Then he found one that had no insects or animals inside, and with enough sunlight shining through the open hatches to show a bucket seat facing the vehicle’s control console and screens. The seat was soft and dirty and so big that he had to sit on the edge to reach the control keys. Everything was rusty except for the plastic bits, which were covered with thick, sticky dust. He had to rub the keys with his fingers to see what color they were. Neither the dust nor the rust, which was all over his shirt and trousers by then, nor the dead master screen facing him, made any difference to the battles he was fighting.
This had been a real fighting machine with a real soldier in it, and in his imagination the screen was filled with bright images of enemy tanks and aircraft that exploded even more brightly as soon as they attacked him, because his was a very special, secret tank and he was invincible. He had heard his father and mother talking about the times when such battles had really happened, but they never thought them exciting or interesting and they acted as if everyone concerned in them were sick or something.
But now he was shooting at anything he wanted to imagine- dive bombers, attacking spaceships, horrible other-species soldiers coming at him through the trees-and shouting out loud with excitement when he blew them out of the sky or wiped them out as he always did at the last moment. His parents were not there to stop him yelling, or to remind him that the pretend targets he was shooting down had imaginary people inside them, and that it did not matter what kind of horrible monsters he was pretending to shoot at because they were still people.
Some of their other-species neighbors really were horrible monsters, at least to him, and if any of them had visited the house and found him shooting down things that looked like the visitors, his parents had said, they might take offense and consider the whole Hewlitt family to be less than civilized and not call again. Big peopie never seemed to have any fun.
Gradually he was running out of imaginary enemies to destroy. The sun was no longer shining into the vehicle, and the rusty metal looked almost black instead of red. It was silly, but he started thinking about the being who had driven the tank, and what would happen to him if it came back and found him playing inside. He climbed out so quickly that he tore his trousers again.
The sun had gone down below the trees, but the sky was blue and clear and there was still plenty of light. He could not see anything nearby that he wanted to explore, and he was beginning to feel hungry. It was time to go home, sneak back through the window, and ask his mother for something to eat. But he could see nothing but trees and long grass in every direction.
When he climbed onto the top of the largest vehicle he could find, the view was better. Not far away there was a tall tree standing on the edge of a deep ravine. It had lots of thick, twisting, leafy branches growing close to the ground and nearly all the way to the top, where there was a cluster of bare, thinner branches with fruit hanging from them. From the top he should be able to see his house.
It was another adventure, he told himself as he began to climb, but this time it was real instead of a pretend one. He was not feeling scared, just hungry and all alone, and he wanted to see where his house was so that he could return and eat and end this game. As he climbed higher he could look down through the branches onto the floor of the ravine, where there were more rusting shapes, including a fat, round one directly below him. Then he climbed up into sunlight and was dazzled so that the inside of the ravine became dark and blurred.
Still he could not see any houses, because smaller trees instead of long grass were in the way, so he climbed higher. Then two things happened at once: he reached the top of the tree where the clusters of fruit were and he saw his house. The house was closer than he had expected, and between him and it there was a signpost in the shape of a small tree with funny branches on it. But his arms and legs were very tired, he felt hot and thirsty as well as hungry, and the clusters of fruit were hanging just above him, bobbing gently in the wind that was beginning to blow through the high branches.
At the end of a great adventure, he thought, there should be a reward. The fruit had to be it.
The branch he was sitting on was thick and strong, and one of its twists took it within reach of a fruit cluster. No longer feeling tired, he crawled along it, gripping the twigs growing from it to hold himself steady. The sun was beginning to go down behind the trees, and below him the lower branches were getting harder to see and the ravine was just a dark green blur. He stopped looking down, because the cluster of fruit above him was almost touching his head.
When he tried to pull off the first one, it squashed in his hand. With the second one he was more careful and it came away in one piece.
It looked like a big pear, but none of the pears he had seen in the Earth vegetation tapes had dark green-and-yellow stripes running vertically from the stem to the heavy end. He already knew from the way the first one had squashed that it was full of juice, and this one was so heavy and squishy that it felt like a small balloon filled with water. The juice that had spilled over his hand was drying already and was making it feel nice and cool. He watched the last damp patch on his wrist steaming as it dried off.
He still felt hungry and wanted to eat something solid, but he was hot as well after his climb and a drink of cold juice would be nice, too, so he held on to the branch with only his legs and took the fruit in both cupped hands.
The juice had a funny taste, not nice but not nasty, either. Not wanting to make a mess, he bit out a tiny hole with his teeth and sucked the fruit empty. When he used his fingers to widen the hole, the skin split open along one of the green-and-yellow lines and he discovered that it was not empty. As well as the juice there was a soft, yellow spongy mass with black seeds in the center. He spat out the seeds because they burned his tongue, and the rest of it had the same taste as the juice but it helped fill his stomach better.
He was still not sure whether he liked the fruit or not. While he was trying to make up his mind about eating another one, he felt a pain in his stomach that came and went and grew steadily worse every time.
For the first time since leaving the house he felt scared and wanted to go home. He began bumping himself backward along the branch toward the main trunk, where he could climb down again, but the stomach pains were so bad that they made him yell out loud, and tears were making it hard for him to see what he was doing. Then one very bad pain made him grab his stomach with both hands, and he felt himself falling sideways. For a moment he hung upside down with his legs still wrapped tightly around the branch, but when he tried to pull himself upright again the pains got so bad that he could think about nothing else. He felt himself falling.
He saw sunlit leaves whipping past him, then others that were in shadow, and felt branches hitting his back, arms, and legs; then it was dark for a moment and nothing was hitting him. He knew where he was when he hit the steep slope of the ravine and began rolling to the bottom, then all at once his arms, legs, and back were feeling as sore as his stomach. The side of his head and body hit something that broke under his weight, and the pain in his stomach and everything else faded away.
He wakened to the sound of many voices, two of them belonging to his parents, and with a spotlight shining down onto the floor of the ravine around him. In the beam he could see an adult wearing Monitor Corps uniform and an antigravity belt floating down to him. His parents and some other-species people were scrambling down the slopes using their hands, feet, or whatever. The monitor landed beside him and knelt down.