For Eileen Dukas it must have been much the same as for her son. Pearly haze seemed to float inside Eddie's mind. Like a million bits of ancient news clippings always in motion, his recollections of his father seemed to burst in a thousand ever-shifting fragments within his brain. He felt an awful compulsion to recall. It sapped his strength until all consciousness faded away. Yet before this happened he knew that the probing would go on and on. The next thing he knew he was sitting groggily in a pneumatic tube train, with his mother, all but exhausted, too, leaning against him. Almost as an afterthought, their own minds and bodies had been "recorded" there at the laboratory. They seldom exchanged questions or speculations afterward about what had happened to them. It had been a dream. Let it be a dream. II Life had become hard enough for Eileen Dukas and her son. While most people treated them all right--from some they even received exaggerated kindness--there was, very often, a certain disturbing expression in eyes that looked at them. Les Payten, Eddie's friend said once, "I promise, Ed. No more talk about your uncle from me. Finished, see? You've had enough." Eddie suppressed the anger which sprang from loyalty to Mitchell Prell, for he understood Les Payten's good intentions. At regular intervals there were police visits at the house, and questioning. "It's partly for your protection, Mrs. Dukas," was one honest comment from the detectives. But Eddie sensed that there was more to it than that. Subtly, the interpretation of law had changed since the lunar blowup. It went backward, as grief sought people to blame. Catastrophe had been too big for reason or fairness. And the scapegoat himself was not around to be mobbed. A freckle-faced brat from the Youth Center--her name, Barbara Day, had been drawn out of a hat, for of course she had no known parents--offered advice: "You ought to go far away, Eddie, where folks don't know you. It would be better." Ed knew that this was good advice. Many people were saying and shouting and whispering that too much knowledge was a dangerous possession. And Ed's uncle still represented such a thing. More than once Ed had to run fast, with some big lug chasing him. Black eyes he collected with great frequency, and delivered some, too. Still, he ached inside. It was as if Uncle Mitch were part of him. The world began to look normal and green again. But the undercurrents of memory were still there. And Ed Dukas began to answer hate with hate, though he didn't like to. There was a crowd of young toughs with rocks to throw, in front of the house one night. "This is the place," Eddie heard one of them say. "Both my parents are gone. And the bums that live here were in on the reason."