When Gordie first said he was gonna do it, I didn't believe him.  He was always like that, saying he was gonna do a thing and then not, and I guess I figured him being thirteen and a year younger than me, he wouldn't have the nerve.  But then one night right in front of Aunt Gert he says that when he's figured out how to unseal the night door, he's going outside.  Aunt Gert nearly had a stroke on the spot, and said he oughtn't trifle with the Law of God like that, and to get all his "outdoorsiness" out of his system in the daytime when he was supposed to.  "And you, Benjamin," she says to me over her nose, "you stop putting ideas like that into his head!"

Well I never put it there, but I can't say I never thought about it myself -- going outside after dark, I mean.  The grown-ups never give you any good reason why not.  Not really.  Except for all of that kid's stuff about demons and monsters.  It's all got something to do with freedom of religion and how we came to New Earth, like the pilgrims, and with the stuff people were doing back on Old Earth that we didn't believe in.  It's got something to do with all that, only nobody will tell me exactly what.

I tried unsealing one of the doors once, but I couldn't.  Gordie's smarter with mechanical things, though.  He got a window unsealed.  I never would've thought of it, the way he did it.  There was a crack in the wall under this window, and he pushed an ice pick in there over and over till it made a round little hole all the way through to the outside.  He plugged it with flour paste, so in the daytime no one would notice.  Then he stole all kinds of weird stuff out of the kitchen -- "borrowed it," he says.  Anyhow, he mixed up this powdery stuff and sprinkled it around outside the window one day when nobody was watching him.  Next night we both snuck out of bed and went to the same window, and Gordie had a long, thin stick he'd put in the furnace and lit the tip of.  With the unlit end, he pushed the flour plug out of the hole, then he shoved the lit end through.  Next thing I know, whoosh -- the window seal curls up just like it's morning.  Gordie jammed the stick in it so it couldn't come down again.  He says he fooled the little glass eye out there into thinking it was daytime, but I still don't understand how.  It didn't matter then though, because the seal was open and night was looking back at us through the open window.

There were hulking, shadowy things swaying out there -- the trees, I realized.  I'd seen them a million times through that window in daylight, but now they looked all gross and misshaped, like the monsters God says are supposed to wait for you in the night.  Me, I never figured why God would want any truck with monsters, anyhow.  I think Aunt Gert and the rest just made all that up to scare little kids.  Excepting the grown-ups must be scared of something, else why don't they ever go out after dark?

Gordie, he must've thought the same, because he stared out that window with me a long time before he whispered, "See? I knew there weren't any demons."  Like he expected them to be standing right there, dripping scales and flicking their forked tongues at us or something.

"Well then," I said, all grown-up like, "let's go out and see if we can find some."

Gordie made a noise in his throat, sort of a stifled cough, and went all stuttery on me.  "Let's... let's not.  Not t-t-tonight, huh?  Tomorrow.  I think I'm tired now."

"But you got the seal open tonight.  What's the deal?"

"Nothing.  I'm tired, that's all.  I can open it again tomorrow night."

I thought he must've spent so much time planning how to fool that stupid glass eye, he'd never really thought about going outside after he'd done it.  So now he was scared -- too scared even to move.

"All right," I told him.  "You be a baby and go back to bed.  I'm going out."  And I put one leg over the sill, just to show him I wasn't bluffing.  "You coming or not?"

He said "Yeah," but he didn't look so sure.  He crawled out after me though, and then hung onto the sill like it could save him if some slobbering thing with three-inch teeth suddenly came hulking around the corner.  I didn't really much care that he was scared.  I was a little shaky myself, mostly because I had the knots-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach feeling we maybe could get caught any minute by one of the grown-ups.  But I wasn't afraid of any monsters.  Crap on the monsters.  It was night and I'd never seen night before, and I wanted to see it.  All of it.

The first thing I noticed that wasn't the way I'd expected was the dark.  I mean, it wasn't dark, not like when the light is off in your room and you can't see anything.  Out here, I could see everything pretty clear, once I looked at it hard.  I guess that was because of the moons.  I knew the moons stayed out at night, not like the sun, because I'd heard Grandpa Samuel talk about them and how they lit up the night.  They say once, a long time ago, he fell off his horse hunting and knocked himself out.  Didn't come home all night, and next day about all he could talk about were those moons.  Grandma and the others all said he'd gone loony, and nobody paid much attention to him after that.  But he still goes on about the moons, and Aunt Gert and Esther and Eban all shush him just like Grandma used to do.

Standing there by the window, the wind blew cold on us, and I think it spooked Gordie, but I liked it.  Demon wind it was, maybe, like could take your soul away, and that was fine with me, too.  Anywhere away from here.  We both knew we'd get a whipping if we were found out here.  I guess that made just being there a pretty big thrill all by itself.  I hadn't felt that tingly since we both snuck our first drink of liquor out of Uncle Eban's still.  I wasn't planning to get sick this time, though.

"Geez," Gordie had hunkered down until he was almost sitting in the scorched little mound of his powder concoction.  "Look at the buildings."

I squatted down beside him and was about to say "What of it?" till I looked at the other houses too, and saw what he meant.  They weren't the same -- nothing at all like in the daytime.  They seemed closer together, huddled in a scared circle as if they could reach out for each other at the first sign of something dangerous.

"It's the seals, Gordie.  The windows, the doors -- they're all covered over for the night, like usual.  We just never saw it from the outside."

"It... Well it's just sorta weird, but... they look like a picture I saw once, of a place where they used to put dead people."

"Yeah.  I know the picture you mean, in one of Schlessinger's old books.  But they only buried you in one of those buildings if you were rich.  Otherwise they burned you."

"Listen, forget I mentioned it, okay?"

"Fine, " I said, and got up.  "Let's go, then.  We won't find any demons sitting around here."

Gordie started to stammer some more, but rather than stay there all alone, he followed me out past the Donahue's place and their sealed-up barn, over the wood rail fence and into the corn fields.  Well, leastways they used to be corn fields before harvest.  They'd get rotated to string beans next.  The earth was new-plowed now and scrunched under our feet.  Shadows, long and spidery, reached out to clutch at us and that wind kept blowing, fresh and chilly and stinging with a wonderful crisp kind of wetness that it never had in the daylight.

"Look up, Gordie.  Look at the sky!" I wanted to shout the words out loud, but in the stillness even my normal voice was almost booming.

"It's all different," Gordie squeaked.  He was straining his voice through a craned neck.  "It's so black.  Where does the sun go?"

For some one smart enough to fake out a glass electric eye, Gordie could be awful stupid.  "It sinks into the ocean, you dope.  Don't you know anything?"

I guess he didn't, because he stared up at that wide, dark sky like it could drink him, and turned circles round and round till he fell whump on his backside from the dizzies.

"What is that?" he breathed, still sitting there in the plowed furrows, an overgrown turnip with legs.  "God, it's beautiful.  It glitters."

"Not it.  They.  The stars.  Didn't you ever hear Grandpa Samuel talk about the stars?"

In both his hands, Gordie had picked up dirt clods, and he was crumbling them through his fingers while he talked.  "I guess not," he said.

"I dunno what you wanted to come out at night for then." I plopped down beside him to get a better look at the stars myself.  "I've been wanting to get out here to see them ever since I first heard Grandpa Samuel say how they sparkled like sun shining on a snow bank."

I could tell by the pout in his voice that Gordie was irked.  "So if you wanted out so bad, why didn't you figure out how to break the seals yourself?"

"Because you did, dope."

I guess he didn't feel much like arguing the point, and the stars were too beautiful to argue under anyhow.  So we both just sat hugging our knees and watching the sky without saying anything for a while.  Then Gordie looked over at me and whispered, "Listen."

"To what?"

"Don't you hear it?  Singing.  They're singing."

For a minute I thought he'd gone raving crazy.  Then I did listen, and I realized there'd been a sound -- a whole bunch of sounds, really -- chiming like a million little bells ever since we'd climbed through the window.  I'd been so wrapped up in looking that I hadn't even thought to wonder what it was, even though I'd been hearing it right along.  The sound was almost eerie, now I listened to it close, and it made me shiver just a little.  I crossed my arms to keep Gordie from noticing.

"What singing?" I asked him, and then, edgy-like, "That's not singing, stupid."

"What is it then?"

"How do I know?  Maybe it's the monsters."

He giggled.  "Monsters can't sing.  Besides, all I see are stars. Just stars."

"What's making the noise, then?"

"It's them," he decided.  "It's the stars singing."

"Yeah," I agreed, and looked at the sky with new awe.  "I guess it is."

Star music is the most beautiful sound on New Earth.  Even though Grandpa Samuel tried to tell me, much later, that it was only a bunch of bugs making that sound out in the bushes and trees, I never believed him.  It made sense the stars should have a music all their own, and besides, I never saw a bug yet that knew how to sing like that.  It was the stars all right.

Gordie had crumbled another dirt clod and was scattering the soil in front of him.  "I don't believe there are any demons," he said out loud.

"You don't know that."

"Yes I do.  It was some old monster tried to eat your great-grandfather that started it all, so they put it down in a book that nobody could go out after night.  The monster crawled off and died a hundred years ago, but no one ever came outside to see if it was gone.  They just stayed in there, all sealed in, and made up a lot of demon stories to scare little kids with."

"Yeah.  But I bet they still believe it, about the demons.  Like their parents told them, and their parents' parents told them.  Aunt Esther believes it.  I can tell just by the way she talks about 'em; how they're all fire-tongued and bulgy-eyed."

Gordie made a snorting noise.

"Your folks believe it.  Mine, too.

"They're all crazy."

We listened to the stars sing for a long time then, and one of the moons crawled down toward the ground and got swallowed up. The stars got so much brighter after that, I couldn't believe this was the same sky I'd looked at so often in the daytime, when it was nothing but a boring bunch of cloudy blue.

After a long time, Gordie said, "If there aren't any more monsters, why should night still be Forbidden?  If there weren't ever any monsters, why'd they put it on the list of the Forbidden to begin with?"

I told him I couldn't guess why, except that night always was on top of the list of the Forbidden, way higher than lying and stealing and just one notch above something called war that I could never get my folks or Aunt Gert or anybody to explain.

"I'll bet I know," Gordie said suddenly.  "I'll bet I know where they keep all the answers hidden."

I knew what he was thinking, because I'd been thinking it too.  "In Schlessinger's barn, you mean?  I figured that too.  That's why they keep it sealed up even in the daytime.  Something Forbidden's gotta be in there."

"We can find out.  Tomorrow I'll mix up some more powder.  Barn's got glass eyes, too."

"Maybe there's a monster inside it."  The idea excited me.

"Nah.  Not unless it's a dead one.  Just his bones, maybe.  We'll find out."

"Yeah." I leaned back and was almost lying down across the furrows when I felt Gordie go all stiff and rigid and draw in a breath.

"What is it?" I asked him, and sat up straight to look where he was looking, out across the plowed field into the stand of birch trees.  They swayed back and forth and muttered to themselves, all dark and black and shadowy.  I didn't see anything else out there, and started to say so, but Gordie shushed me.

"Listen, " he hissed.  "Something's moving out there."

I listened, and there was a kind of rustle and crunching noise from somewhere among the trees.  It was getting louder, coming toward us.

Gordie was on his feet and I was halfway up when we saw it come out of the bushes, tall and black and stalking straight at us.  We didn't stick around to become some monster's dinner.  We made for the fence at a dead run and I swear I could hear my heart thumping louder than both our feet.  We were almost to the fence before I realized there were more than four feet tearing up ground on the way there, and something was behind us, running too, and probably reaching out to grab for us.  I could even hear it breathing, but I was way too scared to look back, scared I'd miss getting over the fence if I tried.  We both hit the wood rails at the same time, but halfway over I saw Gordie jerk backwards just like something had yanked him by the collar.  He hollered, or started to, but something strangled it off and I heard him fall, kicking and whimpering, back into the dirt. I'd've hollered myself if I could, only the sound refused to come.  I had the sudden stupid idea that if I pinched my backside I could wake up safe in bed and everything would be okay.  But it wasn't okay.  I got over the fence and landed hard on the other side, scrambling to get up and run again, even if I would be leaving Gordie behind.  When I stood up, though, I got a really good look at the "demon," and instead of running I just sat back down in the dirt and let my breath out.  I almost wanted to cry.

It was Grandpa Samuel.  No scaly, clawed, fire-eyed monster, but Grandpa Samuel with his hand clamped over Gordie's mouth, still trying to shush him, because Gordie had his eyes squinched shut and was fighting for all he was worth.

"Quiet!" I whisper-shouted at him, and climbed back over the fence.  "Be quiet, you idiot.  It's only Grandpa Samuel!"

Gordie opened his eyes then, and stopped fighting when he saw it was true, though his struggling hadn't been getting him anywhere anyhow.  Any demon worth its salt would have gobbled him down a long time before this.

Gordie started stammering again when the hand let go of his mouth.  "D-did you follow us?"

Grandpa Samuel chuckled the way grown-ups do when they know something you don't.  "I was about t'ask you boys that same question.  What are you doin' out here, and better asked, how'd you get here?"

"Gordie fooled the eye," I confessed, and felt more like a tattler than a criminal owning up to his crime.  "We opened the seal on the southwest window."

"Hm.  That's pretty smart, fooling the eye.  How'd you do that?"

"Made a powder that burns bright enough to fake it out," Gordie answered.  Then, rather than explain any more, he asked, "How'd you get out?"

"Me? I get out most every night, boy, while you're safe asleep in bed.  I keep those eyes all workin'.  Didn' you know that?  I take care of the windmill, which runs the generator, which runs the lights and seals and eyes.   I know right how to turn one off when I want."

Gordie hadn't even heard that last part.  "Every night?" he echoed.  "You come out every night?"  He'd gotten up on his feet, and was brushing the dirt off his dungarees.

"Since when?" I wanted to know.  "Since you fell off your horse in the woods?"

"Never fell off no horse.  Just made that up to explain why I stayed out.  Wanted to see the sun go down all the way and watch the stars come out.  But I'd been sneakin' out for a long time before that -- since I was younger 'n either of you.  Ain't nobody else I know of in all that time ever tried it but you.  Ain't nobody else ever knew I did -- till now.  We ain't gonna tell on each other, now are we?"

With a whole new kind of respect for him, Gordie and I both said, "No  sir.

"Do you stay out all night?" I asked him.  "All night every night?""

"Not always.  Gotta sleep some time y'know.  But if I do spend all night out, ain't nobody cares I sleep late next day.  I'm old, see, so they don't wonder.  You now -- with you they'd wonder.  Maybe even start to suspect."

"The demons," Gordie piped up.  "Did you ever see the demons?"

Grandpa Samuel looked a little like he wasn't so sure how to answer.  "No, he said at last.  "Can't say as I ever did."

"Then I was right.  There aren't any monsters.  No monsters at all."

"Hold on there.  I never said there weren't none.  I said I never seen 'em.  There's a difference."

I climbed back on the fence and straddled it.  "Were there demons once?  Didn't you ever see one, not even a long time ago?"

He leaned on the fence beside me, and his voice all of a sudden got sad.  "Never did," he said.  "But I heard about the worst one, from my grandpa.  His name was Evan Merrill and he was one of the very first colonists.  He could still remember Old Earth and how come we left it.  Ain't nobody wants to talk about any of that no more.  It's what they call taboo."

Gordie's nose wrinkled.  "What's that?"

"It's anything you can't do," I answered.  "Like the Forbidden."

"So?" said Gordie.  "What's it got to do with demons?"

"Everything, son.  You want I should show you?  You sure you really want to know?"  I guess both our eyes lit up then, because he said, "All right, come on," and started walking off toward the Schlessinger place.  While we trotted along after, he went on talking.

"Demons on Old Earth had lots of names.  And when my Grandpa Merrill and the first Donahues and Vincis and Schlessingers and Kams and some others who ain't here no more all come out to New Earth, they made the demons taboo: the ones named lie and steal and cheat, deceive and adulterate and murder... and war.  That was the worst one, that war one.  They say it come after us.  Followed us out into the stars and a long while after we was here, it was still lookin' out to devour us.  I reckon it almost did, too, and that's how night got to be Forbidden like it is.  That's the 'how come?' you was gonna ask me next, wasn' it?"

We both nodded.  I saw Gordie's eyes get big when he saw we were walking straight for Schlessinger's barn, the one the seals stayed on all day and night to keep anyone from going in.  Grandpa Samuel knew how to get in, though.  He used a key to open up a little box on the barn wall and when he did something in there, the seal on the main door rolled straight up and the lights went on inside, shining bright through the cracks in the door.

"What's in there?" Gordie asked, all breathless and scared.

"Ain't nothin' to be afraid of."  There was that chuckle again.  "Then too, maybe it is.  Come on, come on.  You won't learn nothin' standin' out here."  When he pulled open the door, the light spilled out across the ground in one big yellow splash, making us blink.

First thing I noticed about the inside was whitewashed walls, all bright and gleaming -- not like the inside of a barn ought to be.  There weren't any animals, or hay; not even any stalls or lofts to put them in.  And no tack or harness hanging on the walls like in a real barn -- just some wire and a few tools hung up beside the gray squatty thing that Grandpa Samuel called the generator.  It was wired to the windmill out in the yard, he said, and it made all the power work.  That was interesting, I guess, but we didn't spend much time looking at it, because there was another machine in Schlessinger's barn, and it was a lot bigger and a whole lot more interesting.

It was more than twice as tall as us, and so long it almost filled up the whole back half of the barn.  It had flat, painted metal sides and a domed glass whatsit on top, and there were rust-speckled silver letters on its nose.  They said, "Leviathan." I couldn't remember where, but I'd seen that word before.

"I don't suppose," Grandpa Samuel mused, "you'd likely believe me if I told you 't'weren't nothin' but a fancy plow."

"A plow?"  Gordie and I said it both together, with just the same sort of squeakiness in our voices.  I said it over again, though, because I couldn't figure how the wood-carved plows our horses pulled and this thing could ever be remotely related.

"Well, I said a fancy plow.  Used t'call 'em agro-cultivators, which was just another highbrow word for tractor, which is what they was called before that.  Time was we had a whole flock of 'em right here on New Earth, crawlin' up 'n' down hills like a lot of overgrowed bugs.  I hear tell you could plow acres with 'em in less'n a day.  That was just a little before my time, though.  Can't say I ever did see one movin'."

"It moved?" Gordie said.  "How?  No horse could pull it.  It's way too big."

"Didn' need no horse.  Used to run 'em on whatcha call 'chemical fuel.'  Used t'get that from the supply ships, till they didn't come no more.  My grandpa and the others tried to make their own fuel then, but it didn' work so good.  So mostly the tractors got parked in the barnyards, an' we learned how to do things primitive-like.  They was all still out there by the time I come along.  Whole barnyard full o' Leviathans.  I can remember playin' on 'em."

Gordie's finger traced part of the blue and white pattern on the tractor's side and came away dusty.  "What happened to them?"

"And the ships," I added.  "What happened to the ships?"

"I was comin' to that.  Now I've showed her to you, what say we go back outside?"

Reluctant, we followed him out, and while he reset the seal, I remembered where I'd seen the tractor's name.  It was in Aunt Gert's Bible, and she'd told me it meant a terrible beast, a monster like the ones living out in the dark.  I wondered if the tractors were really Aunt Gert's demons.  Maybe now we could go home and tell her there weren't any more running loose to be afraid of.

"Guess I really hadn't ought to be tellin' ya," Grandpa Samuel was saying.  "Because once you know, there's no un-knowin'.  But I don't figure no harm's in it.  There's only the one tractor left, and it ain't got no fuel."

I didn't know what he meant by that, but it didn't matter to me just then, because we were back out under the stars, and I stared up at them so long while I was walking that I ran smack into the Schlessinger's fence and nearly did a nose dive over it.  Nobody seemed to notice, luckily.

"There weren't ever any real monsters, were there?" I heard Gordie asking as I disentangled myself from the fence rails.

Grandpa Samuel sat on the top rail next to me.  "War was real enough," he said.  "It come out here after us, so I reckon it musta been real.  Don't remember a lot about that the first time it happened.  But I was here when it came again.  Musta been around eight years old.  We hadn't had no supply ships in longer'n that.  Guess folks thought war was all over and everybody dead and maybe Old Earth wasn' even there anymore.  But another ship did come."

"A ship," Gordie echoed.  "A space ship?"

"Starship, they called it.  And it looked like a star, too.  You could see it move across the sky at night, and when the little ships left it to fly down, you could see them, too."

Night, my head whispered back to me.  He said you could see it move across the sky at night.  Aunt Gert never told us the truth.  She said night always was part of the Forbidden.

I didn't realize I'd said part of that out loud until Grandpa Samuel answered me.  "Far back as she can remember, it was.  You forget I'm the oldest one around here.  People want to forget what I know, so they figure I'm crazy.  Makes it a whole lot easier for 'em."

"The people in the ships," Gordie said, impatient as ever, "what'd they want?"

"Us, I hear tell.  Wanted folks to go off 'n' help fight their war for 'em, cause it'd gone on so long I guess they was short of people to kill off.  My grandpa told 'em no, and said that spoke for ever'one, and he figured it was so.  Only it wasn' so.  Lots of young men here listened real good 'n' hard to what those starship fellas had t' say, all about flyin' up there between the stars and doin' their part for the human race and some other patriotic hogwash.  They said their war'd come too close to ignore now -- too close to hide from, 'cause all you'd have to do was look up at the sky some uncloudy night and you'd see it up there.  You'd see the stars move, the stars that were really ships.  And sometimes you could see a bright flash of light and a fireball that'd go spinnin' off into nowhere.  When we saw all that, they said, we'd want to go.

"Well there were some young fellas did wanna go, only they didn' dare volunteer right there.  So the starship warriors said they'd leave us fuel and supplies and anything else we needed, and maybe when we used it, we'd remember who gave it to us and maybe be a little ashamed of ourselves.  Made my grandpa pretty mad, that last part.  He took their fuel, though, and he never figured he owed 'em diddly squat for it, either."

"Space ships," Gordie muttered, not absorbing half of what was being said.  "Real space ships."

I watched the stars glitter down at me and looked hard for one that moved.  "They're all holding pretty still, " I said, disappointed.

"Ain't seen one move for near fifty years myself.  Oh, little'ns skitter cross the sky ever now 'n' then.  Ain't the same thing.  Back then, you could see the whole sky lit up with 'em, night after night.  And those young men I told you listened so close, they watched and they did feel ashamed and pretty soon, they wanted to go and find out what flyin' among the stars was like for themselves."

"I'd like to go," sighed Gordie.  "I'd like to find out, too."

"Yeah," said Grandpa Samuel a little sadly. "So'd my Pa.  And quite a few others.  Wasn' much they could do about it though, till one night one of them fireballs went down in Kams' wheat field.  They all run out to put the fire out and found out it'd mostly already gone out by itself.  All there was left was a burned up space ship in a big charred hole.  They buried what was left of her crew, and then they took apart the ship -- told everyone else it was for parts to try and fix the tractors, 'cause even with the new fuel we couldn' get most of 'em to run.  They'd sat there too many years, I guess.

"So they was smart, these boys.  A little too smart, maybe.  They took apart the tractors, most of 'em, and built 'em back to look an awful lot like the burned up space ship might've looked before it was burnt.  Grandpa Merrill, he figured out what they was doin' and I guess there was a pretty terrible row.  But in the end, they went -- took their new-built space ships with the fuel the starshippers gave 'em and flew away to join the war.  My Pa went with 'em.  And more went after that, one by one, soon as they could rebuild a Leviathan and go.  Every night the stars moved more and more, and flashed and burned and spiraled down. Just about the last of our young men built ships and left, and nothin' anybody ever tried could stop 'em.  Nobody ever came back.  Not even one.  Grandpa Merrill used to tell about that and cry when he told it, how none of 'em come back."

"But I don't understand, " I told him, "how that explains the seals and the eyes and night being Forbidden."

"Explains it pretty clear, you think about it."  Grandpa Samuel smiled at me and suddenly he didn't look half as old as I'd always thought.  "You can't go chasin' after what you can't see, boy.  My grandpa and the others figured that out soon enough.  Had a few tricks of their own left over.  Right there in Schlessinger's barn, they'd stashed what was left of the ship they come on all those years before.  They took apart just about ever' last tractor left, and with all them parts, they built the eyes and the seals and fixed it so no one could watch the war.  And just to be extra sure, they burned what was left of the Leviathans -- all except one.  That one Grandpa Merrill locked away in the barn because he said it was a sin to destroy your own tech-no-lo-gy.  That's a big word means 'smarts.'  He figured someday the tractor'd get used again for its real purpose.  Me, I always hoped I could maybe charge it up somehow with the generator.  Only I just never could figure out how."

"Let me try," Gordie begged.  "I could figure it, Grandpa Samuel.  I know I could."

"Maybe someday," was all the answer he got.  "Ain't you boys plannin' on any sleep tonight?"

I objected to that.  "Sleep?  Who could sleep?  Tell us more about the war, Grandpa Samuel.  What was it exactly, and why did it happen?"

He shrugged.  "Got no answer to that.  Don't know nobody ever knew the answer.  Anyway, now there's no more war -- maybe no more Old Earth either, or if there is they forgot about us a long time since.  The stars don't move nowadays, and nobody remembers how to build space ships any more.  Since nobody knows that, though, or wants to, night just goes on bein' Forbidden."

"I'm gonna go," Gordie said to the stars.  "Someday, when I've figured it out, I'm gonna go."

I don't know why, but I believed him.  And even though Grandpa Samuel seemed to get a little miffed at that and made us go back inside to bed, we've gone back out most every night since then and watched the stars with him.  Maybe one day we'll get to see them move.  We've been in Schlessinger's barn again, too, and got to know the tractor better.  Gordie wants to know all there is to know about Leviathan, and about space ships too.  He says once he knows enough about a thing, it shouldn't be so hard to build it.  Soon as we can, we'll get Grandpa Samuel to tell us what one looks like.  Then we'll build a space ship of our own.

We can do it.  I know we can.