the piping winds of subterranean caverns, like that of the Calabrian Caves, which has been known to leave stout cavers white-haired, babbling wrecks? What do we understand of such forces?
“Our human race is a colony of ants, Mr. Lawton, inhabiting an anthill at the edge of a limitless chasm called infinity. All things may happen in infinity, and who knows what might come out of it? What do we know of the facts of anything, in our little corner of a never-ending universe, in this transient revolution in the space-time continuum? Seeping down from the stars at the beginning of time there were giants—beings who walked or flew across the spaces between the worlds, inhabiting and using entire systems at their will—and some of them still remain. What would the race of man be to creatures such as these? I’ll tell you—we are the plankton of the seas of space and time!
“But there, I’m going on a bit, away from the point. The facts are these: that before I came to Navissa with Sam, he had already been told that he was sterile, and that after I left—after that horror had killed my husband—well, then I was pregnant.
“Of course, at first I believed that the doctors were wrong, that Sam had not been sterile at all, and this seemed to be borne out when my baby was born just within eight months of Sam’s death. Obviously, in the normal scale of reckoning, Kirby was conceived before we came to Navissa. And yet it was a difficult pregnancy, and as a newborn baby he was a weedy, strange little thing—frail and dreamy and far too quiet—so that even without knowing much of children I nevertheless found myself thinking of his birth as having been…premature!
“His feet were large even for a boy, and his toes were webbed with a pink stretching of skin that thickened and lengthened as he grew. Understand, please, that my boy was in no way a freak—not visibly. Many people have this webbing between their toes; some have it between their fingers too. In all other respects he seemed to be completely normal. Well, perhaps not completely…
“Long before he could walk, he was talking—baby talk, you know—but not to me. Always it was when he was alone in his cot, and always when there was a wind. He could hear the wind, and he used to talk to it. But that was nothing really remarkable; grown children often talk to invisible playmates, people and creatures that only they can see; except that I used to listen to Kirby, and sometimes—
“Sometimes I could swear that the winds talked back to him!
“You may laugh if you wish, Mr. Lawton, and I don’t suppose I could blame you, but there always seemed to be a wind about our home, when everywhere else the air was still….
“As Kirby grew older this didn’t seem to happen so frequently, or perhaps I simply grew used to it, I really don’t know. But when he should have been starting school, well, that was out of the question. He was such a dreamer, in no way slow or backward, you understand, but he constantly lived in a kind of dreamworld. And always—though he seemed later to have given up his strange conversations with drafts and breezes—he had this fascination with the wind.
“One summer night when he was seven, a wind came up that threatened to blow the very house down. It came from the sea, a north wind off the Gulf of Mexico—or perhaps it came from farther away than that, who can say? At any rate, I was frightened, as were most of the families in the area where we lived. Such was the fury of that demon wind, and it reminded me so of…of another wind I had known. Kirby sensed my fear. It was the strangest thing, but he threw open a window and he shouted. He shouted right into the teeth of that howling, banshee storm. Can you imagine that? A small child, teeth bared and hair streaming, shouting at a wind that might have lifted him right off the face of the Earth!
“And yet in another minute the worst of the storm was over, leaving Kirby scolding and
“Our human race is a colony of ants, Mr. Lawton, inhabiting an anthill at the edge of a limitless chasm called infinity. All things may happen in infinity, and who knows what might come out of it? What do we know of the facts of anything, in our little corner of a never-ending universe, in this transient revolution in the space-time continuum? Seeping down from the stars at the beginning of time there were giants—beings who walked or flew across the spaces between the worlds, inhabiting and using entire systems at their will—and some of them still remain. What would the race of man be to creatures such as these? I’ll tell you—we are the plankton of the seas of space and time!
“But there, I’m going on a bit, away from the point. The facts are these: that before I came to Navissa with Sam, he had already been told that he was sterile, and that after I left—after that horror had killed my husband—well, then I was pregnant.
“Of course, at first I believed that the doctors were wrong, that Sam had not been sterile at all, and this seemed to be borne out when my baby was born just within eight months of Sam’s death. Obviously, in the normal scale of reckoning, Kirby was conceived before we came to Navissa. And yet it was a difficult pregnancy, and as a newborn baby he was a weedy, strange little thing—frail and dreamy and far too quiet—so that even without knowing much of children I nevertheless found myself thinking of his birth as having been…premature!
“His feet were large even for a boy, and his toes were webbed with a pink stretching of skin that thickened and lengthened as he grew. Understand, please, that my boy was in no way a freak—not visibly. Many people have this webbing between their toes; some have it between their fingers too. In all other respects he seemed to be completely normal. Well, perhaps not completely…
“Long before he could walk, he was talking—baby talk, you know—but not to me. Always it was when he was alone in his cot, and always when there was a wind. He could hear the wind, and he used to talk to it. But that was nothing really remarkable; grown children often talk to invisible playmates, people and creatures that only they can see; except that I used to listen to Kirby, and sometimes—
“Sometimes I could swear that the winds talked back to him!
“You may laugh if you wish, Mr. Lawton, and I don’t suppose I could blame you, but there always seemed to be a wind about our home, when everywhere else the air was still….
“As Kirby grew older this didn’t seem to happen so frequently, or perhaps I simply grew used to it, I really don’t know. But when he should have been starting school, well, that was out of the question. He was such a dreamer, in no way slow or backward, you understand, but he constantly lived in a kind of dreamworld. And always—though he seemed later to have given up his strange conversations with drafts and breezes—he had this fascination with the wind.
“One summer night when he was seven, a wind came up that threatened to blow the very house down. It came from the sea, a north wind off the Gulf of Mexico—or perhaps it came from farther away than that, who can say? At any rate, I was frightened, as were most of the families in the area where we lived. Such was the fury of that demon wind, and it reminded me so of…of another wind I had known. Kirby sensed my fear. It was the strangest thing, but he threw open a window and he shouted. He shouted right into the teeth of that howling, banshee storm. Can you imagine that? A small child, teeth bared and hair streaming, shouting at a wind that might have lifted him right off the face of the Earth!
“And yet in another minute the worst of the storm was over, leaving Kirby scolding and
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