The Hills of Home | Page 3

of the things----"
Kimball said: "I talked too much."
"You had to."

"You wouldn't think my secret life was so dangerous, would you," the
Colonel said smiling.
"You were married, Kim. What happened?"
"More therapy?"
"I'd like to know. This is for me."
* * * * *
Kimball shrugged. "It didn't work. She was a fine girl--but she finally
told me it was no go. 'You don't live here' was the way she put it."
"She knew you were a career officer; what did she expect----?"
"That isn't what she meant. You know that."
"Yes," the psych said slowly. "I know that."
They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds
and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky.
Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched
them wheel across the clear, deep night.
"I wish you luck, Kim," Steinhart said. "I mean that."
"Thanks." Vaguely, as though from across a deep and widening gulf.
"What will you do?"
"You know the answers as well as I," the Colonel said impatiently. "Set
up the camp and wait for the next rocket. If it comes."
"In two years."
"In two years," the plastic figure said. Didn't he know that it didn't
matter?

He glanced at his watch. Zero minus fifty-six minutes.
"Kim," Steinhart said slowly. "There's something you should know
about. Something you really should be prepared for."
"Yes?" Disinterest in his voice now, Steinhart noted clinically. Natural
under the circumstances? Or neurosis building up already?
"Our tests showed you to be a schizoid--well-compensated, of course.
You know there's no such thing as a normal human being. We all have
tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the
symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an
inability to distinguish reality from--well, fancy."
* * * * *
Kimball turned to regard the psych coolly. "What's reality, Steinhart?
Do you know?"
The analyst flushed. "No."
"I didn't think so."
"You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child," Steinhart
went on doggedly. "You were a solitary, a lonely child."
Kimball was watching the sky again.
Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. "We know so little about the
psychology of space-flight, Kim----"
Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the
murmur of the command car's engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny
sunbright flashes deep in the hollows of the hot metal.
"You're glad to be leaving, aren't you--" Steinhart said finally. "Happy
to be the first man to try for the planets----"
Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull

rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon.
They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of
the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously
checkered in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false
dawn.
* * * * *
Kimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted
middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the
pebbled shore of the River Iss.
They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and
seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he
could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze
came up.
"Kimm-eeeee--"
They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far
down the river. "Kimmmmm--eeeeeeeeee--"
He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could
hear the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious
horror.
He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their voices
carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.
"Where is that little brat, anyway?"
"He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find
him----"
"Playing with that old faucet--" Mimicry. "'My rad-ium pis-tol----'"
"Cracked--just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you
AN-swer!"

Something died in him. It wasn't a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He
looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren't really his sisters. They
were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John
Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their
bodies for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords
in the shifting light of the two moons.
"Kimmmm--eeee Mom's going to be mad at you! Answer us!"
If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak
would come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two
swords clashing----
"He's up there in that clump of willows--hiding!"
"Kimmy! You come down here this instant!"
The Valley