"Wait a while," counseled Chairman Riggs. "Who knows? Today, tomorrow."
"Or a million years from now," Young told him bitterly and left, a tall, vigorous-looking man whose step was swift in anger where normally it was slow with weariness and despair.
There was yet a chance, of course.
But there was little hope.
How can a man go back almost six thousand years and snare a thing he never understood?
And yet Andrew Young remembered it. Remembered it as clearly as if it had been a thing that had happened in the morning of this very day.
It was a shining thing, a bright thing, a happiness that was brand-new and fresh as a bluebird's wing of an April morning or a shy woods flower after sudden rain.
He had been a boy and he had seen the bluebird and he had no words to say the thing he felt, but he had held up his tiny fingers and pointed and shaped his lips to coo.
Once, he thought, I had it in my very fingers and I did not have the experience to know what it was, nor the value of it. And now I know the value, but it has escaped me—it escaped me on the day that I began to think like a human being. The first adult thought pushed it just a little and the next one pushed it farther and finally it was gone entirely and I didn't even know that it had gone.