ose of the mother.
Gently John Rush tugged those hands away and led them toward their own
bed. The small hands were cold in his own and he felt a tiny feeling of
revulsion as they tightened. Then the feeling slipped away and was
replaced--as if a current had crossed from their hands to his. It was a
warm feeling--one that he had known before when they touched him, but
for which he had never been able to find mental words to express the
sensation.

Slowly he helped them undress. When they were in the single bed he
covered them with the top sheet. Their milky eyes surveyed him,
unseeing, somehow withdrawn.

"I have not known you well," he said. "I left that to her. I have sat
and brooded and buried myself in the earth until it is too late for much
else." He touched the small heads. "I wish you could hear me. I wish ..."

Outside on the road a truck roared past. Instinctively he set to hear
it. The faces below him did not change.

He turned away quickly then and went back out on the porch. He filled
his pipe and sat down in the old, creaky rocker. A tiny rain had begun
to fall hesitantly--as if afraid of striking the sun-hardened ground.

_Somewhere out there, somewhere hunted, but not found, the plumbers
gathered. There had been a man--what was his name? Masser--that was it.
He had been working on a way to inhibit radioactivity--speed up the
half-life until they had taken the grant away. If a man can do whatever
he thinks of--can he undo that which he has done?_

_Masser was the theoreticist--I was the applier, the one who translated
equations into cold blueprints. And I was good until they ..._

They had hounded him back to the land when he quit. Others had not been
so lucky. When a whole people panic then an object for their hate must
be found. A naming. An immediate object. He remembered the newspaper
story that began: "They lynched twelve men, twelve ex-men, in New Mexico
last night ..."

_Have I been wrong? Have I done the right thing?_ He remembered the tiny
hands in his own, the blind eyes.

_Those hands. Why do they make me feel like ..._

He let his head slide back against the padded top of the rocking chair
and fell into a light, uneasy sleep.

The dreams came as they had before. Tiny, inhumanly capable hands
clutched at him and the sun was hot above. There was a background sound
of hydrogen bombs, heard mutely. He looked down at the hands that
touched and asked something of his own. The eyes were n