and on each one, Bleys encountered roughly similar situations with the head of the local organizations; and used roughly similar methods of persuasion.
This, with the aim of not only getting the organizations themselves to prepare for change, but to bind them to himself; ostensibly—to begin with—merely as channels through which official business could be transacted between them and Dahno. Some three months after leaving, according to the interstellar calendar, he was standing once more back on the surface of Association.
He checked in by phone with Dahno, from the terminal, to explain that he would like to go out and visit Henry and Joshua first, even before meeting with Dahno, to let them know that he shared in their loss of Will.
Dahno was quick in agreeing. His ready emotions had apparently responded almost immediately to the news of Will's death. He had already made visits to the farm and used all his untouchable persuasive skill to lift the spirits of the two of the family that were left.
This, Bleys thought, must have been a remarkable effort, even for Dahno; since Henry would probably not discuss his dead youngest son at all; and Joshua would find it painful to discuss Will, limiting his talk about his brother as much as possible.
Nonetheless, there were ways of being comforting simply by being there—overflowing the one chair that could hold Dahno's weight, in their front room; lending a hand about the farm, which he had done for a large number of years; and generally radiating sympathy.
Accordingly, Bleys was not too surprised when Dahno told him to take as much time as he wanted with Henry and Joshua.
It was after dark when Bleys pulled a rental hovercar into the yard of the farm. The lights were on inside the house. By this time, he knew, both Henry and Joshua would have had their dinner. Also they could not have failed to hear the roar of the air cushion of his hovercar and driving jets coming up the farm road.
Consequently, it was Joshua—not Henry—just as Bleys had expected, who came bursting out of the door of the farmhouse, as Bleys stepped out of the hovercar, now settled down on the ground.
Joshua was now in his mid-twenties, but he ran to the car almost as Will had run in that one moment when Bleys had left for the city. He did not throw his arms around Bleys, though, as Will had done, but merely put out his hand, which Bleys took; and they grasped each other strongly for an emotional moment.
"I knew you'd be here as soon as you could be, Bleys!" said Joshua. "Oh, but it's good to see you!"
"It's good to be here," said Bleys; and found he meant it.
"Bleys—" said Joshua as together they both headed for the house, "you won't bring up the subject of Will until- Father does, will you?"
"No, I wasn't going to," answered Bleys.
They went inside.
Henry was seated at his table, at his paperwork for the sale of the goat milk. He looked up with that brief smile of his. "Welcome, Bleys," he said.
"How you've stretched up!" said Joshua, staring at him in the sudden light of the room. "You're a giant!" Bleys laughed.
"Dahno's still the giant," he said, "not me."
"Are you taller than he is?" asked Henry.
"We're exactly the same height," Bleys said. "But he outweighs me by anywhere from forty to eighty pounds. And none of it's fat."
Joshua had evidently been mending one of the cart harnesses for the goats. It was draped over the chair he had been sitting in. He ducked into what had been the bedroom he had shared with Bleys and Will; and came out again, carrying the oversized chair that Dahno had been used to using on his visits.
"Sit," he said to Bleys. Bleys did so and Joshua went back and retook his own chair, draping the harness over his knees and picking up the awl and the heavily threaded needle he had been using to make holes and sew on a place that needed mending in the leather of the harness. Like Henry, he continued working as they talked. With anyone else, this would have
seemed like a disturbing element to Bleys. But he knew that the two of them had to use every available hour to get all the work done on the farm; and he remembered them this way, always busy, even in the evenings. Here, it was a comfortable, almost a homey thing to sit with them, so occupied.
"You've been off-planet?" Henry asked, without looking up from his papers.
"Yes," said Bleys. He was finding the chair more comfortable than he had expected—not surprising since it had been built for Dahno; and for the past few months, Bleys had been sitting in furniture that was scaled for people a good deal shorter than himself. "I've been on all the worlds where there're extensions of Dahno's organization."
"But not on Ceta?" said Henry, still not raising his head.
"No," Bleys lied, "not on Ceta."
Henry did not say anything and Joshua stepped into the gap in the conversation.
"What were these other worlds like, Bleys?" he asked. It was not just an idle question. Joshua was interested.
Bleys smiled.
"The cities were pretty much all like Ecumeny. The people—the people were pretty much like the people who live in Ecumeny here, when you got right down to it. The same things, business and politics went on."
"Still, it must have been an interesting trip," said Joshua; and there was—for him—almost a wistful note in his voice.
"It wasn't uninteresting," said Bleys, "but nothing I ran into was mind-shaking. You haven't missed a lot by not seeing the places I saw."
"Our work is here, Joshua," said Henry.
"Yes, I know, Father," answered Joshua; in just the same way that Bleys could remember him answering many times when he had lived with them.
It was taken for granted that Bleys would stay the night at least; and hopefully for several days and nights. Joshua had torn out Bleys' old bunk in the boys' room, which in any case would have been too small for Bleys nowadays, and replaced it with a bedframe also made for Dahno, with a couple of mattresses.
This bed had been left in p
lace, in hopes that Bleys would
come by soon. So he found himself,
after all, at what was now
for him the relatively early hour
of nine o'clock at night, going
to bed in the same room acr
oss from Joshua, just as he had when they were boys.
The next day and the next, during the daylight hours, he was out with the two of them working at one thing or another. The alternative to doing so would have been to sit in the farmhouse alone by himself, which was foolish as well as uncomfortable—since he had never taken to killing time very well.
He began by working mostly alongside Joshua. As they worked, Joshua filled him in on many things previously unmentioned, from the years between the time when he had left the farm and the present; and even ventured a few opinions about his father.
"Father would never speak of it," he said, "and as far as he can he'll never show it; but the loss of Will on top of the loss of Mother some years back has lefthim feeling very alone."
They were mending one of the fences by stringing new wire.
"That's one of the reasons I've hesitated to go ahead and get married," he went on. "Right now this is still his farm. If I bring in a wife and eventually we have a family, little by little he'll feel that he's being pushed into the background, into the chimney corner. I hate to do that to him. On the other hand,
RuUt
—I can't ask her to wait indefinitely."
"Ruth?" asked Bleys.
Joshua stapled a top strand of wire to the fence post, nodding at the stretcher in Bleys' bands. "Take a strain on that."
Bleys' large hands closed the jaws of the stretcher on the wire, pivoting the tool's head against the fence post to draw the wire taut. Joshua drove a second staple, fastening it with the maximum degree of tightness and, using the puller, lifted the staple he had put in originally. They walked on down to the next post.
"Ruth Mclntyre," Joshua said, "you'd remember her from school here—no, that's right, you didn't go to our local school. In any case she'd have been a little bit older than you and you probably wouldn't have seen much of her. But you must remember the family of the Mclntyres." "Yes," said Bleys, "I do."
He tried to summon up the picture of the Ruth whom Joshua was talking about, but no memory would come. If he had seen her, it would have been on a Sunday, at the time of the church service to which every family went.
"Tell me what she looks like," Bleys said.
"Oh, she's tall, almost as tall as I am, with very black hair and sort of a round face," said Joshua. "I think I love her, Bleys."
"Perhaps you should get married, then, in spite of Uncle Henry. I know if you asked him, he'd be the first to tell you to do that."
"That's why I've got no intention of asking him," said Joshua, "at least not for a while yet."
"Perhaps, I—" Bleys was beginning. Joshua shook his head and stopped him in mid-sentence.
"I'll handle it myself when the time comes," he said.
They talked about the weather, the animals, farm prices and other things. Then, there were other times, in which he found himself working with Henry, usually in construction, since Henry was enlarging the barn that held his herd of goats, intending to add numbers to the herd itself Henry, by contrast, talked about the work and about a number of day-by-day things of merely passing importance. It was nottmtil the third day that he paused after finishing a part of the roofing and, having come down the ladder and wiped his brow, looked squarely at Bleys.
"Will thought a lot of you, Bleys," he said.
"I know," said Bleys, "he told me so." It occurred to him that perhaps this was the ideal time. He reached in his pocket for the letter Will had sent him from Ceta. "He said so in the last letter he wrote me. Would you like to read it?"
"If it's not an intrusion on your private correspondence, or Will's—" Henry said. But his eyes were fixed almost yearningly on the letter.
Bleys passed it over. Henry took it and read it, standing there. Clearly, he read it several times before at last he reverently folded it and held it out once again to Bleys.
"Why don't you keep it?" said Bleys. "This was Will's home and the rest of his things are here. This last letter probably should be with them."
Henry shook his head.
"It was a letter he wrote you," he said. "If you want to keep it, that's your decision."
"Be sure I will," said Bleys, reluctantly taking it. "If you ever change your mind and want it back—"
"No, the matter's settled," said Henry, picking up a new roll of roofing material and beginn
ing to climb the ladder again.
Later on that afternoon, however, Joshua managed to get Bleys alone.
"Showing Father that letter," said Joshua, "was the best thing you could have done. He reads it to mean that Will found solace in the Lord before his death. You've no idea how that thought comforts him. Could I also see the letter?"
"Of course!" said Bleys, pulling it out of a pocket and passing it to him. "I should've thought of showing it to you right away. I tried to make your father take it to keep it here; but he wouldn't hear of it."
"I know," said Joshua, reading the letter as hungrily as his father had done, "he told me not to let you give it to me, either."
He interrupted his reading to look up at Bleys.
"But if you're willing to, I'll take it," Joshua said. "Later on, he'll be glad I did, no matter what he says to me about it."
A few hours later, that afternoon, a message came from the store via one of the local people passing by, that Dahno had phoned for Bleys. Bleys took his hovercar down to the store. It was faster than taking the goat-cart, although Henry offered it to him. He reversed the charges and got Dahno on the phone.
"Sorry to interrupt your visit," said Dahno, "but I think it's time I had you here and heard from you about your trip. Have you got transportation?"
"Yes, I rented a hovercar," answered Bleys.
"If you'll come right away then," said Dahno, "we can talk over dinner. Henry and Joshua had to come first, but it's time you and I talked."
CHAPTER 27
Bleys had read
an urgency into the phone call from Dahno. But now, sitting in a small, private restaurant with his half-brother, right after having left the farm and Henry and Joshua, the relaxed attitude of Dahno took Bleys back in memory to the days when he used to be brought into Ecumeny on visits.
Dahno was talking about everything under the sun, interesting talk, humorous talk, but about nothing important except the city and some of the goings-on in it; and only a few things that were a matter of business or politics, but none of them particularly important.
Bleys waited.
After they finished the main course of the meal, Dahno ordered and got another drink and sat back in the private quarter circle of padded booth in which they had eaten. Bleys suspected the restaurant of knowing Dahno well and catering to him, for as it also was in the large restaurant where he usually held court nights, the seat and seat-backs offered leg room not only for Dahno, but for himself.