"The ground!" panted Angalo. "It was so close! No one seemed to mind!"

He sagged to his knees.

"And they made honking noises!" he said. "And kept swinging from side to side! And they're all knobbly under the feathers!"

Masklin flexed his arms to let the tension out.

The land around them didn't seem a lot different from the place they'd left, except that the vegetation was lower and Masklin couldn't see any water.

"Shrub says that this is as close as the geese can go," the Thing said.

"It is too dangerous to go any farther."

Shrub nodded, and pointed to the horizon.

There was a white shape on it.

"That?" said Masklin.

"That's it?" said Angalo.

"Yes."

"Doesn't look very big," said Gurder quietly.

"It's still quite a long way off," said Masklin.

"I can see helicopters," said Angalo. "No wonder Shrub didn't want to take the geese any closer."

"And we must be going," said Masklin. "We've got an hour, and I reckon that's barely enough. Er. We'd better say good-bye to Shrub. Can you ex plain, Thing? Tell her that-that we'll try to find her again. Afterward.

If everything's all right. I suppose."

"If there is any afterward," Gurder added. He looked like a badly washed dishcloth.

Shrub nodded when the Thing had finished translating, and then pushed Pion forward.

The Thing told Masklin what she wanted.

"What? We can't take him with us!" said Masklin.

"Young names in Shrub's people are encouraged to travel," said the Thing.

"Pion is only fourteen months old and already he has been to Alaska."

"Try to explain that we're not going to a Laska," said Masklin. "Try to make her understand that all sorts of things could happen to him!"

The Thing translated.

"She says that is good. A growing boy should always seek out new experiences."

"What? Are you translating me properly?" said Masklin suspiciously.

"Yes."

"Well, have you told her it's dangerous?"

"Yes. She says that danger is what being alive is all about."

"But he could be killed!" Masklin shrieked.

"Then he will go up into the sky and become a star."

"Is that what they believe?"

"Yes. They believe that the operating system of a nome starts off as a goose. If it is a good goose, it becomes a nome. When a good nome dies, NASA takes it up into the sky and it becomes a star."

"What's an operating system?" said Masklin. This was religion. He always felt out of his depth with religion.

"The thing inside you that tells you what you are," said the Thing.

"It means a soul," said Gurder wearily.

"Never heard such a lot of nonsense," said Angalo cheerfully. "At least, not since we were in the Store and believed we came back as garden ornaments, eh?" He nudged Gurder in the ribs.

Instead of getting angry about this, Gurder just looked even more despondent.

"Let the lad come if he likes," Angalo went on. "He shows the right spirit. He reminds me of me when I was like him."

"His mother says that if he gets homesick be can always find a goose to bring him back, " said the Thing.

Masklin opened his mouth to speak.

But there were times when you couldn't say anything because there was nothing to say. If you had to explain anything to someone else, then there had to be something you were both sure of, someplace to start, and Masklin wasn't sure that there was anyplace like that around Shrub. He wondered how big the world was to her. Probably bigger than he could imagine. But it stopped at the sky.

"Oh, all right," he said. "But we have to go right away. No time for long tearful-"

Pion nodded to his mother and came and stood by Masklin, who couldn't think of anything to say. Even later on, when he understood the geese nomes better, he never quite got used to the way they cheerfully parted from one another. Distances didn't seem to mean much to them.

"Come on, then," he managed.

Gurder glowered at Topknot, who had insisted on coming this far. "I really wish I could talk to that nome," he said.

"Shrub told me he's quite a decent nome, really," said Masklin. "He's just a bit set in his ways."

"Just like you," said Angalo.

"Me? I'm not-" Gurder began.

"Of course you're not," said Masklin, soothingly. "Now, let's go."

They jogged through scrub two or three times as high as they were.

"We'll never have time," Gurder panted.

"Save your breath for running," said Angalo.

"Do they have smoked salmon on shuttles?" said Gurder.

"Dunno," said Masklin, pushing his way through a particularly tough clump of grass.

"No, they don't," said Angalo authoritatively. "I remember reading about it in a book. They eat out of tubes."

The nomes ran in silence while they thought about this.

"What, toothpaste?" said Gurder, after a while.

"No, not toothpaste. Of course not toothpaste. I'm sure not toothpaste."

"Well, what else do you know that comes in tubes?"

Angalo thought about this.

"Glue?" he said, uncertainly.

"Doesn't sound like a good meal to me. Toothpaste and glue?"

"The people who drive the space jets must like it. They were all smiling in the picture I saw," said Angalo.

"That wasn't smiling, that was probably just them trying to get their teeth apart," said Gurder.

"No, you've got it all wrong," Angalo decided, thinking fast. "They have to have their food in tubes because of gravity."

"What about gravity?"

"There isn't any."

"Any what?"

"Gravity. So everything floats around."

"What, in water?" said Gurder.

"No, in air. Because there's nothing to hold it on the plate, you see."

"Oh." Gurder nodded. "Is that where the glue comes in?"

Masklin knew that they could go on like this for hours. What these sounds mean, he thought, is: I am alive and so are you. And we're all very worried that we might not be alive for much longer, so we'll just keeptalking, because that's better than thinking.

It all looked better when it was days or weeks away, but now when it was"

How long. Thing?"

"Forty minutes."

"We've got to have another rest! Gurder isn't running, he's just fallingupright."

They collapsed in the shade of a bush. The shuttle didn't look much closer, but they could see plenty of other activity. There were morehelicopters. According to Pion, who climbed up the bush, there werehumans, much farther off.

"I need to sleep," said Angalo.

"Didn't you sleep on the goose?" said Masklin.

"Did you?"

Angalo stretched out in the shade.

"How are we going to get on the shuttle thing?" he said.

Masklin shrugged. "Well, the Thing says we don't have to get on it, we just have to put the Thing on it."

Angalo pushed himself up on his elbows. "You mean we don't get to ride on it? I was looking forward to that!"

"I don't think it's like the Truck, Angalo. I don't think they leave a window open for anyone to sneak in," said Masklin. "I think it'd take more than a lot of nomes and some string to fly it, anyway."

"You know, that was the best time of my life, when I drove the Truck," said Angalo dreamily. "When I think of all those months I lived in theStore, not even knowing about the Outside ..."

Masklin waited politely. His head felt heavy.

"Well?" he said.

"Well, what?"

"What happens when you think of all those months in the Store not knowing about the Outside?"

"It just seems like a waste."

Pion curled up and started to snore. Angalo yawned.

They hadn't slept for hours. Nomes slept mainly at night, but needed catnaps to get through the long day. Even Masklin was nodding.

"Thing?" he remembered to say, "wake me up in ten minutes, will you?"