The People

"Something slender and shiny and complicated?" said Remy idly.
"Well, yes," I said, casting back into my mind. "Maybe it does have something to do with that, but there's something really bad that's bothering him."
"Well, then, let's figure out what that slender, shiny thing is, then maybe we can help him figure out that much-By the way, thanks for getting me out of range. I could have got perforated, but good-"
"Oh, I don't know," I said. "I don't think he was really aiming at you."
"Aiming or not, I sure felt drafty there when I saw what he was holding."
I smiled and went on with the original topic. "If only we could get up closer," I said. "I'm not an expert at this Sensing stuff yet."
"Well, try it anyway," said Remy. "Read it to me and I'll draw it and then we'll see what it is." He cleared a little space, shoving the aspen litter aside, and taking up a twig, held it poised.
"I've studied hardly a thing about shapes yet," I said, lying back against the curve of the slope, "but I'll try." So I cleared my mind of everything and began to coax back the awareness of whatever the metal was at the Selkirk. I read it to Remy-all that metal so closely surrounded by the granite of the mountain and yet no intermingling! If you took away the metal there'd he nothing left but a tall, slender hole
My eyes flipped open. "The mine shaft!" I cried. "Whatever it is, it's filling the mine shaft-the one that goes straight down. All the drifts take
off from there!"
"So now we have a hole," said Rainy. "Fill it up. And I'll bet it's just the old workings-the hoist-the cage-"
"No, it isn't." I closed my eyes and concentrated again, Sensing diagonally up through the hill and into the Selkirk Carefully I detailed it to Remy contour by contour.
"Hey!" I sat up, startled at Remy's cry. "Look what we've made!" I leaned over his sketch, puzzling over the lines in the crumbly soil.
"It looks a little like a shell." I said. "A rifle shell. Oh, my gosh! Do you suppose that's what it is? That we've spent all of this time over a rifle shell?"
"If only we had some idea of relative size." Remy deepened one of the lines.
"Well, it fills the hole it's in," I said. "The hole felt like a mine shaft and that thing fills it."
"A rifle shell that big?" Remy flicked a leaf away with his twig. "Why that'd be big enough to climb into-"
Remy stiffened as though he had been jabbed. Rising to his knees, he grabbed my arm, his mouth opening wordlessly. He jabbed his twig repeatedly at the railings dump, yanking my arm at the same time.
"Remy!" I cried, alarmed at his antics. "What on earth's the matter?"
"It's-" he gasped. "It's a rocket! A rocket! A spaceship! That guy's building a spaceship and he's got it down in the shaft of the Selkirk!"
Remy babbled in my ear all the way home, telling again and again why it had to be a spaceship and, by the time we got home, I began to believe him. The sight of the house acted as an effective silencer for Remy.
"This is a secret," he hissed as we paused on the porch before going into the house. "Don't you dare say a word to anyone!"
I promised and kept my promise but I was afraid for Remy all evening. He's as transparent as a baby when he gets excited and I was afraid he'd give it away any minute. Both Mother and Father watched him and exchanged worried looks-he acted feverish. But somehow we made it through the evening.
His arguments weren't nearly so logical by the cold light of early morning and his own conviction and enthusiasms were thinned by the hard work he had to put in before noon at the campsites.
Armed with half a cake and a half-dozen oranges, we cautiously approached the Selkirk that afternoon. My shoulders felt rigid as we approached the old shack and I Sensed apprehensively around for the shotgun barrel-I knew that shape! But nothing happened. No one was home.
"Well, dern!" Remy sat down by me on a boulder near the door. "Where d'you suppose he went?"
"Fishing, maybe," I suggested. "Or to town." "We would have seen him if he were fishing on the Cayuse. And he's an Outsider-he'd have to use the road to go to town, and that goes by our place."
"He could have hiked across the hills instead,"
"That'd be silly. He'd just parallel the road that way."
"Well, since he isn't here-" I paused, lifting an inquiring eyebrow.
"Yeah! Let's do. Let's go take a look in the shaft!" Remy's eyes were bright with excitement. "Put this stuff somewhere where the ants won't get into the cake. We'll eat it later, if he doesn't turn up."
We scrambled across the jumble of broken rock that was the top of the dump, but when we arrived where the mouth of the shaft should be, there was nothing but more broken rock. We stumbled and slipped back and forth a couple of times before I perched up on a boulder and, closing my eyes, Sensed for metal.
It was like being in a shiny, smooth flood. No matter on which side of me I turned, the metal was there and, with that odd illusion that happens visually sometimes, the metal under me suddenly seemed to cup upward and contain me instead of my perching over it. It was frightening and I opened my eyes.
"Well?" asked Remy, impatiently.
"It's there," I said. "It's covered over, but it's there. We're too close, now, though. I can't get any idea of shape at all. It could be a barn door or
a sheet of foil or a solid cube. All I know is that it's metal, it's under us,
and there's lots of it."
"That's not much help." Remy sagged with disappointment.
"No, it's not," I said.
"Let's lift," said Remy. "You did better from the air."
"Lift? With him around?"
"He's not around now," said Remy.
"He might be and we just don't Sense him."
"How could we keep from it?" asked Remy. "We can always Sense Outsiders. He has no way to shield-"
"But if that thing’s a rocket and he's in it, that means he'd be shielded-and that means there's some way to get in it-"
We looked at each other and then scrambled down the dump. It was pretty steep and rugged and we lifted part of the way. Otherwise we might have ended up at the bottom of a good-sized rockslide-us under. We searched the base of the hill, trying to find an entrance. We searched all afternoon, stopping only a few minutes to shake the ants off of and out of the cake and eat it and the oranges, burying the peels carefully before we went back to work. We finally gave up, just before sunset, and sprawled in the aspen thicket at the base of the dump, catching our breath before heading home.
I raised up on one elbow, peering upward to the heights 1 couldn't see. "He's there now," I said, exasperated. "He's back. How'd he get past us?"
"I'm too tired to care," said Remy, rubbing the elbow he'd banged against a rock-and that's pretty tired for Remy.
"He's crying," I said softly. "He's crying like a child."
"Is he hurt?" Remy asked, straightening.
"No-o-o, I don't think so," I said, trying to reach him more fully. "It's sorrow and loneliness-that's why he's crying."
We went back the next day. This time I took a deep-dish apple pie along. Most men have a sweet tooth and miss desserts the most when they're camping. It was a juicy pie and, after I had dribbled juice down the front of me and down onto Remy where he lifted below, I put it into a nice, level inanimate lift and let it trail behind me.
I don't know exactly what we expected, but it was rather an anticlimax to be welcomed casually at the Selkirk-no surprise, no shotgun, no questions, but plenty of thanks for the pie. Between gulps and through muffling mouthfuls, we learned that the old man's name was Thomas.
"Should have been Doubting Thomas," he told us unhappily. "Didn't believe a word my son said. And when he used up all our money buying-" He swallowed hard and blinked and changed the subject.