So he decided to sell it.
He persuaded a charitable lithographer to make him a batch of stock certificates. They looked very authentic. Each said plainly it was good for one share of blue sky, though the fat half-draped woman portrayed in three colors stood outside a Domed City pointing not at the sky but at a distant river with forested hills behind it.
Arch sold his certificates for a stiff price; ten dollars apiece. He could do it because by this time his wanderings followed a fairly definite route. The people who hated or feared or despised him were pretty well eliminated from it, and most of his calls were at apartments where he was known and expected and even respected a little.
My grandfather's was one of these—or rather, my great-grandfather's. When Arch first brought his stock certificates my grandfather was a little fellow everybody called Ham, maybe seven years old. He had a sister named Annie who was five. He's given me a mental picture of the two of them standing close together for reassurance, and from an open doorway shyly watching the old man eat and listening to him talk.
When my great-grandfather bought a ten dollar stock certificate in my grandfather's name, my grandfather took it as a promise. And his little sister Annie was so jealous that the next time Old Arch came around my great-grandfather had to buy a share for her.
As they grew to be nine, ten, eleven, twelve, every winter when Old Arch would come around, my grandfather and his sister Annie would ask, "When are you going to take us to see the sky, Arch?" And he would say, "When you're older. When your folks say you can go." And, "When it's summer, and not too cold for these old bones."
But when my grandfather was fourteen he followed Old Arch out and down the stairs after the old man had paid his annual call, and he stopped him on a landing to ask, "Arch, have you ever taken anyone Outside?"
"No," Arch said, sighing. "People won't go."
"I'll go," said my grandfather, "and so will my sister Annie."