Perhaps....

"Eric," Gwin said aloud.

"Yes, mother?"

"We've decided you're going to go to school, the way you want to. Mr.
Walden here is going to be your teacher. Isn't that nice?"

Eric looked at her and then at the old man. Strangers didn't often come
out on the sunporch. Strangers usually left him alone.

He bounced the ball again without answering.

"Say something, Eric," his mother commanded.

Eric looked back at Walden. "He can't teach me to be like other
children, can he?"

"No," Walden said. "I can't."

"Then I don't want to go to school." Eric threw the ball across the room
as hard as he could.

"But there once were other people like _you_," Walden said. "Lots of
them. And you can learn about them, if you want to."

"Other people like me? Where?"

Myron and Gwin looked helplessly at each other and at the old man. Gwin
began to cry and Myron cursed softly, on the perception level so that
Eric wouldn't hear them.

But Walden's face was gentle and understanding as he answered, so
understanding that Eric couldn't help wanting desperately to believe
him.

"Everyone was like you once," Walden said. "A long time ago."

* * * * *

It was a new life for Eric. Every day he would go over to Walden's and
the two of them would pull back the curtains in the study and Walden
would lift down some of the books. It was as if Walden was giving him
the past, all of it, as fast as he could grasp it.

"I'm really like the old race, Walden?"

"Yes, Eric. You'll see just how much like them...."

Identity. Here in the past, in the books he was learning to read, in the
pictures, the pages and pages of scenes and portraits. Strange scenes,
far removed from the gardens and the quiet houses and the wordless smile
of friend to friend.

Great buildings and small. The Parthenon in the moonlight, not too many
pages beyond the cave, with its smoky fire and first crude wall
drawings. Cities bright with a million neon lights, and still later,
caves again--the underground stations of the Moon colonies. All unreal,
and yet--

They were his people, these men in the pictures. Strange men, violent
men: the barbarian trampling his enemy to death beneath his horse's
hooves, the knight in armor marching to the Crusade, the spaceman. And
the quieter men: the farmer, the artisan, the poet--they too were his
people, and far easier to understand than the others.

[Illustration]

The skill of