When I came conscious again it was just sunrise, rose light and gold shadows. I woke not because of the light but because something was touching my head, ever so gently. I took it for a hay stem, floating there. Second time I knew it was a bug, swatted wildly and nearly broke my hand... a nine-sixteenths end-wrench is a hard chunk of iron to swat full speed, and I woke up fast. The wrench bounced off the aileron hinge, buried itself for a moment in the grass, then floated grandly to hover in the air again. Then as I watched, coming wide awake, it sank softly back down to the ground and was still. By the time I thought to pick it up, it was the same old nine-sixteenths I knew and loved, just as heavy, just as eager to get at all those pesky nuts an bolts.
"Well, hell!"
I never say hell or damn-carryover from an ego thing as a child. But I was truly puzzled, and there was nothing else to say. What was happening to my wrench: Donald Shimoda was sixty miles at least over some horizon from here. I hefted the thing, examine it, balance it, feeling like a prehistoric ape that cannot understand a wheel is turning before its very eyes. There had to be some simple reason . . .
I gave up at last, annoyed, put it on the toolbag an lit the fire for my pan-bread. There was no rush to go anywhere. Might stay here all day, if I felt like it.
The bread had risen well in the pan, was just ready to be turned when I hear a sound in the sky to the west.
There was no way that the sound could have been Shimoda's airplane, no way anybody could have tracked me to this one field out of millions of midwest fields, but I knew that it was him an started whistling. . . watching the bread and the sky an trying to think of something very calm to say when he lane.
It was the Travel Air, all right, flew in low over the Fleet, pulled up steep in a show-off turn, slipped own through the air an lane 60 mph, the speed a Travel Air ought to land. He pulled alongside an shut own his engine. I didn't say anything. Waved, but didn't say a word. I did stop whistling.
He got out of the cockpit an walked to the fire. "Hi, Richard."
"You're late," I said. "Almost burned the pan-bread."
"Sorry-"
I handed him a cup of stream water and a tin plate with half the pan-bread and a chunk of margarine.
"How'd it go ?" I said.
"Went OK," he said with an instant's half-smile. "I escaped with my life."
"Had some doubts you would."
He ate the bread for a while in silence. "You know," he said at last, contemplating his meal, "this is really terrible stuff."
"Nobody says you have to eat my panbread," I said crossly. "Why does everybody hate my pan-bread? NOBODY LIKES MY PAN-BREAD! Why is that, Ascended Master?"
"Well," he grinned, "-and I'm speaking as God, now-I'd say that you believe that it's good and that therefore it does taste good to you. Try it without deeply believing what you believe and it's sort of like . . . a fire . . . after a flood . . . in a flour mill, don't you think? You meant to put the grass in, I guess."
"Sorry. Fell in off my sleeve, somehow. But don't you think the basic bread itself --not the grass or the little charred part, there-the basic pan-bread, don't you think . . . ?"
"Terrible," he said, handing me back all but a bite of what I had handed to him. "I'd rather starve. Still have the peaches?"
"In the box."
How had he found me, in this field? A twenty-eight-foot wingspan in ten thousand miles of prairie farmland is not an easy target, looking into the sun, especially. But I vowed not to ask. If he wanted to tell me, he would tell me.
"How did you find me?" I said. "I could have landed anywhere."
He had opened the peach can and was eating peaches with a knife . . . not an easy trick.
"Like attracts like," he muttered, missing a peach slice.
"Oh-"
"Cosmic law. "
"Oh "
I finished my bread and then scraped the pan with sand from the stream. That sure is good bread.
"Do you mind explaining? How is it that I am like your esteemed self? Or did by 'like' you mean the airplanes are alike, sort of?"
"We miracle-workers got to stick together," he said. The sentence was both kind and horrifying the way he said it.