The Return | Page 3

Loudons had shifted
from Forward to Hover, and was peering through a pair of binoculars. "See that island,
the long one? Across the river from it, on the north side, toward this end. Yes, by Einstein!
And I can see cleared ground, and what I think are houses, inside a stockade--"
* * * * *
Murray Hughes walked around the corner of the cabin, into the morning sunlight,
lacing his trousers, with his hunting shirt thrown over his bare shoulders, and found,
without much surprise, that his father had also slept late. Verner Hughes was just
beginning to shave. Inside the kitchen, his mother and the girls were clattering pots and
skillets; his younger brother, Hector, was noisily chopping wood. Going through the door,
he filled another of the light-metal basins with hot water, found his razor, and went
outside again, setting the basin on the bench.
Most of the ware in the Hughes cabin was of light-metal; Murray and his father had
mined it in the dead city up the river, from a place where it had floated to the top of a
puddle of slag, back when the city had been blasted, at the end of the Old Times. It had
been hard work, but the stuff had been easy to carry down to where they had hidden their
boat, and, for once, they'd had no trouble with the Scowrers. Too bad they couldn't say as
much for yesterday's hunting trip!
As he rubbed lather into the stubble on his face, he cursed with irritation. That had
been a bad-luck hunt, all around. They'd gone out before dawn, hunting into the hills to
the north, they'd spent all day at it, and shot one small wild pig. Lucky it was small, at
that. They'd have had to abandon a full-grown one, after the Scowrers began hunting
them. Six of them, as big a band as he'd ever seen together at one time, and they'd gotten
between them and the stockade and forced them to circle miles out of their way. His
father had shot one, and he'd had to leave his hatchet sticking in the skull of another,
when his rifle had misfired.
That meant a trip to the gunsmith's, for a new hatchet and to have the mainspring of
the rifle replaced. Nobody could afford to have a rifle that couldn't be trusted, least of all
a hunter and prospector. And he'd had words with Alex Barrett, the gunsmith, just the
other day. Not that Barrett wouldn't be more than glad to do business with him, once he
saw that hard tool-steel he'd dug out of that place down the river. Hardest steel he'd ever
found, and hadn't been atom-spoiled, either.
He cleaned, wiped and stropped his razor and put it back in the case; he threw out the

wash-water on the compost-pile, and went into the cabin, putting on his shirt and his belt,
and passed on through to the front porch, where his father was already eating at the table.
The people of the Toon liked to eat in the open; it was something they'd always done, just
as they'd always liked to eat together in the evenings.
He sweetened his mug of chicory with a lump of maple sugar and began to sip it
before he sat down, standing with one foot on the bench and looking down across the
parade ground, past the Aitch-Cue House, toward the river and the wall.
"If you're coming around to Alex's way of thinking--and mine--it won't hurt you to
admit it, son," his father said.
He turned, looking at his father with the beginning of anger, and then grinned. The
elders were constantly keeping the young men alert with these tests. He checked back
over his actions since he had come out onto the porch.
To the table, sugar in his chicory, one foot on the bench, which had reminded him
again of the absence of the hatchet from his belt and brought an automatic frown. Then
the glance toward the gunsmith's shop, and across the parade ground, at the houses into
which so much labor had gone; the wall that had been built from rubble and topped with
pointed stakes; the white slabs of marble from the ruined building that marked the graves
of the First Tenant and the men of the Old Toon. He had thought, in that moment, that
maybe his father and Alex Barrett and Reader Rawson and Tenant Mycroft Jones and the
others were right--there were too many things here that could not be moved along with
them, if they decided to move.
It would be false modesty, refusal to see things as they were, not to admit that he was
the leader of the younger men, and the boys of the