“Yes. Now.”

Charley fed Mirtin steadily. No part of Mirtin’s body moved except his lower jaw, which went snap, snap, snap, biting steadily. Mirtin gobbled five tortillas before he indicated that he had had enough for now.

He said, “What are those made off?”

“Cornmeal. You know corn? The plant we grow.”

“Yes. I know.”

“We grind it up, we bake it on a hot stone. Just like they did long ago. We do a lot like they did long ago.”

“You sound angry about that,” Mirtin observed.

“Why not? What year is this, 1982 or 1492? Why can’t we be civilized like the others? Why we have to go on doing everything the old way?”

“Who makes you do things that way, Charley?”

“The white men!”

Mirtin frowned. “Do you mean, they force you to use old-fashioned methods? They pass laws about it?”

“No, no, nothing like that’ Charley groped for the right words. “They let us do what we like, as long as we stay peaceful. We can elect our own governor for the pueblo, our own policemen, everything. If we wanted, we could tear the pueblo down and build a new one out of plastic. But then there’d be no tourists. No cameras. Look, we’re a museum. We’re the funny men out of the past. You follow me?”

“I think so,” Mirtin murmured. “A deliberate retention of archaic ways.”

“What ways?”

“Old-fashioned.”

“That’s it. We voted it ourselves, the people. We got to put on a good show for the tourists. They bring the money. We don’t have money ourselves. A few of us, they left the pueblo, they run stores in Albuquerque or something, but most of us, we’re poor, we need the money the tourists bring. We dance for them, we paint our faces, we do everything the old way. But it’s phony, because we forgot what it all means. We got the secret societies, only we don’t remember the initiation words, so we made up new ones. Phony! Phony!” Charley shook with anger. “You want another tortilla, maybe?”

“Yes. Please.”

In satisfaction, Charley watched the paralyzed star-man eat.

He said, “We ought to have refrigerators, heat, pavement, real houses, roads, everything. Instead we live in mud. We got television and cars, that’s all. Everything else like it was in 1500. That’s how they voted. It makes me sick. You know what I want, Mirtin? I want to get out. Go to Los Angeles and learn to build rockets. Or be a spaceman. I know lots of things. And I could learn lots more.”

“But you’re too young to leave home?”

“Yeah. Eleven! Hell, who wants to be eleven? I leave home, they arrest me fast. You don’t learn electronics in reform school. I’m stuck here.” He scooped up some cool earth from the cave floor and hurled it at the far wall. “Look,” Charley said, “I don’t want to talk about my little mud village. Tell me about your world, will you? Tell me everything!”

Mirtin laughed. “That’s a great deal to ask. Where should I begin?”

Pausing a moment, Charley said, “You have big cities there?”

“Yes, very big.”

“Bigger than New York? Than L.A.?”

“Some of them.”

“You got jet planes?”

“Something similar,” said Mirtin. “They use—” he chuckled “—they use fusion generators. You saw one explode in the sky, remember?”

“Oh. Yeah. What a dope I am! The flying saucers! What drives them? Like sun energy?”

“Yes,” said Mirtin. “A small fusion generator that creates a plasma we house in a strong magnetic field. What happened to our ship was that the magnetic field weakened.”

“Oh, oh! Boom!”

“A very big boom. But that’s how we travel, in flat, round ships. That you call flying saucers.”

“How fast they go?” Charley asked. “Five thousand miles an hour?”

“More or less,” Mirtin answered, literally but obliquely.

Charley took this as an affirmative. “So you can go from here to New York in an hour, huh? And on your planet you get around just as fast. How many people you got on your planet?”

Mirtin laughed. “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. It’s — what do they say? — classified information. Top secret.”

“Come on! I won’t tell the newspapers!”

“Well — ”

Charley dangled a tortilla over the star-man’s lips. “You want another one, or don’t you?”

Mirtin sighed. His eyes twinkled in the darkness. “We’ve got eight billion people,” he said. “Our world’s somewhat larger than yours, although the gravity’s about the same. Also, we don’t take up as much room as you do. We’re quite small. I’ll have that tortilla, now.”

Charley gave it to him. While Mirtin chewed, Charley puzzled over his last remarks.

“You mean, you don’t look like us, really?”

“No.”

“That’s right, you said you were different inside. But I figured you had different bones, maybe your heart and your stomach in different places. You’re more different than that?”

“Much more different,” said Mirtin.

“Like how? Tell me how you’d look without the disguise.”

“Small. Three feet long, I guess. We have no bones at all, just a stiffening of cartilage. We—” Mirtin stopped. “I’d rather not describe myself, Charley.”

“You mean, right now, inside you, inside what I see, you got a thing like that? No bigger than a baby, all curled up in you? Is that it?”

“That’s it,” Mirtin admitted.

Charley rose and walked to the mouth of the cave. He felt shaken/by that, and he couldn’t say why. In the short time since he had known Mirtin, he had come to think of the man from the stars as just that, a man, someone who had been born on another planet the way some people are born in other countries, but not too different, really. Smarter than an Earthman, but not all that different except in the way his insides were arranged. But Mirtin seemed to be some kind of big worm, really. Or worse. He hadn’t actually described himself. Charley looked up at the three bright stars, and it seemed to him that for the first time he knew what an alien thing he had befriended.

“I could use another tortilla,” Mirtin said.

“This is the last one. I didn’t think you’d be so hungry, you being hurt and all.”

“You’d be surprised.”

Charley fed it to him. Then they talked some more. They talked of Mirtin’s planet, whose name was Dirna, and they talked of the watchers and why they watched Earth, and they talked of stars and planets and flying saucers. When Mirtin grew tired of that, the conversation turned around, and they talked of San Miguel. Charley tried to explain what it was like to grow up in a village that still kept to prehistoric ways. The words bubbled from him as he tried to express the frustration he felt, tried to communicate the seething impatience within him, the hunger to learn, to know, to see, to do.

Mirtin listened. He was a good listener, who knew when to be silent and when to ask a question. He seemed to understand. He told Charley not to worry, just to go on looking at things and asking questions, and a time would come when he’d get away from San Miguel into the real world. That was encouraging. Charley stared at the little man with the friendly eyes and the gray fringe of hair, and it was impossible for him to accept the fact that Mirtin was a rubbery thing without bones, underneath it all. Mirtin seemed so human, so kind. Like a doctor or a teacher, except he wasn’t absentminded and distant, the way the doctors and teachers Charley knew were. The only one who had ever talked to Charley like this before was the good teacher, Mr Jamieson; and there were times when Mr Jamieson forgot Charley’s name, and called him Juan, or Jesus or Felipe. Mirtin would never forget my name, Charley told himself.

After a while he decided that he must be tiring the star-man out. And he couldn’t risk staying away from the pueblo for long. “I got to go now,” he said. “I’ll be back after dark tomorrow night. I’ll bring more tortillas, lots of them. And we can talk again. All right, Mirtin?”

“It sounds fine, Charley.”