Oh, I had heard these stories before. Who hadn’t? Men on the moon. What surprised me was that someone as well-educated as Julian would believe them.

“Just take the book,” he insisted.

“What: to keep?”

“Certainly to keep.”

“Believe I will,” I muttered, and I stuck the object in my back-satchel and felt both proud and guilty. What would my father say, if he knew I was reading literature without a Dominion stamp? What would my mother make of it? (Of course I would not tell them.)

At this point I backed off, and found a grassy patch a little away from the rubble, where I could sit and eat some of the lunch I had packed, and watch Julian, who continued to sort through the detritus with a kind of scholarly intensity. Sam Godwin came and joined me, brushing a spot on an old timber so he could recline without soiling his uniform, such as it was.

“He sure loves those old books,” I said, making conversation.

Sam was often taciturn—the very picture of an old veteran—but he nodded and spoke familiarly:

“He’s learned to love them. I helped teach him. I wonder if that was wise. Maybe he loves them too much. It might be they’ll kill him, one of these days.”

“How, Sam? By the apostasy of them?”

“Julian’s too smart for his own good. He debates with the Dominion clergy. Just last week I found him arguing with Ben Kreel

“Why, what threatens him?”

“The jealousy of the powerful,” Sam said, but he would say no more on the subject, only sat and stroked his graying beard, and glanced occasionally, and uneasily, to the east.

* * *