"Certainly I will answer you. When you were eighteen you were not aware of the ability you had. There was no way to make you aware of it. It would have done no good to tell you or to attempt to train you, for you had to grow into it. We figured it would take fifteen years and it took more than twenty and you aren't even yet as aware as you should be."

"But I could have…"

"Yes," said Flanders, "you could have grown aware of it is your own body, except that there is another factor — inherent memory. Your genes carry the inherent memory factor, another mutation that occurs as infrequently as our telepathic listeners. Before Jay Vickers started fathering children we wanted him to be entirely aware of his hunch ability."

Vickers remembered how he had speculated on the possibility of inherent memory, lying on the corn shuck mattress in the loft of Andrews' house. Inherent memory, memory passed on from father to son. His father had known about inherent memory, so he had guessed it, too. He had known about it, or at least he'd remembered it when the time had come for him to know about it, when he was growing — he groped for the word — aware.

"So that is it," said Vickers. "You want me to put the hunch on Crawford and you want to have my children because they will have hunch, too."

Flanders nodded. "I think we understand one another _now_."

"Yes," said Vickers. "I am sure we do. First of all, you want me to stop Crawford. That is quite an order. What if I put a price on it?"

"We have a price," said Flanders. "A most attractive price. I think it will interest you."

"Try me."

"You asked about Kathleen Preston. You asked if there were such a person and I can tell that there is. How old were you when you knew her, by the way?"

"Eighteen."

Flanders nodded idly. "A very fine age to be." He looked at Vickers. "Don't you agree?"

"It seemed so then."

"You were in love with her," said Flanders.

"I was in love with her."

"And she in love with you."

"I think so," Vickers said. "I can't be sure — thinking of it now, I can't be sure, of course. But I think she was."

"You may be assured that she was in love with you."

"You will tell me where she is?"

"No," said Flanders. "I won't."

"But, you…"

"When your job is done, you'll go back to eighteen again."

"And that's the price," said Vickers. "That's the pay I get. To be given back a body that was mine to start with. To be eighteen again."

"It is attractive to you?"

"Yes, I guess so," Vickers said. "But don't you see, Flanders. The dream of eighteen is gone. It has been killed in a forty-year-old android body. It's not just the physical eighteen — it's something else than that. It's the years ahead and the promise of those years and the wild, impractical dreaming of those years and the love that walks beside you in the spring of life."

"Eighteen," said Flanders. "Eighteen and a good chance at immortality and Kathleen Preston, herself seventeen again."

"Kathleen?"

Flanders nodded.

"Just like it was before," said Vickers. "But it won't be the same, Flanders. There is something wrong. Something that has slipped away."

"Just like it was before," insisted Flanders. "As if all these years had never been."

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

So he was a mutant, after all, in the guise of android, and once he had stopped Crawford, he'd be an eighteen-year-old mutant in love with a seventeen-year-old mutant and there was just a possibility that before they died the listener might pin down immortality. And if that were so, then he and Kathleen would walk enchanted valleys forever and forever and they'd have mutant children who would have terrific hunch and all of them would live a life such as the old pagan gods of Earth would look upon with envy.

He threw back the covers and got out of bed and walked to the window. Standing there, he looked down the moonlit enchanted valley where he'd walked that day of long ago and he saw that the valley was an empty place and would stay empty no matter what he did.

He had carried the dream for more than twenty years and now that the dream was coming true, he saw that it was tarnished with all the time between, that there was no going back to that day in 1956, that a man never can go back to a thing he once has left.

You could not wipe out the years of living, you could not pile them neatly in a corner and walk away and leave them. They could be wiped from out your mind and they would be forgotten, but not forever, and the day would come when they'd break through again. And once they'd found you out you'd know that you had lived not one lie, but two.

That was the trouble, you couldn't hide away the past.

The door creaked open and Vickers turned around.

Hezekiah stood in the doorway, the dim light from the landing sparkling on his metal-plastics hide.

"You cannot sleep?" asked Hezekiah. "Perhaps there's something I can do. A sleeping powder, perhaps, or…"

"There's something you can do," said Vickers. "There's a record that I want to see."

"A record, sir?"

"Yes, a record. My family record. You must have it here somewhere."

"In the files, sir. I can get it right away. If you will only wait."

"And the Preston file as well," added Vickers. "The Preston family record."

"Yes, sir," said Hezekiah. "It will take a moment."

Vickers turned on the light beside the bed and sat down on the edge of the bed and he knew what he had to do.

The enchanted valley was an empty place. The moonlight shattering on the whiteness of the pillar was a memory without life or color. The rose-scent upon the long-gone night of June had blown away with the wind of yesteryear.

Ann, he said to himself. I've been a fool too long about Ann. "What about it, Ann?" he spoke, half-aloud. "We've bantered and quarreled and we've used the bantering and the quarreling to cover the love that both of us have held and if it hadn't been for me and my dreaming of a valley, the dream growing cold and my never knowing it, we would have known long ago the way it was with us."

They took from us, he thought, the two of us, the birthright that was ours of living out our life in the body in which we first knew the world. They've made of us neither man nor woman, but something that passes for a man and woman and we walk through the streets of life like shadows flickering down the wall. And now they would take from us the dignity of death and the knowing that our task was done and they make us live a lie — I an android powered by the life force of a man that is not myself, and you alive with a life that is not your own.

"To hell with them," he said. "To hell with all this double living, with this being a manufactured being."

He'd go back to that other Earth and find Ann Carter and he'd tell her that he loved her, not as one loved a moonlight-and-roses memory, but as a man and woman love when the flush of youth is gone and together they would live out what was left to them of life and he would write his books and she would go on with her work and they'd forget, as best they could, this matter of the mutants.

He listened to the house, the little murmurings of a house at night, unnoticed in the daytime when it is filled with human sound. And he thought, if you listened closely and if you knew the tongue, the house would tell you the tales that you wished to know, could tell you the look upon the face and the way a word was spoken and what a man might do or think when he was alone.

The record would not tell the tale that he wished to know, not all the truth that he hoped to find, but it would tell him who he'd been and something about that tattered farmer and his wife who had been his father and his mother.