"Thanks a lot," Julian said. "I appreciate that a lot."
They ate their lunch lazily in the shade of the Vogelhart willow tree. Foster was persuaded to partake of a cooky. There was a noonday stillness on Gone-Away; only the red-winged blackbirds trilled and clucked, and the frog in the lunch box gave a sudden resounding boom.
"Yeeps!" said Foster. "He would have scared me all right."
After the little boys had departed, Julian and Portia lingered on, lying on their backs in the warm grass and looking straight into the sky.
"Not a cloud, not a bird, not a plane. Not a mosquito, even," Portia mused. "Just blue nothing. It makes you feel—I don't know—peaceful, I guess."
"M-m-m," Julian murmured noncommittally. It made him feel sleepy. He lay with his eyes half closed, chewing on a grass stem.
"Millions and trillions of miles of just blue nothing," Portia repeated dreamily. She liked that phrase.
"There goes a June bug, though. And up, way up, now, there's a hawk. And even if you can't see them, think of all the other things there are up there: satellites in orbit, meteors and meteorites, suns, moons, planets, stars; millions and billions and trillions of those! It doesn't make me feel peaceful, brother, it makes me feel nervous! 'Blue nothing,' nothing!"
"Honestly," was all Portia could think of to say to that.
Now a tiny plane went purring across the sky, very high, very slow to eyes grown accustomed to the flight of jets.