his soft voice whisper
in my ear:

"Get out of this town as soon as you can!"

I looked at him in startled amazement, but he was walking along, shaking
himself from his stumble, and looking up and down the street for passing
trucks.

"As I was saying," he said in a matter-of-fact voice, "we expect to
reach the one-and-one-quarter million mark this month. I never saw a
place grow so fast."

* * * * *

I felt a great leap of sudden understanding. For a moment my muscles
tightened, but I took my cue.

"Remarkable place," I said calmly; "one reads a lot of half-truths about
it. Too bad I can't stay any longer."

"Sorry you have to leave," he said, in exactly the right tone of voice.
"But you can come again."

How thankful I was for the forty years of playing and working together
that had accustomed us to that sort of team-work! Unconsciously we
responded to one another's cues. Once our ability to "play together" had
saved my life. It was when we were in college and were out on a
cross-country hike together; Benda suddenly caught my hand and swung it
upward. I recognized the gesture; we were cheerleaders and worked
together at football games, and we had one stunt in which we swung our
hands over our heads, jumped about three feet, and let out a whoop. This
was the "stunt" that he started out there in the country, where we were
by ourselves. Automatically, without thinking, I swung my arms and
leaped with him and yelled. Only later did I notice the rattlesnake over
which I had jumped. I had not seen that I was about to walk right into
it, and he had noticed it too late to explain. A flash of genius
suggested the cheering stunt to him.

"_Communication_ is a science!" he had said, and that was all the
comment there was on the incident.

So now, I followed my cue, without knowing why, nor what it was all
about, but confident that I should soon find out. By noon I was on the
bus, on my way through the pass, to meet the vehicle from Washington. As
the bus swung along, a number of things kept jumbling through my mind:
Benda's effusive glee at seeing me, and his sudden turning and bundling
me off in a nervous hurry without a word of explanation; his lined and
worried face and yet his insistence on the joys of his work in The
Science Community; his obvious desire to be hospitable and play the good
host, and yet his evasiveness and unwillingness to chat intimately and
discuss important th