Dan opened the door of Biddy's room and said, "Hi, pigeon. Hot in there?" "Not bad, Pop. There's a breeze through the window." The gruesome leg brace smote him as usual and his inward tightening against it was so habitual that he hardly noticed the slight tension of his chest muscles. He said, "How about coming out on the porch and telling me all about this cave?" "Is it all right with Mom?" "Uh-huh. I fixed it." "She told you about the cave and the box?" "Just mentioned it in passing. Told me to get the details from you." He picked her up and carried her out front where they sat down side by side on the front steps and looked out across the miserable little desert town. Dan's eyes fell on the tavern front over near the depot. There would be at least half a dozen drunks in there and after sundown there would be foremen from the ranches roundabout talking them into going back to work. "The cave wasn't there before." "It wasn't?" "No. It's the place I always played Roy Rogers, but I went there yesterday and there was a door in the rock." "The door was open?" "Wide open. I went inside and there was a big shiny box in there." Maybe a man was better off in the city--in the war plants. "Well what do you know about that!" "Pop! You aren't listening." "Oh yes, I am." "But you don't believe me." "I sure do." "The box had a lot of tubes and dials on it." Of course, now they'd taken the profit out of war there wasn't much more money there either unless you worked fifteen hours a day. "Was Roy there waiting for you?" "Pop! It wasn't make believe! The box was really there and the Eastern Bloc is going to use it to wreck our space station." "They'd better not!" That was another thing. If the blow ever fell and all the brains thought it was sure to, a man had better have his family as far from a city as possible. "I thought maybe they would capture Buck and me so we couldn't tell on them but there wasn't anybody there. We got away all right." Not that it would do much good. The radiation would get everybody eventually. Maybe it would be better to be killed quick and get it over with. "Pop--I'm not fibbing to you--" Dan roused himself from his somber thoughts. "I know you're not honey. Listen, let's go out and give Buck some water and about that time Mom will have supper ready. What do you say?" Biddy sighed. "All right Pop...." * * * * * The sun blazed down on the desert just as it had yesterday and would do tomorrow. Biddy sat on the dozing Buck and looked across the rocks at the place she'd first seen the doorway. It had taken a lot of courage to come back here after being so scared before and after nobody had believed her. They'd said there hadn't been any door at all--that she'd only been make-believing. And maybe--just maybe--they had been right, because there wasn't any door there now.