The Judge raised one liverspotted hand, cutting him off. His eyes twinkled in his time-beaten face. “Softly, my boy—softly. No one on your committee has been leaking, not that I know of, and I keep my ear close to the ground. No, I whispered the secret to myself. Why did you come here tonight? Your face is an education in itself, Larry. I hope you don’t play poker. When I was talking about my few simple pleasures, I could see your face sag and droop… a rather comic stricken expression appeared on it—”

“Is that so funny? What should I do, look happy about… about…”

“Sending me west,” the Judge said quietly. “To spy out the land. Isn’t that about it?”

“That’s exactly it.”

“I wondered how long it would be before the idea would surface. It is tremendously important, of course, tremendously necessary if the Free Zone is to be assured its full chance to survive. We have no real idea what he’s up to over there. He might as well be on the dark side of the moon.”

“If he’s really there.”

“Oh, he’s there. In one form or another, he is there. Never doubt it.” He took a nail-clipper from his pants pocket and went to work on his fingernails, the little snipping sound punctuating his speech. “Tell me, has the committee discussed what might happen if we decided we liked it better over there? If we decided to stay?”

Larry was flabbergasted by the idea. He told the Judge that, to the best of his knowledge, it hadn’t occurred to anybody.

“I imagine he’s got the lights on,” the Judge said with deceptive idleness. “There’s an attraction in that, you know. Obviously this man Impening felt it.”

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Larry said grimly, and the Judge laughed long and heartily.

When he sobered he said, “I’ll go tomorrow. In a Land-Rover, I think. North to Wyoming, and then west. Thank God I can still drive well enough! I’ll travel straight across Idaho and toward Northern California. It may take two weeks going, longer coming back. Coming back, there may be snow.”

“Yes. We’ve discussed that possibility.”

“And I’m old. The old are prone to attacks of heart trouble and stupidity. I presume you are sending backups?”

“Well…”

“No, you’re not supposed to talk about that. I withdraw the question.”

“Look, you can refuse this,” Larry blurted. “No one is holding a gun to your hea—”

“Are you trying to absolve yourself of your responsibility to me?” the Judge asked sharply.

“Maybe. Maybe I am. Maybe I think your chances of getting back are one in ten and your chances of getting back with information we can actually base decisions on are one in twenty. Maybe I’m just trying to say in a nice way that I could have made a mistake. You could be too old.”

“I am too old for adventure,” the Judge said, putting his clippers away, “but I hope I am not too old to do what I feel is right. There is an old woman out there someplace who has probably gone to a miserable death because she felt it was right. Prompted by religious mania, I have no doubt. But people who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad. I’ll go. I’ll be cold. My bowels will not work properly. I’ll be lonely. I’ll miss my begonias. But…” He looked up at Larry, and his eyes gleamed in the dark. “I’ll also be clever.”

“I suppose you will,” Larry said, and felt the sting of tears at the corners of his eyes.

“How is Lucy?” the Judge asked, apparently closing the subject of his departure.

“Fine,” Larry said. “We’re both fine.”

“No problems?”

“No,” he said, and thought about Nadine. Something about her desperation the last time he had seen her still troubled him deeply. You’re my last chance, she had said. Strange talk, almost suicidal. And what help was there for her? Psychiatry? That was a laugh, when the best they could do for a GP was a horse doctor. Even Dial-A-Prayer was gone now.

“It’s good that you are with Lucy,” the Judge said, “but you’re worried about the other woman, I suspect.”

“Yes, I am.” What followed was extremely difficult to say, but having it out and confessed to another person made him feel much better. “I think she might be considering, well, suicide.” He rushed on: “It’s not just me, don’t get the idea I think any girl would kill herself just because she can’t have sexy old Larry Underwood. But the boy she was taking care of has come out of his shell, and I think she feels alone, with no one to depend on her.”

“If her depression deepens into a chronic, cyclic thing, she may indeed kill herself,” the Judge said with chilling indifference.

Larry looked at him, shocked.

“But you can only be one man,” the Judge said. “Isn’t that true?”

“Yes.”

“And your choice is made?”

“Yes.”

“For good?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Then live with it,” the Judge said with great relish. “For God’s sake, Larry, grow up. Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little applied over all your scruples is an absolute necessity! It is to the soul what a good sun-block is to the skin during the heat of the summer. You can only captain your own soul, and from time to time some smartass psychologist will question your ability to even do that. Grow up! Your Lucy is a fine woman. To take responsibility for more than her and your own soul is to ask for too much, and asking for too much is one of humanity’s more popular ways of courting disaster.”

“I like talking to you,” Larry said, and was both startled and amused by the open ingenuousness of the comment.

“Probably because I am telling you exactly what you want to hear,” the Judge said serenely. And then he added: “There are a great many ways to commit suicide, you know.”

And before too much time had passed, Larry had occasion to recall that remark in bitter circumstances.

At quarter past eight the next morning, Harold’s truck was leaving the Greyhound depot to go back to the Table Mesa area. Harold, Weizak, and two others were sitting in the back of the truck. Norman Kellogg and another man were in the cab. They were at the intersection of Arapahoe and Broadway when a brand-new Land-Rover drove slowly toward them.

Weizak waved and shouted, “Where ya headed, Judge?”

The Judge, looking rather comic in a woolen shirt and a vest, pulled over. “I believe I might go to Denver for the day,” he said blandly.

“Will that thing get you there?” Weizak asked.

“Oh, I believe so, if I steer clear of the main-traveled roads.”

“Well, if you go by one of those X-rated bookstores, why don’t you bring back a trunkful?”

This sally was greeted with a burst of laughter from everyone—the Judge included—but Harold. He looked sallow and haggard this morning, as if he had rested ill. In fact, he had hardly slept at all. Nadine had been as good as her word; he had fulfilled quite a few dreams the night before. Dreams of the damp variety, let us say. He was already looking forward to tonight, and Weizak’s sally about pornography was only good for a ghost of a smile now that he had had a little first-hand experience. Nadine had been sleeping when he left. Before they dropped off around two, she had told him she wanted to read his ledger. He had told her to go ahead if she wanted to. Perhaps he was putting himself at her mercy, but he was too confused to know for sure. But it was the best writing he had ever done in his life and the deciding factor was his want—no, his need. His need to have someone else read, experience, his good work.

Now Kellogg was leaning out of the dump truck’s cab toward the Judge. “You be careful, Pop. Okay? There’s funny folks on the roads these days.”

“Indeed there are,” the Judge said with a strange smile. “And indeed I will. A good day to you, gentlemen. And you too, Mr. Weizak.”

That brought another burst of laughter, and they parted.

The Judge did not head toward Denver. When he reached Route 36, he proceeded directly across it and out along Route 7. The morning sun was bright and mellow, and on this secondary route, there was not enough stalled traffic to block the road. The town of Brighton was worse; at one point he had to leave the highway and drive across the local high school football field to avoid a colossal traffic jam. He continued east until he reached I-25. A right turn here would have taken him into Denver. Instead he turned left—north—and nosed onto the feeder ramp. Halfway down he put the transmission in neutral and looked left again, west, to where the Rockies rose serenely into the blue sky with Boulder lying at their base.