a different kind came into his features, a fiendish kind of exaltation common enough in childhood, but often disturbing to adults.
It was shockingly disturbing to Durkin. Roused suddenly to consciousness in the middle of the kitchen floor he saw the great malicious child face staring in at him, and struggled frantically to rise, his eyes wild with terror.
There were other things Durkin did not understand, about energy, about time, about other worlds of life and purpose lying parallel to ours in undreamed of dimensions of space.
He did know that a single farmhouse in the path of a tornado could be uprooted and carried for miles through the sky. He knew that a fence could be leveled, a tree torn down and the rest of the countryside remain unscathed, even to the last sun-gilded haystack.
It was easy to understand how such things might be. But nothing had prepared Durkin’s mind for the disturbing and frightening parallel which a scientist might have drawn from a hurricane’s erratic course. He had no way of knowing that matter on the fringe of an atomic blast could be agitated abnormally, and pass into another dimension piecemeal.
He had no way of knowing that the desert at the edge of an atomic proving ground might decide suddenly to blossom like some multidimensional rose.
He had no way of knowing that size is a relative thing, varying with every matter dissolving energy shift in the physical universe, and that a house could be huge in one dimension, his own, and tiny in another, and might even indeed take on the aspect of a house built solely to delight the eye of childhood.
He had no way of knowing, for he had not heard the great eternal voices discussing it. The reddening of the rose meant nothing to him, the stars in their wheeling courses, the speculations of men like gods.
All time, all space is relative, Einstein had said. There is only one equation for energy, matter, light, fire, air—
And who knows how closely other dimensions may parallel ours?
Durkin had no way of knowing until the great dimpled hand reached in through the window and picked him up. Then, and only then, in one blinding flash of intuition, he guessed the truth.
Too late. The blade of grass was like a tendril rope, and it went so swiftly about Durkin’s throat he had no time to leap back. As he screamed and struggled a huge wet palm smothered his mouth, rumpled his hair, and squeezed the breath from his lungs. His struggles were of no avail.
Emotional impulses which later in life are filtered through reason and harden into social attitudes remain in children appallingly fluid and direct. A child identifies itself with its toys and it is very easy for a child to see a living, breathing adult human being in a doll which is in reality quite unlike the object of its love—or hate.
Kneeling beside the house, a child Durkin knew nothing about thought it all out for the barest instant, its body oddly bent. Then it leaned forward, and hung its hated foster father very carefully to a ceiling rafter in the precise middle of the house.
Ever so slowly the child arose, and the snowy-crested bird burst into song again, somewhere off in the distance. But Durkin knew nothing of that.
Two Way Destiny
She was kneeling when I saw her, her face half in shadows, her girlishly slender figure mirrored by the cool-running stream at her feet.
You’d think that on a planet like Dracona a man would be safe from shock. Between the fire mountains and the sea, and the snowy-crested birds that never stop singing you’d think that nothing could surprise him.
Remember Blake’s City and Garden, his New Jerusalem with its shining Eden just over the hill? Well—Dracona is just as tremendous as that, even though it’s all a garden wilderness with the city part left out.
Surely on Dracona there was enough nerve-tingling beauty everywhere to enchant a lad with my capacity for enjoyment. Why couldn’t I have accepted that beauty as a near approach to paradise, content in the knowledge that I was my own master under the stars? Why did I have to step into a forest clearing and let a slender pale girl strip away all of my defenses, leaving me as naked as a newborn babe to the great, roaring winds of unreason?
If I had shouted the question then and there the forest might have murmured in reply: “It’s because you haven’t seen a woman for so long. It’s because loneliness is a destructive blight, and you’re a young romantic fool.”
It might have shouted that to my mind, to the tumultuously pounding blood at my temples. But it wouldn’t have been a complete answer.
I knew she wasn’t from Earth the instant she raised her eyes, and looked at me. Mocking eyes she had, of a deep, lustrous violet, and her pale hair clustered in little, golden ringlets about her brow, giving her the tantalizingly defiant aspect of a woman with enough of the eternal tease in her to be secretly amused by her own beauty.
She was collecting zoological specimens in the pollen-scented Draconian dusk. Not me, especially. Just iridescent spider bats, darter birds with vermilion beaks, and flying lizards which measured forty-eight inches straight across their wing-tips.
To be strictly accurate—there was only one lizard. It was thrashing wildly about in the metallic net at her back, the glow from the stationary lure-light giving it the aspect of some fiery monster which she had enticed from its cave by her beauty, and trapped at the risk of her life.
As I returned her stare she blinked in amazement, then laughed outright, the gulfs between us dissolving in a sudden, warming intimacy that was like nothing I’d ever known before.
To keep the scales from dipping too cruelly to her side I threw in everything I had that could be weighed and measured. Mother Earth still gives her sons a good start physically. Surely I
