“No,” said Zebediah.

“Don’t you want to know who it’s from?” asked Winifred.

“I already know. And it’s secret. I’m sworn to secrecy.”

“Nonsense,” said Winifred. “You’re just trying to make yourself important. You’d better let me read it. It might have big words.”

“He promised it wouldn’t,” said Zebediah.

“Who promised? Is it from Daddy?” demanded Winifred in outraged tones. “Is he writing to you and not to us?”

“It’s none of your business,” said Zebediah, and then when Winifred started to stand up to try to grab the letter, he leapt off the porch and made for the woods.

“Let him go,” said Winifred wearily.

Watching him run, I surmised we had no choice. For someone with such short little legs, he ran like the wind and was across the fields and under cover of the forest before we knew it.

“Are you sure he won’t get lost?” I asked. “He may have a good sense of direction, but it’s a big forest.”

“Doesn’t matter. I think he has a compass in his brain,” said Winifred. “And there’s no sense trying to get something away from him that he doesn’t want to give you. He’s got a terrible stubborn streak. Mother says he gets it from Daddy. You can never tell Daddy what to do or what not to do either. Anyhow, I’ll just sneak into his room some night and read it. Daddy is probably just sending him drawings of planes or something. They’re both plane crazy. They’re both plain crazy.” She laughed heartily at her own joke but stopped when a car suddenly came barreling toward the house. When it pulled up we could see it was a very important-looking little man with a fedora and a lot of pens and small instruments in his shirt pocket.

“It must be…” said Winifred.

I looked at him breathlessly. “The man from the Space Institute.”

THE MAN FROM THE SPACE INSTITUTE

“Sina,” I yelled, running into the house, “it’s the man from the Space Institute! He’s here!”

“He’s here two hours early,” said Sina grumpily, emerging from the parlor.

We went to the kitchen to see how the cookies were coming, but Gladys was sitting on the kitchen table singing bits of bebop and hitting her leg with a spoon in time to the music in her head. There was flour everywhere, and there were ashes from the stove drifting about.

“Cookies?” asked Sina.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” said Gladys mysteriously and went on tapping her leg.

Sina sighed and we went back to meet the scientist. “Oh well, he can’t expect cookies if he comes two hours early. He’s probably a physicist. They don’t believe in time. Where is he?”

I pointed to the front porch, where he had made his way and was chatting to Winifred.

“Hello,” said Sina, coming out and shaking his hand. “Do come in.”

“Long way out here. Winding roads,” said the scientist, grabbing her hand and shaking it enthusiastically and then wiping his forehead as if he’d just come off the Oregon Trail. He took his shoes off on the porch with such wrist flicks and exaggerated motions as if to make clear this was not ordinary good manners but Space Institute protocol, infusing the occasion with ceremony and import along the lines of surgeons scrubbing up before an operation. Sina wasn’t a stickler for indoor shoe removal, and the rest of us had our shoes on, but we didn’t point this out. We felt a man from the Space Institute must certainly know what he was doing. We children watched in awe, as if we’d never seen anyone remove their shoes before, and then we all went inside.