Curt blinked at him, absorbing this new bit of information. "You wanted _me_ to vanish?" he echoed. "Yes, I can see that now. I didn't know. It seemed too absurd. I thought you were just imagining things. Yes, I went out while you were at school and spent the whole morning teaching her every step. It was fairly easy. We had planned on coaxing you to explain it to her. Knowing it ahead of time she could pretend to grasp it that much more easily. We were planning on coaxing you into a more social relationship. Actually, she had already read the theory in your father's book she was reading for the publisher." A glassy look came into his eyes. "The book. If the theory is at the root of the disappearances the book shouldn't be published. Yes, by God. That's what your father was driving at. Your mother told me the publisher had told her your father tried to get him not to publish it." "The book has the theory in it?" Fred said. "It mustn't get published. Why--thousands of people would read it and vanish. We've got to stop them!" Curt was shaking his head in bewilderment. "But we can't be sure. It must be something else, though what I don't know." "No," Fred said bitterly. There was a long silence. Curt broke it by saying, "What did you expect to accomplish by my vanishing?" Fred told him of Horace's shouting to his wife, "Ethel! I've got it!", and the others seeming to have a flash of divination or insight just before they vanished. "I wanted," he explained dully, "to be with you when it happened, in the hopes I could get something more than I have to go on. In that way I might be able to find out something so I could bring my father back. And Mom." He began to cry. "I see," Curt said, calm and a little subdued. "It's possible that may come. After what I've seen happen I can admit it as a possibility." "Then you will make every effort to tell me?" Fred asked. Curt smiled wryly. "You make it sound inevitable. But--yes, I will." Fred's eyes were large and round. "I've got to find the mechanism. I've got to go where they've vanished to and show them how to get back!" He turned his eyes on Curt. "Don't you hate me?" he pleaded. "I'm just the same as a murderer!" "No, my son," Curt said gently. "Wherever your father is, your mother is with him now. If--" A startled expression appeared on his face. "So _that's_ it," he almost whispered. "_What's_ it?" Fred asked. "Tell me. Please tell me. I've got to know, you know. You promised!" Curt frowned in a visible effort to jerk himself back. His eyes, holding a faraway look, rested on Fred's face, looked at it, and through it. "You promised!" Fred screamed. "Tell me!" Curt opened his mouth as though to speak. His lips smiled. And--he was no longer there. Fred was alone, with the picnic lunch on the white square of tablecloth, with the gleaming Cadillac a few yards away, with the two white and black spotted cows grazing a short distance away, with the noisy little brook nearby. Alone....