I thought about it, then shook my head. "No."

"But the road, Miles! Only one way into town now, almost impassable; that doesn't make sense! And that salesman, and the way the town looks – "

"It's impossible, Becky; it'd take a whole town to do that, every soul in it. It'd have to be absolutely unanimous in decision, and action. And that would include us."

"Well," she said simply, "they tried to include us."

For a moment I just stared at her; she was right. "Come on," I said then, laid a quarter on the counter, and stood up. "Let's get out of here; we've seen what we came to see."

At the next corner, we passed my office, and I looked up at my name in gold leaf on the second-storey window; it seemed a long time since I'd been there. When we turned off Main then, onto my street and Becky's, she said, "I've got to step in at my house and see my father, and, Miles, I hate to; I can hardly bear seeing him the way he is now."

There was nothing I could say to that, and I simply nodded. A block south of Main, just ahead of us now, lay the old, red-brick, two-storey public library, and I remembered it was Saturday, and that the library closed at twelve-thirty for the week-end. "We'll have to take a minute to step in at the library," I said.

Miss Wyandotte was at the desk as we walked up the wide library steps from the street door, and I smiled with real pleasure, as always. She'd been librarian since I was a grade-school kid coming in for Tom Swift and Zane Grey books, and she was the exact opposite of the conventional notion of what a librarian usually is. She was a grey-haired, intelligent-eyed, brisk little woman, and you could talk in the main reading-room of her library, if you weren't too loud about it. You could smoke, too, and she'd bought ash trays and placed them around the room, and there were comfortable cushioned wicker chairs beside low magazine-strewn tables. She'd made it a nice place to spend a pleasant hour or afternoon, a place where people met friends to talk quietly, smoking and discussing books. She was wonderful with children – she had an enormous natural and interested patience – and as a kid, I always remembered, you felt welcome there, and not an intruder.

Miss Wyandotte was one of my favourite people, and now as we stopped at her desk, and greeted her, she smiled, a bright, really pleased smile that made you glad you were here. "Hello, Miles," she said. "Glad to see you're reading again," and I grinned. "It's nice to see you, Becky," she said. "Say hello to your dad for me."

We answered, then I said, "Could we look at the Tribune file, Miss Wyandotte? For last spring; the first part of May, say from the first to the fifteenth."

"Certainly," she said, and when I offered to go get the file myself, she said, "No, sit down and relax; I'll bring it to you."

We took a couple of wicker chairs by one of the tables, lighted cigarettes, then Becky picked up a Woman's Home Companion, and I began glancing through Collier's. It took a while before Miss Wyandotte came out from the file room again; I'd finished my cigarette, and noticed it was twelve-twenty, before she appeared, smiling, with the big, cloth-covered, newspaper-sized book stamped Santa Mira Tribune, April, May, June, 1953. She laid it on the table beside, us, and we thanked her; the date-line on Jack's Santa Mira clipping had been May 9, and I opened the big book and found the Tribune for the day before.

Both of us scanned the front page, glancing carefully at each story; there was nothing there about giant seed pods or Professor L. Bernard Budlong, and I turned the page. In the upper left-hand corner of page three was a rectangular hole, two columns wide by five or six inches deep; a news story had been neatly sliced out with a razor blade, and Becky and I glanced at each other, then scanned the rest of that page, and page two. We found nothing of what we were looking for, nor did we find it in the remaining three pages of the May 8 Tribune.

We turned to the May 7 issue and began with page one. There was nothing in the paper about Budlong or the pods. On the bottom half of the May 6 Tribune's first page was a hole seven or eight inches long and three columns wide. On the bottom half of the May 5 issue was another hole, just about as long, but only two columns wide.

It wasn't a guess, but a sudden stab of direct, intuitive knowledge – I knew, that's all – and I swung in my chair to stare across the room at Miss Wyandotte. She stood motionless behind the big desk, her eyes fastened on us, and in the instant I swung to look at her, her face was wooden, devoid of any expression, and the eyes were bright, achingly intent, and as inhumanly cold as the eyes of a shark. The moment was less than a moment the flick of an eyelash – because instantly she smiled, pleasantly, inquiringly, her brows lifting in polite question. "Anything I can do?" she said with the calm, interested eagerness typical of her in all the years I had known her.

"Yes," I said. "Would you come here, please, Miss Wyandotte?"

Smiling brightly, she walked around her desk and crossed the room toward us. There was no one else in the library now; it was twenty-six minutes past twelve by the big old clock over her desk, and the only other patron had left a few minutes before.

Miss Wyandotte stepped beside me, I glanced up at her, and she stood looking down at me, her expression pleasantly inquiring. I nodded at the hole on the front page of the newspaper before me. "Just before you brought us this file," I said quietly, "you cut out all references to the seed pods found here last spring, didn't you?"

She frowned – bewildered by this accusation – and leaned forward to stare down in surprise at the mutilated paper on the low round table.

Then I stood up to face her, my face a few inches from hers. I said, "Don't bother, Miss Wyandotte, or whatever you are. Don't bother to put on an act for me." I leaned closer, staring her directly in the eyes, and my voice dropped. "I know you," I said softly. "I know what you are."

For a moment she still stood, glancing helplessly from me to Becky in utter bewilderment; then suddenly she dropped the pretence. Grey-haired Miss Wyandotte, who twenty years ago had loaned me the first copy of Huckleberry Finn I ever read, looked at me, her face going wooden and blank, with an utterly cold and pitiless alienness. There was nothing there now, in that gaze, nothing in common with me; a fish in the sea had more kinship with me than this staring thing before me. Then she spoke. I know you, I'd said, and now she replied, and her voice was infinitely remote and uncaring. "Do you?" she said, then turned on her heel and walked away.

I gestured at Becky, she stood, then we walked on out of the library. Outside, on the sidewalk, we took half a dozen steps in silence, then Becky shook her head. "Even her," she murmured, "even Miss Wyandotte," and the tears shone in her eyes. "Oh, Miles," she said softly, and glanced around, first over one shoulder, then the other, at the houses, quiet lawns, and the street beside us, "how many more?" I didn't know the answer to that, and I just shook my head, and we walked on, toward Becky's house.