The memory was a treasured one—the old man had perished in a 'copter crash several years ago—and for a long while Blake did not move. He had never been in his own mind before. Consequently he was more affected than he might otherwise have been. Finally, stirring himself, he walked out into the kitchen. On a shelf above the sink stood a gaily colored box of his mother's favorite detergent with a full-length drawing of Vera Velvetskin, the company's blond and chic visual symbol, on the front. His mother was standing before the huge automatic range, preparing a meal she had served twenty-three years ago. He regarded her with moist eyes. She had died a dozen years before his father, but the wound that her death had caused had never healed. He wanted to go up behind her and touch her shoulder and say, "What's for supper, mom?" but he knew it would do no good. For her he had no reality, not only because he was far in her future, but because in his mind-world she was a mortal and he, a god—a picayune god, perhaps, but a real one.
As he was about to turn away, the name-plate on the range caught his eye, and thinking that he had read the two words wrong, he stepped closer so that he could see them more clearly. No, he had made no mistake: the first word was "Sabrina", and the second was "York".
He stepped back. Odd that a kitchen range should have the same name as his quarry. But perhaps not unduly so. Giving appliances human names had been common practice for centuries. Even a name like "Sabrina York", while certainly not run-of-the-mill, was bound to be duplicated in real life. Nevertheless a feeling of uneasiness accompanied him when he left the kitchen and climbed the stairs to the second floor.
He went through each room systematically, but saw no sign of Sabrina York. He lingered for some time in his own room, wistfully watching his fifteen-year-old self lolling on the bed with a dog-eared copy of The Galaxy Boys and the Secret of the Crab Nebula, then he stepped back out into the hall and started to descend the stairs.
At the head of the stairs a narrow window looked out over the front yard and thence out over the meadow. He glanced absently through the panes, and came to an abrupt halt. His three pursuers were wading through the long meadow grass less than a quarter of a mile away—not close enough as yet for him to be able to make out their faces, but close enough for him to be able to see that two of them were wearing dresses and that the third had on a blue skirt and blouse, and a kepi to match. He gasped. It simply hadn't occurred to him that his pursuers might be women. To his consternation he discovered that he was even more loath to go back and accost them than he had been before. He actually had an impulse to flee.
He controlled it and descended the stairs with exaggerated slowness, leaving the house by way of the back door. He picked up Sabrina's trail in the back yard and followed it down to the Martian waterway and thence along the bank to where the waterway ended and a campus began. Not the campus of the university which he had visited two days ago to attend his protegee's graduation. It was not a place-time that he cared to revisit, nor a moment that he cared to relive, but Sabrina's trail led straight across the artificially stunted grass toward the little bench where he and Deirdre Eldoria had come to talk after the ceremony was over. He had no choice.
The bench stood beneath a towering American elm whose feathery branches traced green arabesques against the blue June sky. A set of footprints slightly deeper than its predecessors indicated that Sabrina had paused by the trunk. Despite himself Blake paused there too. Pain tightened his throat when he looked at Deirdre's delicate profile and copper-colored hair, intensified when he lowered his eyes to the remembered blueness of her graduation dress. The diamond brooch that he had given her as a graduation present, and which she had proudly pinned upon her bodice for the whole wide world to see, made him want to cry. His self-image of two weeks ago shocked him. There were lines on the face that did not as yet exist, and the brown hair was shot with streaks of gray that had yet to come into being. Lord, he must have been feeling old to have pictured himself like that!
Deirdre was speaking. "Yes," she was saying, "at nine o'clock. And I should very much like for you to come."