“And we’ll go back to your home, Basil, and bring Ansa and Terra together and have a dozen children and—”

  He nodded. “Sure. Sure.”

  But he wouldn’t forget. In the winter nights, when the stars were sharp and cold in a sky of ringing crystal black, he would—go out and watch them? Or pull his roof over him and wait for dawn? He didn’t know yet.

  Still—even if this was a long ways from being the best of all possible universes, it had enough in it to make a man glad of his day.

  He whistled softly, feeling the words ran through his head:

  Lift your glasses high,

  kiss the girls good-bye,

  (Live well, my friend, live well, live you well)

  for we’re riding,

  for we’re riding,

  for we’re riding out to Terran sky!

  Terran sky! Terran sky!

  The thought came all at once that it could be a song of comradeship, too.

  The Last of the Deliverers

  Till I was nine years old, we had a crazy man living in our town. He was almost a hundred himself, I suppose, and none of his kin were left. But in those days every town still had a few people who did not belong to any family.

  Uncle Jim was harmless, even useful. He wanted to work, and did a bit of cobbling. His shop was in his house, always neat, and when you stood there among the good smells of leather and oil, you could see his living room beyond. He did not have many books, but shelf after shelf was loaded with tall bright sheaves cased in plastic—cracked and yellowed by age like their owner. He called them his magazines, and if we children behaved nicely he sometimes let us look at the pictures in them. After he was dead I had a chance to read the texts. They didn’t make sense. Nobody would worry about the things the people in those stories and articles made such a fuss over. He also had a big antique television set, though why he kept it when there was nothing to receive but announcements and the town had a perfectly good set, I don’t know. Well, he was crazy.

  Every morning he took a walk down Main Street. The Trees along it were mostly elms, tall, overshadowing in summer except where gold sunflecks got through. Uncle Jim always dressed his long stiff body in ancient clothes, no matter how hot the day, and Ohio can get plenty hot; so no doubt the shadiness was the reason for his route. He wore frayed white shirts with scratchy, choky collars and a strip of cloth knotted around his neck, long trousers, a clumsy kind of jacket, and narrow shoes that pinched his feet. The outfit was ugly, though painfully clean. We children, being young and therefore cruel, thought at first that because we never saw him unclothed he must be hiding some awful deformity, and teased him about it. My aunt’s brother John made us stop, and Uncle Jim never held our bad ways against us. In fact, he used to give us candy he had made himself, till the dentist complained. Then we had solemn talks with our parents and learned that sugar rots the teeth.

  Finally we decided that Uncle Jim—we called him that, without saying on which side he was anyone’s uncle, because he wasn’t really—wore those things as a sort of background for his button that said Win with Willard. He told me once, when I asked, that Willard had been the last Republican President of the United States and a very great man who tried to avert disaster but was too late because the people were already far gone in sloth and decadence. That was a big lading for a nine-year-old head and I still don’t really understand it, except that the towns did not govern themselves then and the country was divided between the two big groups who were not even clans but who more or less took turns furnishing a President; and the President was not an umpire between towns and states, but ran everything.

  Uncle Jim used to creak down Main Street past Townhall and the sunpower plant, then turn at the fountain and go by my father’s great-uncle Conrad’s house to the edge of town where the fields and Trees rolled to the rim of the world. At the airport he would turn and come back by Joseph Arakelian’s, where he always looked in at the hand looms and sneered and talked about automatic machinery; though what he had against the looms I don’t know, because Joseph’s weavery was famous. He also made harsh remarks about our ratty little airport and the town’s half-dozen flitters. That wasn’t fair; we had a good airport, surfaced with concrete ripped out of the old highway, and plenty of flitters for our longer trips. You’d never get more than six groups going anywhere at any one time in a town this size.

  But I wanted to tell about the Communist.

  This was in spring. The snow had melted and the ground begun to dry and our farmers were out planting. The rest of our town bustled with preparations for the Fete, cooking and baking, oh, such a smell as filled the air, women trading recipes from porch to porch, artisans hammering and sawing and welding, the washlines afire with Sunday-best clothes taken out of winter chests, lovers hand in hand whispering of the festivals to come. Red and Bob and Stinky and I were playing marbles by the airport. It used to be mumbletypeg, but some of the kids flipped their knives into Trees and the Elders made a rule that no kid could carry a knife unless a grown-up was along.

  So it was a fair sweet morning, the sky a dizzy-high arch of blue, sunlight bouncing off puffy white clouds and down to the earth, and the first pale whisper of green had been breathed across the hills. Dust leaped where our marbles bit, a small wind blew up from the south and slid across my skin and rumpled my hair, the world and the season and we were young.

  We were about to quit, fetch our guns and take into the woods after rabbit, when a shadow fell across us and we saw Uncle Jim and my mother’s cousin Andy. Uncle Jim wore a long coat above his other clothes, and still shivered as he leaned on his cane, and the shrunken hands were blue from cold. Andy wore a kilt, for the pockets, and sandals. He was our town engineer, a stocky man of forty. In the prehistoric past before I was born he had been on an expedition to Mars, and this made him a hero for us kids. We never understood why he was not a swaggering corsair. He owned three thousand books at least, more than twice the average in our town. He spent a lot of time with Uncle Jim, too, and I didn’t know why. Now I see that he was trying to learn about the past from him, not the dead past mummified in the history books but the people who had once been alive.

  The old man looked down at us and said: “You boys aren’t wearing a stitch. You’ll catch your death of cold.” He had a high, thin voice, but steady. In the many years alone, he must have learned how to be firm with himself.

  “Oh, nonsense,” said Andy. “I’ll bet it’s sixty in the sun.”

  “We was going after rabbits,” I said importantly. “I’ll bring mine to your place and your wife can make us a stew.” Like all children, I spent as much time with kinfolk as I did with my ortho-parents, but I favored Andy’s home. His wife was a wonderful cook, his oldest son was better than most on the guitar, and his daughter’s chess was just about my speed, neither too good nor too bad.

  I’d won most of the marbles this game, so now I gave them back. “When I was a boy,” said Uncle Jim, “we played for keeps.”

  “What happened after the best shooter had won all the marbles in town?” said Stinky. “It’s hard work making a good marble, Uncle Jim. I can’t hardly replace what I lose anyway.”

  “You could have bought more,” he told him. “There were stores where you could buy anything.”

  “But who made those marbles?”

  “There were factories—”

  Imagine that! Big grown men spending their time making colored glass balls!

  We were almost ready to leave when the Communist showed up. We saw him as he rounded the clump of Trees at the north quarter-section, which was pasture that year. He was on the Middleton road, and dust scuffed up from his bare feet.

  A stranger in town is always big news. We kids started running to meet him till Andy recalled us with a sharp word and reminded us that he was entitled to proper courtesy. Then we waited, our eyes bugging out, till he reached us.

  But this was a woebegone stranger. He was tall, like Uncle Jim, but his cape hung in rags about a narrow chest where you could count the ribs, and under a bald dome of a head was a dirty white beard down to his waist. He walked heavily, leaning on a staff, heavy as Time, and even then I sensed the loneliness like a weight on his thin shoulders.

  Andy stepped forward and bowed. “Greetings and welcome, Freeborn,” he said. “I am Andrew Jackson Welles, town engineer, and on behalf of the Folks I bid you stay and rest and refresh yourself.” He didn’t just rattle the words off as he would for someone he knew, but declaimed them with great care.

  Uncle Jim smiled then, a smile like thawing after a nine year’s winter, for this man was as old as himself and born in the same forgotten world. He trod forth and held out his hand. “Hello, sir,” he said. “My name is Robbins. Pleased to meet you.” They didn’t have very good manners in his day.

  “Thank you, Comrade Welles, Comrade Robbins,” said the stranger. His smile was lost somewhere in that tangled mold of whiskers. “I’m Harry Miller.”

  “Comrade?” Uncle Jim spoke it slowly, like a word out of a nightmare. His hand crept back again. “What do you mean?”

  The wanderer straightened and looked at us in a way that frightened me. “I meant what I said,” he answered. “I don’t make any bones about it. Harry Miller, of the Communist Party of the United States of America!”

  Uncle Jim sucked in a long breath. “But—” he stammered, “but I thought…at the very least, I thought all you rats were dead.”

  “Now hold on,” said Andy. “Your pardon, Freeborn Miller. Our friend isn’t, uh, isn’t quite himself. Don’t take it personally, I beg you.”

  There was a grimness in Miller’s chuckle. “Oh, I don’t mind. I’ve been called worse than that.”

  “And deserved it!” I had never seen Uncle Jim angry before. His face got red and he stamped his cane in the dust. “Andy, this, this man is a traitor. D’you hear? He’s a foreign agent!”

  “You mean you come clear from Russia?” murmured Andy, and we boys clustered near, our ears stiff in the breeze, because a foreigner was a seldom sight.

  “No,” said Miller. “No, I’m from Pittsburgh. Never been to Russia. Wouldn’t want to go. Too awful—they had socialism once.”

  “Didn’t know anybody was left in Pittsburgh,” said Andy. “I was there last year with a salvage crew, after steel and copper, and we never saw anything but birds.”

  “A few. A few. My wife and I. But she died, and I couldn’t stay in that rotten empty shell of a city, so I went out on the road.”

  “And you can go back on the road,” snarled Uncle Jim.

  “Now, please be quiet,” said Andy. “Come on into town, Freeborn Miller—Comrade Miller, if you prefer. May I invite you to stay with me?”

  Uncle Jim grabbed Andy’s arm. He shook like a dead leaf in fall, under the heartless fall winds. “You can’t!” he shrieked. “Don’t you see, he’ll poison your minds, he’ll subvert you, we’ll end up slaves to him and his gang of bandits!”

  “It seems you’ve been doing a little mind-poisoning of your own, Mister Robbins,” said Miller.

  Uncle Jim stood for a moment, head bent to the ground, and the quick tears of an old man glimmered in his eyes. Then he lifted his face and pride rang in the words: “I am a Republican.”

  “I thought so.” The Communist glanced around and nodded to himself. “Typical bourgeois pseudo-culture. Look at those men, each out on his own little tractor in his own field, hugging his own little selfishness to him.”

  Andy scratched his head. “What are you talking about, Freeborn?” he asked. “Those are town machines. Who wants to be bothered keeping his own tractor and plow and harvester?”

  “Oh…you mean—” I glimpsed a light of wonder in the Communist’s eyes. He half-stretched out his hands. They were aged hands; I could see bones just under the dried-out skin. “You mean you do work the land collectively?”

  “Why, no. What on earth would be the point of that?” replied Andy. “A man’s entitled to what he raises himself, isn’t he?”

  “So the land, which should be the property of all the people, is parceled among those kulaks!” flared Miller.

  “How in hell’s name can land be anybody’s property? It’s…it’s land. You can’t put forty acres in your pocket and walk off with them.” Andy took a long breath. “You must have been pretty well cut off from things in Pittsburgh. Ate the ancient canned stuff, didn’t you? I thought so. It’s easy enough to explain. Look, that section yonder is being planted in corn by my mother’s cousin Glenn. It’s his corn, that he swaps for whatever else he needs. But next year, to conserve the soil, it’ll be put in alfalfa, and my sister’s son Willy takes care of it. As for garden truck and fruit, most of us raise our own, just to get outdoors each day.”

  The light faded in our visitor. “That doesn’t make sense,” said Miller, and I could hear how tired he was. It must have been a long hike from Pittsburgh, living off handouts from gypsies and the Lone Farmers.

  “I quite agree,” said Uncle Jim with a stiff kind of smile. “In my father’s day—” He closed his mouth. I knew his father had died in Korea, in some war when he himself was a baby, and Uncle Jim had been left to keep the memory and the sad barren pride of it. I remembered my history, which Freeborn Levinsohn taught in our town because he knew it best, and a shiver crept in my skin. A Communist! Why, they had killed and tortured Americans…only this was a faded rag of a man, who couldn’t kill a puppy. It was very odd.

  We started towards Townhall. People saw us and began to crowd around, staring and whispering as much as decorum allowed. I strutted with Red and Bob and Stinky, right next to the stranger, the real live Communist, under the eyes of the other kids.

  We passed Joseph’s weavery. His family and apprentices came out to join the gogglers. Miller spat in the street. “I imagine those people are hired,” he said.

  “You don’t expect them to work for nothing, do you?” asked Andy.

  “They should work for the common good.”

  “But they do. Every time somebody needs a garment or a blanket, Joseph gets his boys together and they make one. You can buy better stuff from him than most women can make at home.”

  “I knew it. The bourgeois exploiter—”

  “I only wish that were the case,” said Uncle Jim, tightlipped.

  “You would,” snapped Miller.

  “But it isn’t. People don’t have any drive these days. No spirit of competition. No desire to improve their living standard. No…they buy what they need, and wear it while it lasts—and it’s made to last damn near forever.” Uncle Jim waved his cane in the air. “I tell you, Andy, the country’s gone to hell. The economy is stagnant. Business has become a bunch of miserable little shops and people making for themselves what they used to buy!”

  “I think we’re pretty well fed and clothed and housed,” said Andy.

  “But where’s your…your drive? Where’s the get-up-and-go, the hustling, that made America great? Look—your wife wears the same model of gown her mother wore. You use a flitter that was built in your father’s time. Don’t you want anything better?”

  “Our machinery works well enough.” Andy spoke in a bored voice. This was an old argument to him, while the Communist was new. I saw Miller’s tattered cape swirl into Si Johansen’s carpenter shop and followed.

  Si was making a chest of drawers for George Hulme, who was getting married this spring. He put down his tools and answered politely.

  “Yes…yes, Freeborn…sure, I work here…Organize? What for? Social-like, you mean? But my apprentices got too damn much social life as is. Every third day a holiday, damn near…No, they aren’t oppressed. Hell, they’re my own kin!…But there aren’t any people who haven’t got good furniture. Not unless they’re lousy carpenters and too uppity to get help—”

  “But the people all over the world!” cried Miller. “Don’t you have any heart, man? What about the Mexican peons?”

  Si Johansen shrugged. “What about them? If they want to run things different down there, it’s their own business.” He put away his electric sander and hollered to his apprentices that they could have the rest of the day off. They’d have taken it anyway, of course, but Si was a wee bit bossy.

  Andy got Miller out in the street again. At Town-hall the Mayor came in from the fields and received him. Since good weather was predicted for the whole week, we decided there was no hurry about the planting and we’d spend the afternoon welcoming our guest.

  “Bunch of bums!” snorted Uncle Jim. “Your ancestors stuck by a job till it was finished.”

  “This’ll get finished in time,” said the Mayor, as if he were talking to a baby. “What’s the rush, Jim?”

  “Rush? To get on with it—finish it and go on to something else. Better things for better living!”

  “For the benefit of your exploiters,” cackled Miller. He stood on the Townhall steps like a starved and angry rooster.

  “What exploiters?” The Mayor was as puzzled as me.

  “The…the big businessmen, the—”

  “There aren’t any more businessmen,” said Uncle Jim. A little more life seemed to trickle out of him as he admitted it. “Our shopkeepers?…No. They only want to make a living. They’ve never heard of making a profit. They’re too lazy to expand.”

  “Then why haven’t you got socialism?” Miller glared around as if looking for some hidden enemy. “It’s every family for itself. Where’s your solidarity?”

  “We get along pretty well with each other, Freeborn,” said the Mayor. “We got courts to settle any arguments.”

  “But don’t you want to go on, to advance, to—”

  “We get enough,” declared the Mayor, patting his belly. “I couldn’t eat any more than I do.”

  “But you could wear more!” said Uncle Jim. He jittered on the steps, the poor crazy man, dancing before our eyes like the puppets in a traveling show. “You could have your own car, a new model every year with beautiful chrome plate all over it, and new machines to lighten your labor, and—”