"So the problem of most importance confronting us then was, how can we carry enough of this fuel to get us to the moon and back? It took us seven years to solve that one, but as everyone knows, we did. Then Van Horne discovered the hitherto unknown properties of--" he was talking blithely, almost by rote, for this was history-book stuff; and there had never been any sprite guiding his tongue at all, nor any voiceless voice in the bitterness of the eternal chasm between the stars and there was no memory anywhere in his consciousness of such things, nor any lingering discomfortable feeling that he had known a thing now forgotten.... CHAPTER III They were driving out Queens Boulevard toward the colony, and Alan said, "Why did you leave, Brave? Where'd you go?" The great Indian spun the wheel for a curve. "Just back to the wall." "Why?" "Lights were too bright for my eyes." Alan stared at him. "You could out-gaze the sun, you pokerfaced liar, and you know it. Why did you leave?" Brave glanced over at him. "Caliph, I hate to go on sounding like a spae-wife, or the Witch of Endor. But never in all my life have I had such a succession of ominous bodings. You'll think I'm turning raven in my old age--" "No, damn it, Brave, I know you can smell danger a mile or a month away. Go ahead." "Quoth the raven, then. I didn't feel happy about standing there. Before we started, it seemed like a good quiet joke. But when we were there and the lights came on, and the cameras started, I suddenly had to step back out of sight. I _had_ to, Alan. A couple of my ghostly ancestors took me by the scruff and hauled me right away from there." "That would have made a nice tableau on TV." Brave chuckled deep in his chest. "Running Lizard and Pony Sees-the-Sky saving John Kiwanawatiwa from the white man's magic ... I laugh, viceroy, but I swear it felt like that. The old desert-spawned blood--the blood that doesn't tame down--boiled up under those lights and cameras. It pulled the civilized flesh and bones away from them. It whispered that things were wrong, wrong for an Indian and wrong for his friend." He stepped on the gas viciously and the MG spurted forward onto the Union Turnpike like a turpentined hound. "Alan, I almost yanked you up and walked off with you under my arm. I didn't like you sitting there in the bath of electrical magic." "Why didn't you do it?" asked Alan curiously. "Oh, hell, boss man. It's one thing to have these primeval urges, and another to forget all your technical training and scientific knowledge so completely that you'll follow the impulse. Do you bust a window every time you'd like to?"