"Poor devil. Let him keep his childhood while he can, Gwin. He'll know he's all alone soon enough." She nodded, burying her face against his chest. "I know...." Eric whimpered again, and his hands clenched into fists and came up to protect his face. Instinctively Gwin reached out to him, and then she drew back. She couldn't reach his emotions. There was no perception. There was no way she could enter his dreams and rearrange them and comfort him. "Poor devil," his father said again. "He's got his whole life to be lonely in." * * * * * The summer passed, and another winter and another summer. Eric spent more and more time by himself. He liked to sit on the glassed-in sunporch, bouncing his ball up and down and talking to it, aloud, pretending that it answered him back. He liked to lie on his stomach close to the wall and look out at the garden with its riotous mass of flowers and the insects that flew among them. Some flew quickly, their wings moving so fast that they were just blurs. Others flew slowly, swooping on outspread bright-colored wings from petal to petal. He liked these slow-flying ones the best. He could wiggle his shoulder blades in time with their wings and pretend that he was flying too. Sometimes other children came by on the outside of the wall. He could look out at them without worrying, because they couldn't see him. The wall wasn't transparent from the outside. He liked it when three or four of them came by together, laughing and chasing each other through the garden. Usually, though, they didn't stay long. After they had played a few minutes his father or his mother went out and looked at them, and then they went away. Eric was playing by himself when the old man came out to the sunporch doorway and stood there, saying nothing, making no effort to interrupt or to speak. He was so quiet that after a while Eric almost didn't mind his being there. The old man turned back to Myron and Gwin. "Of course the boy can learn. He's not stupid." Eric bounced the ball, flung it against the transparent glass, caught it, bounced it again. "But how, Walden?" Gwin shook her head. "You offer to teach him, but--" Walden smiled. "Remember _these_?" _... Walden's study. The familiar curtains drawn aside, and the shelves behind them. The rows of bright-backed, box-like objects, most of them old and spotted, quite unhygienic ..._ Gwin shook her head at the perception, but Myron nodded. "Books. I didn't know there were any outside the museums." Walden smiled again. "Only mine. Books are fascinating things. All the knowledge of a race, gathered together on a few shelves...." "Knowledge?" Myron shrugged. "Imagine storing knowledge in those--boxes. What are they? What's in them? Just words...." The books faded as Walden sighed. "You'd be surprised what the old race did, with just those--boxes."