Early January, with deep snow, and a wind sharp enough to slice your nose off– so of course that was a day for Makepeace Smith to decide he had to work in the forge all day, while Alvin went into town to buy supplies and deliver finished work. In the summer, the choice of jobs tended to go the other way.

Never mind, thought Alvin. He is the master here. But if I'm ever master of my own forge, and if I have me a Prentice, you can bet he'll be treated fairer than I've been. A master and Prentice ought to share the work alike, except for when the Prentice plain don't know how, and then the master ought to teach him. That's the bargain, not to have a slave, not to always have the Prentice take the wagon into town through the snow.

Truth to tell, though, Alvin knew he wouldn't have to take the wagon. Horace Guester's sleigh-and-two would do the job, and he knew Horace wouldn't mind him taking it, as long as Alvin did whatever errands the roadhouse needed doing in town.

Alvin bundled himself tight and pushed out into the wind– it was right in his face, from the west, the whole way up to the roadhouse. He took the path up by Miss Larner's house, it being the closest way with the most trees to break the wind. Course she wasn't in. It being school hours, she was with the children in the schoolhouse in town. But the old springhouse, it was Alvin's schoolhouse, and just passing by the door got him to thinking about his studies.

She had him learning things he never thought to learn. He was expecting more of ciphering and reading and writing, and in a way that's what she had him doing, right enough. But she didn't have him reading out of those primers like the children– like Arthur Stuart, who plugged away at his studies by lamplight every night in the springhouse. No, she talked to Alvin about ideas he never would've thought of, and all his writing and calculating was about such things.

Yesterday:

“The smallest particle is an atom,” she said. “According to the theory of Demosthenes, everything is made out of smaller things, until you come to the atom, which is smallest of all and cannot be divided.”

“What's it look like?” Alvin asked her.

“I don't know. It's too small to see. Do you know?”

“I reckon not. Never saw anything so small but what you could cut it in half.”

“But can't you imagine anything smaller?”

“Yeah, but I can split that too.”

She sighed. “Well, now, Alvin, think again. If there were a thing so small it couldn't be divided, what would it be like?”

“Real small, I reckon.”

But he was joking. It was a problem, and he set out to answer it the way he answered any practical problem. He sent his bug out into the floor. Being wood, the floor was a jumble of things, the broke-up once-alive hearts of living trees, so Alvin quickly sent his bug on into the iron of the stove, which was mostly all one thing inside. Being hot, the bits of it, the tiniest parts he ever saw clear, they were a blur of movement; while the fire inside, it made its own outward rush of light and heat, each bit of it so small and fine that he could barely hold the idea of it in his mind. He never really saw the bits of fire. He only knew that they had just passed by.

“Light,” he said. “And heat. They can't be cut up.”

“True. Fire isn't like earth– it can't be cut. But it can be changed, can't it? It can be extinguished. It can cease to be itself. And therefore the parts of it must become something else, and so they were not the unchangeable and indivisible atoms.”

“Well, there's nothing smaller than those bits of fire, so I reckon there's no such thing as an atom.”

“Alvin, you've got to stop being so empirical about things.”

“If I knowed what that was, I'd stop being it.”

“If I knew.”

“Whatever.”

“You can't always answer every question by sitting back and doodlebugging your way through the rocks outside or whatever.”

Alvin sighed. “Sometimes I wish I never told you what I do.”

“Do you want me to teach you what it means to be a Maker or not?”

“That's just what I want! And instead you talk about atoms and gravity and– I don't care what that old humbug Newton said, nor anybody else! I want to know how to make the– place.” He remembered only just in time that there was Arthur Stuart in the corner, memorizing every word they said, complete with tone of voice. No sense filling Arthur's head with the Crystal City.

“Don't you understand, Alvin? It's been so long– thousands of years– that no one knows what a Maker really is, or what he does. Only that there were such men, and a few of the tasks that they could do. Changing lead or iron into gold, for instance. Water into wine. That sort of thing.”

“I expect iron to gold'd be easier,” said Alvin. “Those metals are pretty much all one thing inside. But wine– that's such a mess of different stuff inside that you'd have to be a– a–” He couldn't think of a word for the most power a man could have.

“Maker.”

That was the word, right enough. “I reckon.”

“I'm telling you, Alvin, if you want to learn how to do the things that Makers once did, you have to understand the nature of things. You can't change what you don't understand.”

“And I can't understand what I don't see.”

“Wrong! Absolutely false, Alvin Smith! It is what you can see that remains impossible to understand. The world you actually see is nothing more than an example, a special case. But the underlying principles, the order that holds it all together, that is forever invisible. It can only be discovered in the imagination, which is precisely the aspect of your mind that is most neglected.”

Well, last night Alvin just got mad, which she said would only guarantee that he'd stay stupid, which he said was just fine with him as he'd stayed alive against long odds by being as pure stupid as he was with out any help from her. Then he stormed on outside and walked around watching the first flakes of this storm start coming down.

He'd only been walking a little while when he realized that she was right, and he knowed it all along. Knew it. He always sent out his bug to see what was there, but then when he got set to make a change, he first had to think up what he wanted it to be. He had to think of something that wasn't there, and hold a picture of it in his mind, and then, in that way he was born with and still didn't understand, he'd say, See this? This is how you ought to be! And then, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, the bits of it would move around until they lined up right. That's how he always did it: separating a piece off of living rock; joining together two bits of wood; making the iron line up strong and true; spreading the heat of the fire smooth and even along the bottom of the crucible. So I do see what isn't there, in my mind, and that's what makes it come to be there.

For a terrible dizzying moment he wondered if maybe the whole world was maybe no more than what he imagined it to be, and if that was true then if he stopped imagining, it'd just go away. Of course, once he got his sense together he knew that if he'd been thinking it up, there wouldn't be so many strange things in the world that he never could've thought of himself.

So maybe the world was all dreamed up in the mind of God. But no, can't be that neither, because if God dreamed up men like White Murderer Harrison then God wasn't too good. No, the best Alvin could think of was that, God worked pretty much the way Alvin did– told the rocks of the earth and the fire of the sun and stuff like that, told it all how it was supposed to be and then let it be that way. But when God told people how to be, why, they just thumbed their noses and laughed at him, mostly, or else they pretended to obey while they still went on and did what they pleased. The planets and the stars and the elements, they all might be thought up from the mind of God, but people were just too cantankerous to blame them on anybody but their own self.