Then he saw the house beneath the mighty trees. He saw the orchard and the trees bending with their fruit and heard the thoughts of people talking back and forth.
He walked down the hill toward the house, not hurrying, for suddenly it had come upon him that there was no need to hurry. And, just as suddenly, it seemed that he was coming home, although that was the strangest thing of all, for he had never known a home that resembled this.
They saw him coming when he strode down across the orchard, but they did not rise and come to meet him. They sat where they were and waited, as if he were already a friend of theirs and his coming were expected.
There was an old lady with snow-white hair and a prim, neat dress, its collar coming up high at her throat to hide the ravages of age upon the human body. But her face was beautiful, the restful beauty of the very old, who sit and rock and know their day is done and that their life is full and that it has been good.
There was a man of middle age or more, who sat beside the woman. The sun had burned his face and neck until they were almost black, and his hands were calloused and pock-marked with old scars and half crippled with heavy work. But upon his face, too, was a calmness which was an incomplete reflection of the face beside him, incomplete because it was not so deep and settled, because it could not as yet know the full comfort of old age.
The third one was a young woman and the Human saw the calmness in her, too. She looked back at him out of cool gray eyes and he saw that her face was curved and soft and that she was much younger than he had first thought.
He stopped at the gate and the man rose and came to where he waited.
"You're welcome, stranger," said the man. "We heard you coming since you stepped into the orchard."
"I have been at the village," the Human said. "I am just out for a walk."
"You are from outside?"
"Yes," the Human told him, "I am from outside. My name is David Grahame."
"Come in, David," said the man, opening the gate. "Come and rest with us. There will be food and we have an extra bed."
He walked along the garden path with the man and came to the bench where the old lady sat.
"My name is Jed," the man said, "and this is my mother, Mary, and the other of us is my daughter Alice."
"So you finally came to us, young man," the old lady said to David.
She patted the bench with a fragile hand. "Here, sit down beside me and let us talk awhile. Jed has chores to do and Alice will have to cook the supper. But I am old and lazy and I only sit and talk."
Now that she talked, her eyes were brighter, but the calmness was still in them.
"We knew you would come someday," she said. "We knew someone would come. For surely those who are outside would hunt their mutant kin."
"We found you," David said, "quite by accident." "We? There are others of you?"
"The others went away. They were not human and they were not interested."
"But you stayed," she said. "You thought there would be things to find. Great secrets to he learned."
"I stayed," said David, "because I had to stay."
"But the secrets? The glory and the power?"
David shook his head. "I don't think I thought of that. Not of power and glory. But there must be something else. You sense it walking in the village and looking at the homes. You sense a certain truth." "Truth," the old lady said. "Yes, we found the Truth." And the way she said it Truth was capitalized.
He looked quickly at her and she sensed the unspoken, unguarded question that flicked across his mind.
"No," she told him, "not religion. Just Truth. The plain and simple Truth."
He almost believed her, for there was a quiet conviction in the way she said it, a deep and solid surety.
"The truth of what?" he asked.
"Why, Truth," the old lady said. "Just Truth."
III
It would be, of course, something more than a simple truth. It would have nothing to do with machines, and it would concern neither power nor glory. It would be an inner truth, a mental or a spiritual or a psychological truth that would have a deep and abiding meaning, the sort of truth that men had followed for years and even followed yet in the wish-worlds of their own creation.
The Human lay in the bed close beneath the roof and listened to the night wind that blew itself a lullaby along the eaves and shingles. The house was quiet and the world was quiet except for the singing wind. The world was quiet, and David Grahame could imagine, lying there, how the galaxy would gradually grow quiet under the magic and the spell of what these human-folk had found.
It must be great, he thought, this truth of theirs. It must be powerful and imagination-snaring and all-answering to send them back like this, to separate them from the striving of the galaxy and send them back to this pastoral life of achieved tranquillity in this alien valley, to make them grub the soil for food and cut the trees for warmth, to make them content with the little that they have.
To get along with that little, they must have much of something else, some deep inner conviction, some mystic inner knowledge that has spelled out to them a meaning to their lives, to the mere fact and living of their lives, that no one else can have.
He lay on the bed and pulled the covers up more comfortably about him and hugged himself with inner satisfaction.
Man cowered in one corner of the galactic empire, a maker of gadgets, tolerated only because he was a maker of gadgets and because the other races never could be sure what he might come up with next; so they tolerated him and threw him crumbs enough to keep him friendly but wasted scant courtesy upon him.
Now, finally, Man had something that would win him a place in the respect and the dignity of the galaxy. For a truth is a thing to be respected.
Peace came to him and he would not let it in but fought against it so that he could think, so that he could speculate, imagining first that this must be the truth that the mutant race had found, then abandoning that idea for one that was even better.
Finally the lullabying wind and the sense of peace and the tiredness of his body prevailed against him and he slept.
The last thought that he had was, I must ask them. I must find out.
But it was days before he asked them, for he sensed that they were watching, and he knew that they wondered if he could be trusted with the truth and if he was worthy of it.
He wished to stay; but for politeness' sake he said that he must go and raised no great objection when they said that he must stay. It was as if each one of them knew this was a racial ritual that must be observed, and all were glad, once it was over and done with.
He worked in the fields with Jed and got to know the neighbors up and down the valley; he sat long evenings talking with Jed and his mother and the daughter and with the other valley folk who dropped in to pass a word or two.
He had expected that they would ask him questions, but they did not; it was almost as if they didn't care, as if they so loved this valley where they lived that they did not even think about the teeming galaxy their far ancestors had left behind to seek here on this world a destiny that was better than common human destiny.
He did not ask them questions, either, for he felt them watching him, and he was afraid that questions would send them fleeing from the strangeness of him.
But he was not a stranger. It took him only a day or two to know that he could be one of them, and so he made himself become one of them and sat for long hours and talked of common gossip that ran up and down the valley, and it was all kindly gossip. He learned many things-that there were other valleys where other people lived, that the silent, deserted village was something they did not fret about, although each of them seemed to know exactly what it was, that they had no ambition and no hope beyond this life of theirs, and all were well content.