walked out on the whole business right then and kept my mouth shut. After all, it's no skin off my nose if we never go any further than the moon. I'm happier right here on terra firma, and I do mean terra. But, if I convince scientists, maybe I'll convince Edna.

So, for the last time, Professor Fronac and anybody else who's interested—if you really want to go places in the Solar System, you have to come down here to Massachusetts. You have to take a boat out on Cassowary Cove at night, every night, and wait. I'll help if you act halfway decent—and I'm sure Fatty Myers will do what he can—but it'll still add up to a whole lot of patience. Shoin wasn't dreefed in a riz. So they say.

Fatty had just told his assistant to take charge of the gas station that evening in March and walked slowly past the Winthrop store up to my grocery window. He waited till my wife was busy with a customer; then he caught my eye and pointed at his watch.

I shucked off my apron and pulled the heavy black sweater over my head. I had my raincoat in one hand and my fishing tackle in the other, and was just tip-toeing out when Edna saw me.

She came boiling around the counter and blocked the door with her right arm. "And where do you think you're going and leaving me to do the work of two?" she asked in that special sin-chasing voice she saves for my tip-toeing moments.

"Aw, Edna!" I said, trying to work up a grin. "I told you. Fatty's bought a new thirty-foot sloop he wants me to make sure will be in shape for the tourist trade this summer. It's dangerous for one man to sail a new boat alone at night."

"It's twice as dangerous for him with you along." She glared the grin off my face. "For the past thirty years, ever since we graduated from school, one unfailing recipe for trouble has been Paul Garland and Fatty Myers doing anything together. I still haven't forgotten the time he came over to help you install the new gas heater in our basement. You were in the hospital for five weeks and the street still looks crooked."

"The flashlight went out, Edna, and Fatty just struck a match to—"

"And what about the time, Mr. Garland," Louisa Capek, the customer, hit me from behind, "that you and Mr. Myers volunteered to shingle the church roof and fell through it on top of the minister? For eight Sundays he had to deliver sermons with his back in a cast and every one of them 'answering a fool according to his 

 Prev. P 2/25 next