you grew up. You have a suitcase along that certainly doesn't have bricks in it. You drop mysterious hints about something special."

Fuller's voice softened, his blue eyes turned anxious. "Just what have you got up your sleeve, Andy?"

Pearce looked away, pain, a sudden tightness in his chest. He said slowly, "Well, I'm taking a sort of trip, Dave. I ... I'm afraid I'm never going to see you and Ellen again."

"Andy!" Ellen's voice was a stricken whisper.

"Never see us again...." Fuller muttered blankly.

The symphony came to an end. There was a moment of strained quiet.

"What are you talking about, Andy?" Fuller demanded in hurt bewilderment. "Where are you going that you'll never see me and Ellen again?"

"It's a long story," Pearce said. He grinned faintly. "I mean that. It's a story that begins fifteen years in the past and ends some two thousand years in the future."

Fuller and Ellen were rigid, staring. Pearce drained the last of his beer and lighted a cigarette.

"In another way," he went on, "the story really begins right where we are now. This part of the woods always was a favorite spot of mine. I'd sneak off here to read books and magazines that I borrowed from a neighbor whose taste in literature was on the blood and thunder side—lucky for me. My uncle didn't like to see me reading, thought it a waste of time. But it was in the middle of the Depression, and there wasn't much else to do. Uncle was an intolerant old bird, a widower, and he wasn't happy about getting stuck with me. I didn't like it, either, but there didn't seem anything a twelve-year-old kid could do about it."

Pearce drew at his cigarette, his gray eyes squinting into distance. "Uncle's chicken farm was a lonely place, and in self-defense I guess I developed a lot more imagination than most kids my age. Most of the time I wasn't on the farm at all—except when Uncle gave me a spanking by way of a reminder. I was out on the deserts of Mars, or walking the streets of a lost city in Africa, or tracking down an international spy ring in London. This day-dreaming, as I can see now, was pretty important."

Fuller said impatiently, "But Andy, what on earth does this build-up have to do with the trip you're going to make?"

"Keep your shirt on," Pearce said. "You'll see."

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