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'It's the key to this,' Dave said. 'You may even find it's the key to everything that has troubled you in your life. To your loneliness and your sadness.'

Sam looked at him, startled. Dave smiled.

'Oh yes,' he said. 'You're lonely, you're sad, and you're closed off from other people. You talk a good game, but you don't walk what you talk. Up until today I wasn't nothing to you but Dirty Dave who comes to get your papers once a month, but a man like me sees a lot, Sam. And it takes one to know one.'

'The key to everything,' Sam mused. He wondered if there really were such conveniences, outside of popular novels and movies-of-the-week populated with Brave Psychiatrists and Troubled Patients.

'It's true,' Dave persisted. 'Such things are dreadful in their power, Sam. I don't blame you for not wantin to search for it. But you can, you know, if You want to. You have that choice.'

'Is that something else you learn in AA, Dave?'

He smiled. 'Well, they teach it there,' he said, 'but that's one I guess I always knew.'

Naomi came out onto the porch again. She was smiling and her eyes were sparkling.

'Ain't she some gorgeous?' Dave asked quietly.

'Yes,' Sam said. 'She sure is.' He was clearly aware of two things: that he was falling in love, and that Dave Duncan knew it.

3

'The man took so long checking that I got worried,' she said, 'but we're in luck.'

'Good,' Dave said. 'You two are goin out to see Stan Soames, then. Does the Library still close at eight durin the school year, Sarah?'

'Yes - I'm pretty sure it does.'

'I'll be payin a visit there around five o'clock, then. I'll meet you in back, where the loadin platform is, between eight and nine. Nearer eight would be better - n safer. For Christ's sake, try not to be late.'

'How will we get in?' Sam asked.

'I'll take care of that, don't worry. You just get goin.'

'Maybe we ought to call this guy Soames from here,' Sam said. 'Make sure he's available.'

Dave shook his head. 'Won't do no good. Stan's wife left him for another man four years ago - claimed he was married to his work, which always makes a good excuse for a woman who's got a yen to make a change. There aren't any kids. He'll be out in his field. Go on, now. Daylight's wastin.'

Naomi bent over and kissed Dave's cheek. 'Thank you for telling us,' she said.

'I'm glad I did it. It's made me feel ever so much better.'

Sam started to offer Dave his hand, then thought better of it. He bent over the old man and hugged him.

4

Stan Soames was a tall, rawboned man with angry eyes burning out of a gentle face, a man who already had his summer sunburn although calendar spring had not yet run its first month. Sam and Naomi found him in the field behind his house, just as Dave had told them they would. Seventy yards north of Soames's idling, mud-splashed Rototiller, Sam could see what looked like a dirt road ... but since there was a small airplane with a tarpaulin thrown over it at one end and a windsock fluttering from a rusty pole at the other, he assumed it was the Proverbia Airport's single runway.

'Can't do it,' Soames said. 'I got fifty acres to turn this week and nobody but me to do it. You should have called a couple-three days ahead.'

'It's an emergency,' Naomi said. 'Really, Mr Soames.'

He sighed and spread his arms, as if to encompass his entire farm. 'You want to know what an emergency is?' he asked. 'What the government's doing to farms like this and people like me. That's a dad-ratted emergency. Look, there's a fellow over in Cedar Rapids who might -'

'We don't have time to go to Cedar Rapids,' Sam said. 'Dave told us you'd probably say -'

'Dave?' Stan Soames turned to him with more interest than he had heretofore shown. 'Dave who?'

'Duncan. He told me to say it's time to pay for the baseballs.'

Soames's brows drew down. His hands rolled themselves up into fists, and for just a moment Sam thought the man was going to slug him. Then, abruptly,