'Did you make the models?' asked Baedecker. Shelves were filled with gray plastic dreadnoughts from Star Wars, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica. Two large space shuttles hung from dark thread in a corner.

The boy made a motion with shoulders and hand, an abbreviated half shrug that reminded Baedecker of his son Scott when he had struck out in a Little League game.

'Dad helped.'

'Are you interested in space, Terry?'

'Yeah.' The boy hesitated and looked up at Baedecker. In his dark eyes there was a brief panic of summoned courage. 'I mean, I useta be. You know, when I was younger. I mean, I still like it and all, but that's sort of kid stuff, you know? What I'd really like to be is, well, like a lead guitarist in a group like Twisted Sister.' He stopped talking and looked steadily at Baedecker.

Baedecker could not stop a wide grin. He touched the boy's shoulder briefly, firmly. 'Good. Good. Let's go upstairs, shall we?'

The streets were dark except for occasional streetlights and the blue flicker of televisions through windows. Baedecker breathed in the scent of freshly cut grass and unseen fields. The stars were hesitant to appear. Except for an occasional car passing on the hardroad a block west, the only noise was the muted but excited gabble of the hidden televisions. Baedecker remembered the sound of console radios through some of these same screen doors and windows. He thought that the radio voices had held more authority and depth.

Glen Oak had never had many oak trees, but in the forties it had been resplendent with giant elms, incredibly massive trees arcing their heavy limbs in a latticework of branches which turned even the widest side street into a tunnel of dappled light and shadow. The elms were Glen Oak. Even a ten-year-old boy had realized that as he rode his bike toward the town on a summer evening, pedaling furiously toward the oasis of trees and Saturday dinner.

Now most of the elms were gone. Baedecker assumed that various epidemics of disease had claimed them. The wide streets were open to the sky. There was still a proliferation of smaller trees. Given the slightest breeze, leaves danced in front of streetlights and threw shadows across the sidewalk. Large old homes set far back from the sidewalks still had their upper stories guarded by gently rustling foliage. But the giant elms of Baedecker's childhood were gone. He wondered if people returning to former homes in small towns all over the nation had noticed this loss. Like the smell of burning leaves in the autumn, it was something that gnawed at his generation by its absence.

The bats danced and dodged against a violet sky. A few stars had come out. Baedecker crossed into a schoolyard, which occupied an entire block. The tall, old elementary school, its shuttered belfry the home for the ancestors of many of this night's crop of bats, had long since been torn down and replaced by a cluster of brick-and-glass boxes huddled at the base of a larger brick-and-glass box, which filled much of the square block. Baedecker guessed that the larger structure was the gymnasium for the consolidated school. There had been no elementary school gym in his day; when they needed one, they walked the two blocks to the high school. Baedecker remembered the old school as being the centerpiece of acres of grass, half a dozen baseball diamonds, and two playground areas — one for the small children and another boasting the high, three-humped slide for the upper grades. All of this had been guarded by the sentinel-silent line of tall trees along the perimeter of the block. Now the low buildings and monstrous gymnasium claimed most of the space. There were no trees. The playgrounds had been reduced to a strip of asphalt and a wooden, stockadelike structure built in a square of sand. Baedecker walked over and sat on a lower level of the thing. It made him think of a poorly designed gallows.

He could see his old home across the street. Even in the fading twilight he could tell that little had been done to change it. Light spilled from the bay windows on both floors. There was siding now where once there had been old clapboard. A garage and asphalt drive had been added where the gravel driveway had once curved around to the backyard. Baedecker guessed that the barn was no longer behind the house. Near the front walk a tall birch grew where none had been before. For a moment Baedecker searched his memory, trying in vain to remember a sapling there. Then he realized that it could have been planted after he had moved away and the tree still would be forty years old.

Baedecker felt no nostalgia, only a slight vertigo of wonder that such an alien shell of stone and board in such an alien part of the world could once have been home to a boy who felt himself the center of creation. A light went on in a second-story room. Baedecker could almost see his old wallpaper in which clipper ships were locked in endlessly repeating squares of rope, each corner complicated by impossible nautical knots. He remembered lying awake during nights of fever, trying again and again to mentally untie those knots. He also remembered the hanging light bulb and cord, the yellow coffin of a closet in one corner, and the huge Rand McNally world map on the wall by the door where the earnest boy had nightly moved colored pins from one unpronounceable Pacific island to another.

Baedecker shook his head, rose, and walked north, away from the school and house. Full night had come, but the stars were hidden by low clouds. Baedecker did not look up again.

'Hey, Dick, how was it? See the old places?' called Ackroyd as Baedecker crossed the yard to the man's home. The couple were sitting in a small, screened porch between the house and garage.

'Yes. It's cooling off very nicely, isn't it?'

'See anybody you knew?'

'The streets were pretty empty,' said Baedecker. 'I could see the lights of Old Settlers — at least I presume it was Old Settlers — out southeast of the high school. Sounded like everyone was out there.' For Baedecker as a boy, the Old Settlers carnival weekend had been three days that marked the very heart of summer while simultaneously being the last joyous event before the sickening countdown to the resumption of school. Old Settlers had meant the recognition of entropy.

'Oh, heck, yeah,' said Ackroyd. 'It'll be going strong tonight with the Jaycees barbecue and all. There's still plenty of time to run out there if you want. The American Legion tent serves beer till eleven.'

'No, thanks, Bill. Actually I am pretty tired. Thought I might turn in. Say good night to Terry for me, would you?' Ackroyd led the way inside and turned on the light above the stairs. 'Actually, Terry's gone over to his friend Donnie Peterson's. They've been spending Old Settlers Weekend together since they were in kindergarten.' Mrs. Ackroyd bustled around making sure that Baedecker had extra blankets even though the night was warm. The guest room had a comfortably familiar motel room smell to it. Mrs. Ackroyd smiled at him, softly closed the door, and Baedecker was alone.

The room was almost pitch-black except for the glow of his digital travel alarm-calculator. Baedecker lay back and stared into the darkness. When the softly glowing digits read 2:32, he rose and went out into the empty, carpeted room. There was no sound from the upper stories. Someone had left a light on over the short stairway in case Baedecker wanted to find his way to the kitchen. Instead, Baedecker crossed to the boy's room, hesitated a second outside the half-opened door, and then stepped inside. The light from the stairway dimly illuminated the pockmarked lunar surface and the blue-and-white rising crescent of earth. Baedecker stood there a minute and was turning to go when something caught his eye. He closed the door and sat down on Terry's bed. For a minute there was no light at all and Baedecker was blind. Then he became aware of a hundred softly glowing sparks on the walls and ceiling. The stars were coming out. The boy — Baedecker felt sure it was the boy — had speckled the room with dots of phosphorescent paint. The half globe of the earth began to glow with a milky radiance, which illuminated the lunar highlands and crater rims. Baedecker had never seen a lunar night from the surface — no Apollo astronaut had — but he sat on the boy's tightly made bed until the stars burned into his eyes and he thought yes, yes.