'Well!' Salla sighed happily as she pushed back her heavy hair with wet hands. 'This is where it begins.' 'Yes.' I closed my hand around the dime and watched the light spray between my fingers. 'Wetly, I might point out.' Salla was scrambling across the sand on all fours. 'It's high enough to stand,' I said, following her. 'I'm being a cave creature,' she smiled back over her shoulder. 'Not a human surveying a kingdom. It looks different from down here.' 'Okay, troglodyte. How does it look down there?' 'Marvelous!' Salla's voice was very soft; 'Bring the light and look!' We lay on our stomachs and peered into the tiny tunnel, hardly a foot across, that Salla had found. I focused the light down the narrow passageway. The whole thing was a lacy network of delicate crystals, white, clear, rosy and pale green, so fragile that I held my breath lest they break. The longer I looked the more wonder I saw- miniature forests and snowflakelike laciness, flights of fairy steps, castles and spires, flowers terraced up gentle hill sides and branches of blossoms almost alive enough to sway. An arm's length down the tunnel a quietly bright pool reflected the perfection around it to double the enchantment. Salla and I looked at each other, our faces so close together that we were mirrored in each other's eyes- eyes that stated and reaffirmed: Ours-no one else in all the universe shares this spot with us. Wordlessly we sat back on the sand. I don't know about Salla, but I was having a little difficulty with my breathing, because, for some odd reason, it seemed necessary to hold my breath to shield from being as easily read as a child. 'Let's leave the light,' Salla whispered. 'It'll stay lighted without you, won't it?' 'Yeah. Indefinitely.' 'Leave it by the little cave. Then we'll know it's always lighted and lovely.' We edged our way out of the cleft in the cliff and hovered there for a minute, laughing at our bedraggled appearance. Then we headed for home and dry clothes. 'I wish Obla could see the cave,' I said impulsively. Then wished I hadn't because I caught Salla's immediate displeased protest. 'I mean,' I said awkwardly, 'she never gets to see-' I broke off. After all she wouldn't be able to see any better if she were there. I would have to be her eyes. 'Obla.' Salla wasn't vocalizing now. 'She's very near to you.' 'She's almost my second self.' 'A relative?' 'No. Only as souls are related.' 'I can feel her in your thoughts so often. And yet-have I ever met her?' 'No. She doesn't meet people.' I was holding in my mind the clean uncluttered strength of Obla; then again I caught Salla's distressed protest and her feeling of being excluded, before she shielded. Still I hesitated. I didn't want to share. Obla was more an expression of myself than a separate person. An expression that was hidden and precious. I was afraid to share-afraid that it might be like touching a finger to a fragile chemical fern in the little tunnel, that there wouldn't even be a ping before the perfection shivered to a shapeless powder. Two weeks after the ship arrived a general Group meeting was called. We all gathered on the flat around the ship. It looked like a field day at first, with the flat filled with laughing lifting children playing tag above the heads of the more sedate elders. The kids my age clustered at one side, tugged toward playing tag, too, but restrained because after all you do outgrow some things-when people are looking. I sat there with them, feeling an emptiness beside me. Salla was with her parents. The Oldest was not there. He was at home struggling to contain his being in the broken body that was becoming more and more a dissolving prison. So Jemmy called us to attention. 'Long-drawn periods of indecision are not good,' he said without preliminary. 'The ship has been here two weeks. We have all faced our problem-to go or to stay. There are many of us who have not yet come to a decision. This we must do soon. The ship will up a week from today. To help us decide we are now open to brief statements pro or con.' There was an odd tightening feeling as the whole Group flowed into a common thought stream and became a single unit instead of a mass of individuals. 'I will go.' It was the thought of the Oldest from his bed back in the Canyon. 'The new Home has the means to help me, so that the years yet allotted to me may be nearly painless. Since the Crossing-' He broke off, flashing an amused. ' 'Brief'!' 'I will stay.' It was the voice of one of the young girls from Bendo. 'We have only started to make Bendo a place fit to live in. I like beginnings. The new Home sounds finished, to me.' 'I don't want to go away,' a very young voice piped. 'My radishes are just coming up and I hafta water them all the time. They'd die if I left.' Amusement tippled through the Group and relaxed us. 'I'll go.' It was Matt, called back from Tech by the ship's arrival. 'In the Home my field of specialization has developed far beyond what we have at Tech or anywhere else. But I'm coming back.' 'There can be no free and easy passage back and forth between the Home and Earth,' Jemmy warned, 'for a number of very valid reasons.' 'I'll chance it,' Matt said. 'I'll make it back.' 'I'm staying,' the Francher kid said. ''Here on Earth we're different with a plus. There we'd be different with a minus. What we can do and do well won't be special there. I don't want to go where I'd be making ABC songs. I want my music to go on being big.' 'I'm going,' Jake said, his voice mocking as usual. 'I'm through horsing around. I'm going to become a solid citizen. But I want to go in for-' His verbalization stopped, and all I could comprehend was an angular sort of concept wound with time and space as with serpentine. I saw my own blankness on the faces around me and felt a little less stupid. 'See,' Jake said. 'That's what I've been having on the tip of my mind for a long time. Shua tells me they've got a fair beginning on it there. I'll be willing to ABC it for a while for a chance at something like that.' I cleared my throat. Here was my chance to broadcast to the whole Group what I intended to do! Apparently I was the only one seeing the situation clearly enough. 'I-' It was as though I'd stepped into a dense fog bank. I felt as though I'd gone blind and dumb at one stroke. I had a feeling of being torn like a piece of paper. I lost all my breath as I became vividly conscious of my actual thoughts. I didn't want to go! I was snatched into a mad whirlpool of thoughts at this realization. How could I stay after all I'd said? How could I go and know Earth no more? How could I stay and let Salla go? How could I go and leave Obla behind? Dimly I heard someone else's voice finishing: '… because Home or no Home, this is Home to me!' I closed my gaping wordless mouth and wet my dry lips. I could see again-see the Group slowly dissolving- the Bendo Group gathering together under the trees, the rest drifting away from the flat. Low leaned across the rock. 'S'matter, feller?' he laughed. 'Cat got your tongue? I expected a blast of eloquence from you that'd push the whole Group up the gangplank.' 'Bram's bashful!' Dita teased. 'He doesn't like to make his convictions known!' I tried a sort of smile. 'Pity me, people,' I said. 'Before you stands a creature shorn of convictions, nekkid as a jay bird in the cold winds of indecision.' 'Fresh out of long-johns,' Peter said, sobering. 'But there's plenty of sympathy available.' 'Thanks,' I said. 'Noted and appreciated.' I couldn't take my new doubt and indecision, the new tumult and pain to Obla-not when she was so much a part of it, so I took them up into the hills. I perched like a brooding buzzard on the stone spur outside the little cave, high above the Canyon. Wildly, until my throat ached and my voice croaked, I railed against this world and its limitations. Hoarsely I whispered over all the lets and hindrances that plagued us-that plagued me. And, infuriatingly, the world and all its echoes placidly paced my every argument with solid rebuttal. I was hearing with both ears now, one for my own voice, one for the world's reply. And my voice got fainter and fainter, and Earth's voice wasn't a whisper any more. 'Nothing is the way it should be!' I hoarsely yelled my last weary assault at the evening sky. 'And never will be, short of eternity,' replied the streak of sunset crimson.
