More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon Page B

“Been thinking,” he said.
       Prodd waited, glad to wait. Lone said, “I should go.” That wasn’t quite it. “Move along,” he said, watching. That was better.
       “Ah, Lone. Why?”
       Lone looked at him. Because you want me to go .
       “Don’t you like it here?” said Prodd, not wanting to say that at all.
       “Sure.” From Prodd’s mind, he caught, Does he know? and his own answered, Of course I know! But Prodd couldn’t hear that. Lone said slowly, “Just time to be moving along.”
       “Well.” Prodd kicked a stone. He turned to look at the house and that turned him away from Lone, and that made it easier. “When we came here, we built Jack’s, your room, the room you’re using. We call it Jack’s room. You know why, you know who Jack is?”
       Yes , Lone thought. He said nothing.
       “Long as you’re... long as you want to leave anyway, it won’t make no difference to you. Jack’s our son.” He squeezed his hands together. “I guess it sounds funny. Jack was the little guy we were so sure about, we built that room with seed money. Jack, he—”
       He looked up at the house, at its stub of a built-on wing, and around at the rock-toothed forest rim. “—never got born,” he finished.
       “Ah,” said Lone. He’d picked that up from Prodd. It was useful.
       “He’s coming now, though,” said Prodd in a rush. His face was alight. “We’re a bit old for it, but there’s a daddy or two quite a bit older, and mothers too.” Again he looked up at the barn, the house. “Makes sense in a sort of way, you know, Lone. Now, if he’d been along when we planned it, the place would’ve been too small when he was growed enough to work it with me, and me with no place else to go. But now, why, I reckon when he’s growed we just naturally won’t be here any more, and he’ll take him a nice little wife and start out just about like we did. So you see it does make a kind of sense?” He seemed to be pleading. Lone made no attempt to understand this.
       “Lone, listen to me, I don’t want you to feel we’re turning you out.”
       “Said I was going.” Searching, he found something and amended, “ ’Fore you told me.” That , he thought, was very right .
       “Look, I got to say something,” said Prodd. “I heard tell of folk who want kids and can’t have ’em, sometimes they just give up trying and take in somebody else’s. And sometimes, with a kid in the house, they turn right round and have one of their own after all.”
       “Ah,” said Lone.
       “So what I mean is, we taken you in, didn’t we, and now look.”
       Lone did not know what to say. “Ah” seemed wrong.
       “We got a lot to thank you for, is what I mean, so we don’t want you to feel we’re turning you out.”
       “I already said.”
       “Good then.” Prodd smiled. He had a lot of wrinkles on his face, mostly from smiling.
       “Good,” said Lone. “About Jack.” He nodded vehemently. “Good.” He picked up the scythe. When he reached his windrow, he looked after Prodd. Walks slower than he used to , he thought.
    Lone’s next conscious thought was, Well, that’s finished.
       What’s finished? he asked himself.
       He looked around. “Mowing,” he said. Only then he realized that he had been working for more than three hours since Prodd spoke to him, and it was as if some other person had done it. He himself had been— gone in some way.
       Absently he took his whetstone and began to dress the scythe. It made a sound like a pot boiling over when he moved it slowly, and like a shrew dying when he moved it fast.
       Where had he known this feeling of time passing, as it were, behind his back?
       He moved the stone slowly. Cooking and warmth and