ere a little afraid we would rub off the bloom. We just enjoyed it.

We must have talked about a thousand things that night and smoked a
couple of hundred cigarettes. After a while we started taking little
catnaps--we'd gotten too much off our chests and come to feel too
tranquil for even our excitement to keep us awake. I remember the first
time I dozed waking up with a cold start and grabbing for Mother--and
then hearing Pop and Alice gabbing in the dark, and remembering what had
happened, and relaxing again with a smile.

Of all things, Pop was saying, "Yep, I imagine Ray must be good to make
love to, murderers almost always are, they got the fire. It reminds me
of what a guy named Fred told me, one of our boys ..."

Mostly we took turns going to sleep, though I think there were times
when all three of us were snoozing. About the fifth time I woke up,
after some tighter shut-eye, the orange soup was back again outside and
Alice was snoring gently in the next seat and Pop was up and had one of
his knives out.

He was looking at his reflection in the viewport. His face gleamed. He
was rubbing butter into it.

"Another day, another pack of troubles," he said cheerfully.

The tone of his remark jangled my nerves, as that tone generally does
early in the morning. I squeezed my eyes. "Where are we?" I asked.

He poked his elbow toward the North America screen. The two green dots
were almost one.

"My God, we're practically there," Alice said for me. She'd waked fast,
Deathlands style.

"I know," Pop said, concentrating on what he was doing, "but I aim to be
shaved before they commence landing maneuvers."

"You think automatic will land us?" Alice asked. "What if we just start
circling around?"

"We can figure out what to do when it happens," Pop said, whittling away
at his chin. "Until then, I'm not interested. There's still a couple of
bottles of coffee in the sack. I've had mine."

I didn't join in this chit-chat because the green dots and Alice's first
remark had reminded me of a lot deeper reason for my jangled nerves than
Pop's cheerfulness. Night was gone, with its shielding cloak and its
feeling of being able to talk forever, and the naked day was here, with
its demands for action. It is not so difficult to change your whole
view of life when you are flying, or even bumping along above the ground
with friends who understand, but soon, I knew, I'd be down in the dust
with something I never wanted to see