ause Homer is dying--you've abandoned
pretense, come out in the open."

"Not all the way out, not yet. You've still got some shocks coming,
Uncle Phil."

"I don't doubt it, you young hoodlum. You were pretty overwhelming there
for a few minutes. But why all the mystery? Why not just tell me?"

"You explained why."

"Overwhelming? Are you that terrific?"

"I'm a humdinger, Bub. Think you can stand it now?"

"I think the full blast would be better than any more of your 'gentle'
hints."

"That's what you think." Come now, the first shock had been fairly
neatly delivered and fielded after all, the concept of difference
proposed, established and accepted. "Well, here goes. You remember
that spray of flowers I handed you in the car that night?"

"I've had my suspicions about them ever since."

"O. K.--now smell this pine cone."

Phil looked at it with distrust.

"The thing that beats me is how I can be morally certain that pine cone
is loaded, cocked, and ready to fire, and yet I take it," he let Tim put
it in his hand, "and smell it." He raised it to his nostrils, held his
breath for a moment, then gingerly sniffed.

* * * * *

Time stopped.

All sense of duration was gone. Awareness drifted in formless
inattention until a focal point, a mere nucleus of intellect, captured
and held it. The nucleus strengthened, became an impression of
identity--not his own identity, nor any that he knew, but that of
some Other. From this other presence came insistently the warmth and
gentleness of good will, an unreserved outpouring that sought to evoke
an unreserved response.

Isolation, the sanctum of the mind, took the assault, melting like an
ice-castle in the sun--but before the tempting surrender could become
irrevocable alarms rang through his being and his mind gathered in on
itself in confusion, holding its isolation intact and inviolate. Through
the opposing desires to yield and to withhold, to break barriers down
and to raise them up, he detected from the Other a reaction both of pity
and of revulsion. The pressure decreased. He knew then that what he
yielded willingly would be accepted as sufficient, and no more be asked
of him than he was capable of giving. Somehow, it was not a victory, but
a defeat.

He became aware that the private domain he had claimed for his own was
truly his own, a corridored, compartmented, dungeoned storehouse of
filed fancies and forgotten files. A t