Pete scowled out the window, thinking of the rocket, the knobs and slings and dials within it, the feel of speed and space and war about it, the slash-grinned young god who rode it. He had something to ask Murph. "Aw fooner," he muttered. His mother swung him to her lap. "Shall we tell him about the surprise?" Pete thought he caught something odd--a nearly invisible craft or knowingness--in the glance they traded. "You didn't get much for your birthday last week, Pete," his mother beamed, "so we decided to give you a kind of late birthday party. You're going to have that picnic on Indian Hill. It'll be an all-day picnic, with all the youngsters you know, hunting for arrowheads and relics. We're going in Mr. Fobey's copter." "Oh boy! Indian Hill! At last!" Then he sobered, thinking of paunchy, bland-faced, nervous Mr. Fobey. "Will Fobey bring his air sluice?" "He says he will." "All right then. Indian Hill! Whoopee!" He kissed them, and went larking toward the door but his mother snagged him. "I hope you aren't forgetting your chores, young man." "Yeah--weeding. I don't see why we don't have all ponics, like everybody else. Gee whiz, can't I skip it just today. It's the next to the last day for the Hester." "What's the Hester, for goodness sake?" "Why, the rocket! The glass rocket!" She held her son's head between her hands and held her eyes on his. "Pete, we told you not to go near that rocket. I mean it. Stay ... away ... from ... it! I know what I'm saying. Stay away from it!" He scuffled his feet. "Okay mom. Okay then. Okay." * * * * * Half an hour later he was legging it across the fields, keeping trees and shrubs between himself and the cottage, and three quarters of an hour later he was handing a crescent wrench to Murph Vanderpool, who had found a loose bolt in the rig of the doube-slung pilot's cradle. Weeding was forgotten. His nostrils were full of hexadrine, his eyes were full of dials and levers and words like "parsecs" and "off ram--on ram," and his head was full of dreams. The Hester. Ever so slightly scored along her sides with the nailhead meteorites she had brushed rushingly aside. An imperceptible waver in her hull where a Panasia heat shell had nearly downed her. Glamorous witch of space. Cleopatra's needle of outer gulfs.