His father never addressed the Merle twin by any but his rightful name, nor did he ever address the other by the one the dead mother had affixed to him, miscalling him by a number of titles, among which were Sputterboy, Gig, Doctor, and Bill.
Before ascending quite to the Whipple New Place they left the dusty road for a path that led over a lawnlike stretch of upland, starred with buttercups and tiny anemones, and inhabited by a colony of gophers that instantly engaged Frank, the dog, now free of his leash, in futile dashes. They stood erect, with languidly drooped paws, until he was too near; then they were inexplicably not there. Frank at length divined that they unfairly achieved these disappearances by descending into caverns beneath the surface of the earth. At first, with frantic claws and eager squeals, he tore at the entrances to these until the prey appeared at exits farther on, only to repeat the disappearance when dashed at. Frank presently saw the chase to be hopeless. It was no good digging for something that wouldn't be there.
"There's life for you, Doctor," said Dave Cowan. "Life has to live on life, humans same as dogs. Life is something that keeps tearing itself down and building itself up again; everybody killing something else and eating it. Do you understand that?"
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur, believing he did. Dogs killed gophers if they caught them, and human beings killed chickens for Sunday dinners.
"Humans are the best killers of all," said Dave. "That's the reason they came up from monkeys, and got civilized so they wear neckties and have religion and post offices and all such."
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.
They climbed to a green height and reclined on the cool sward in the shade of a beech tree. Here they could pick out the winding of the quick little river between its green banks far below, and look across the roofs of slumbrous Newbern. The Wilbur twin could almost pick out the Penniman house. Then he looked up, and low in the sky he surprisingly beheld the moon, an orb of pale bronze dulled from its night shine. Never before had he seen the moon by day. He had supposed it was in the sky only at night. So his father lectured now on astronomy and the cosmos. It seemed that the moon was always there, or about there, a lonesome old thing, because there was no life on it. Dave spoke learnedly, for his Sunday paper had devoted a page to something of this sort.
"Everything is electricity or something," said Dave, "and it crackles and works on itself until it makes star dust, and it shakes this together till it makes lumps, and they float round, and pretty soon they're big lumps like the moon and like this little ball of star dust we're riding on—and there are millions of them out there all round and about, some a million times bigger than this little one, and they all whirl and whirl, the little ones whirling round the big ones and the big ones whirling round still bigger ones, dancing and swinging and going off to some place that no one knows anything about; and some are old and have lost their people; and some are too young to have any people yet; but millions like this one have people, and on some they are a million years older than we are, and know everything that it'll take us a million years to find out; but even they haven't begun to really know anything—compared with what they don't know. They'll have to go on forever finding out things about what it all means. Do you understand that, Bill?"
"Yes, sir," said Wilbur.
"Do you understand how people like us get on these whirling lumps?"