, who reached out to catch her automatically.
He was suddenly holding her, and without thought, without any conscious plan of any kind, he found himself tightening his arms around her; and a moment later finding her lips in the darkness and kissing them.
She shoved against him, in an attempt to break away, but the effort did not last. It died before her full strength tore her loose.
She stood for a long second, merely letting herself be kissed. Then, slowly, Jeebee felt her arms closing around his own back and holding him to her. Then she was kissing back.
For a long moment they held together. Abruptly, with a furious push, she broke loose completely from his arms, turned, and stumbled rapidly over the night-hidden ground toward the fire. He followed slowly.
When he stepped once more into the open firelight of the little clearing where they had settled for the night, she was standing on the other side of the dying fire with her back to him. He stopped, not knowing what to do or what to say.
Neither one of them spoke. The fire crackled and sparks flew up between them, toward the stars.
“Well,” said Merry in a thick voice, “now you know!”
“Know what?” Jeebee said dazedly. What he had done was not like him. But her reaction had been equally unexpected.
“That I’m just as human as you are!” Merry said, still without turning around. “Damn you, stay away from me, or I’ll kill you.”
Jeebee was lost in his own inexperience and bewilderment. He did not understand her and he did not understand himself. He was lost. Only, he realized he had wanted to give in to his own impulsive action of a moment before for a long time now.
“If that’s what you want,” he said numbly.
“That’s what I want!” said Merry, still talking to the dark woods in front of her. “You’re leaving us in a few days!”
“You could come with me,” said Jeebee, in spite of himself and all Nick had said, suddenly reckless.
“I can’t leave the wagon,” she said fiercely. “You know that! Just like you know I don’t have a chance to stay anywhere or meet anyone. You know!”
“It isn’t that,” said Jeebee, not exactly sure himself what he was talking about, but protesting against the emotion in her voice rather than the words she was saying. “I just—”
“You just go your way and I’ll go mine!” Merry turned around and looked at him through the firelight. “I mean that. I mean every word of it!”
Jeebee shook his head, not in denial but simply because he could think of nothing else to do. He sat down cross-legged on his side of the fire, as if to appease her by not seeming to stand over her, in spite of the space and fire between them. She turned aside without a word, went to their supplies, and put a fresh, homemade, and traded-for candle into the lantern she had brought with her, then set it aside and went to her sleeping bag on its air mattress. She sat down, took off her boots but nothing else, and lay down on her side in the sleeping bag, zipping it up tightly.
Jeebee was left sitting on the ground and staring into the fire. He sat staring for a long time, finding no answer to anything there—or anyplace else for that matter.
CHAPTER 15
In the next five days it took them to find the experimental seed farm, Merry never came within six feet of Jeebee. On his part, he was careful to make no move that would seem as if he was trying to intrude into that zone of privacy she had established around herself. In all other ways she acted as if the moment with Jeebee had never taken place. She ignored it so successfully and completely that Jeebee found himself at times almost doubting that it had happened. Only the continuing space between them testified to the fact that it had.
They avoided the small town of Wayne itself, when they came close at last to their destination, just as they had avoided all other dwellings or evidence of human habitation on the rest of the trip. Jeebee’s map included enough landscape features to plot a point-to-point course that intersected the major east-west highway through Wayne several miles west of the town. Merry had wondered why they hadn’t headed directly for Wayne, and Jeebee explained that since they were most likely to miss it in any event, it would save time if they knew for certain whether they’d erred to the east or to the west. Comfortably west of the town and its possible inhabitants, they could circle north and zigzag until they hit the seed farm.
They circled the invisible location of Wayne accordingly, and their zigzagging eventually brought them to the seed farm. They almost walked through a corner of its land without realizing it. Only the fact that it was open territory made them stop and look more closely. Some young bushes and immature saplings masked even this openness to a certain extent; but when they checked, it became clear that between and around this heavier vegetation were what had been organized plantings.
Working around it, they came to identify plots that had been planted with one kind of seed or another—areas in which the rowed stalks of plants even now towered above the weeds of late spring. The plots varied from something like ten to eighty acres in size and were separated one from another by open areas where only weeds flourished.
“I was told these were buffer zones,” Jeebee explained to Merry. “They marked off one experimental area from another, and they also acted as roads, in effect, on which harvesting and other machinery could get at the plots.”
Eventually they came to what seemed to be the only building on the property. It had been visible from some distance, because it was not a small structure. But like Wolf, like all people nowadays, they made any approach to a strange structure cautiously.
It was a large building of iron, with a corrugated metal roof and metal siding. It was about a hundred and fifty feet long and as high as the average barn. From a distance it looked untouched; and after examining it through their binoculars with as much wariness as Wolf, himself, might have shown, they decided to wait a night. It would be wise to see if there was any light or movement around it after dark.
So they camped in some trees at the edge of the open land, and during the night hours took turns keeping a watch on it. But nothing showed to indicate that anyone was there, so with the first predawn light to aid them, they
