He set off, armed with his weighty LOE, and marched through many wondrous domains of field and meandering stream and dark stretches of forest. The world, it developed, was a bit larger than anticipated; but he shifted the growing mass of the book from arm to arm, and rested occasionally, and disciplined his little feet to be undaunted by the unthinkable distances they traveled, and found himself at last at the fringe of Eighty-One.

In this manner he came to meet, not the nymph for which he searched, but the twin boys his own age, Jay and Jervis, and their little sister Jill, and compounded a friendship that was to endure an even seven years.

“Look—he got a hvee!” Jay shouted, spotting the determined traveler.

The children of Eighty-One clustered around Aton, who responded to this interest in his mark of distinction with a condescending frown. “Why don’t you take one?” he inquired.

Jervis scuffled. “I tried. It died.”

“Where you get yours?” Jay demanded.

Aton explained that a lovely woman in the forest had given him the plant for his seventh birthday, and that he was looking for her now.

“I wish I could fib like that,” Jervis said enviously. “Can you make a bomb?”

“We’re making a bomb!” little Jill exclaimed.

Jervis slapped her across her bare chest. “No girls!” he pronounced. “This is man’s business.”

“Yeah,” said Jay.

“Yeah,” Aton echoed, though it made no difference to him. “But I need a safe place for my book. It’s got Words-Earth in it.”

“Is that like purple sand?” Jay asked. “Maybe we can use some for our bomb.”

“No! Words-Earth is a poet. He makes rhymes about hot ashes. ‘Oh, joy that in our embers—’”

“Who cares about that stuff?” Jervis said. “Real men make bombs.”

In due course the three were ensconced in the twins’ hideout, a hollow in the ground not far from the hog corral, concealed by thick bushes. They were fashioning a bomb from rocks and colored sand. Jervis had heard that the correct mixture of sulphur (which they could recognize because it was yellow) and saltpeter would explode, if dropped hard enough. But somehow it wasn’t working.

“Must be the salt,” Jervis said. “This stuff is just white sand. We need real salt.”

Jill, hovering just outside, saw her opportunity. “I can get some salt!”

When she returned with a shaker snitched from the kitchen, she refused to give it up until granted a share of the enterprise. For the rest of the afternoon she attacked herself to Aton, somewhat to his disgust. She was muddy all over, and her long black braids kept falling into the bomb.

Two