1It was the seventh winter after the night of five lights. The two great countries had begun, slowly, to lower their hands. In a city of the old world, a wall that had cut the streets in two was being broken up by the people who lived on both sides of it, and they were carrying the pieces home in their pockets.
2And far out, the first of the twin travellers flew on. It was in the thirteenth year of its road. It had passed the great world and the ringed world long since, and the ringed world's weight had flung it upward, out of the flat plain in which all the worlds go round. It had no more worlds to meet. It was forty times as far from the sun as the earth is. A word sent to it at dawn did not reach it until near midday.
3Lucy Brandt was thirty-seven that winter. She had been thirteen years in the house of the far travellers, and she was now one of those who wrote out the long lists of orders that told a traveller what to do with each minute of its day.
4That winter the house was emptying. The second twin had passed the last cold world in the summer, and there was nothing more for either to visit. Desks were being cleared. Men who had steered the travellers since before they flew were being sent to other work, or to none. Lucy's own section was to be closed by the summer.
5Now Carl Sagan, the watcher of the sky who had made the gold letter, had asked the house for one thing more. He had been asking it for nine years. He asked that the first twin, before its eyes were shut for good, should turn round once and take a picture of home.
6The house had said no, and it had not been foolish to say so. There were three reasons, and Lucy had heard them often from the head of her section, a careful man named Arlen Voss.
7"First, the eye," Voss would say. "It was made for dim worlds a long way from the sun. From out there, the earth sits close beside the sun. Point the eye that way and the sun may burn it out. Second, there is nothing to learn. The earth will be smaller than one grain of the picture. You will not see a sea or a cloud. You will see a point, if you see anything. Third, it takes people to write the orders and people to read the picture, and I am being told to let those people go." He would spread his hands. "I am not against it. I only can't find what it is for."
8Lucy could not have told him what it was for. She only knew that she wanted it, as she had once wanted moving air on her face.
9There was one other who wanted it. Old Haskell, who had been chief of her section in the week of the deaf ear, had left the house seven years before. He lived alone below the hills, in a small house with a great many clocks. Each winter he sent her a card with a single line on it. That winter the line was: Has the man got his picture yet?
10In the first month of the year Haskell's heart began to fail, and they put him in the hospital at the foot of the hills. Lucy went to see him on a Sunday. He was grey, and much smaller, with a tube at his nose. He asked about the picture before he asked about her.
11"They say the eye might burn," she told him.
12"The eye has nothing left to look at," said Haskell. "What are they saving it for? Its old age?" He had to stop for breath. "Thirteen years we have sent that thing orders. Go here. Look at that. Not once has anyone said to it: look where you came from. I would like to see that. I would like it a good deal." He shut his eyes. "I don't say I will wait for it."
13It was not Lucy who won the picture, and it was not Haskell. Carl Sagan carried his asking past the house, up to the chief of all the nation's work in the sky, a man who had himself flown beyond the air. And late in that winter word came down that the picture should be taken.
14So the orders were written after all. Lucy wrote her part of them at a desk with an empty desk on either side. The eye was to look at six worlds, one after another, and the earth among them. For the earth it would take three pictures through three coloured glasses, so that the colours might be put together afterward. There would be sixty pictures in all.
15The orders went up from the great dish, and the traveller carried them out on the day in the second month when lovers send each other letters. Lucy noticed that. She said nothing about it to Voss.
16Far out in the dark the traveller turned its eye toward the sun it had left. It looked at each world in turn. It wrote what it saw onto a reel of tape that it carried, for it could not send so much at once. Then, to spare its small store of power, its eyes were shut off. They have never been opened since. The last work those eyes ever did was to look back.
17And then nothing came. This was the hard part, and no one had warned Lucy of it. The pictures lay on the tape at the edge of the sun's family, and there was no dish free to hear them. The great dishes were promised to younger travellers, on their way to nearer worlds, whose need was pressing. The old twin could wait. It had waited thirteen years.
18It waited five weeks. Lucy went to the hospital each Sunday. Haskell asked each time, and each time she said, "It is taken. It is on the tape. We can't get a dish."
19He took this badly. "It is taken," he would say to the ceiling. "It exists. It is sitting out there in a box, existing, and I am lying here." One Sunday he did not ask, because he was asleep, and the nurse said he slept most of the day now.
20At the end of the next month a dish came free, and the tape began to play. It came down slowly, a piece at a time. It was the first of May before the last of it was home.
21The work of reading the pictures had been given to the few who were left. One of them was a young woman named Tess Iwata, two years in the house, who sat alone in a dim room before a glass. Lucy was with her on the afternoon the earth's three pictures came up. She could not keep away.
22They were poor pictures. Lucy saw that at once, and her heart sank. The eye had been looking so near the sun that stray light had got in and gone glancing about inside it. Each picture was crossed by pale slanting bars, like the light in a shuttered room. The rest was black.
23"Where is it?" said Lucy.
24"It ought to be here." Tess laid the point of her pencil on the glass, at the place where the reckoning said home should lie. It was in the middle of one of the pale bars. There was nothing there.
25Tess leaned closer. Then she wet her finger and rubbed at the glass.
26"What is it?"
27"A speck. On the screen." She rubbed again. The speck did not move. It was in the picture, and it was smaller than a single grain of the picture. The eye had not even been able to hold it whole. "It's a flaw," said Tess. "A bad grain. Or one of the hits we get, when some bit of flying stuff goes through the eye and leaves a spark." She was tired. She reached to mark it for taking out, as she had marked a hundred others that week.
28"Wait," said Lucy.
29She had not known she would say it. She was thinking of a low house on the Cape that she had never seen, and of three torn lines of numbers on a page, one under another. Her mother had told her that story more often than the story of the mouse. The storm struck where it liked. But it did not strike the same spot three times.
30"You have three," she said. "Three pictures, through the three glasses. A spark would be in one of them. Look at the other two."
31Tess brought up the second picture and laid it over the first. Then the third.
32The speck was in all three. It was in the same place in each, to the grain. And it was not the same in each. Through one glass it was faint. Through the next it was stronger. Through the blue glass it was strongest of all.
33Neither of them said anything for a while.
34"It's blue," said Tess at last. Her voice had gone small. "Sparks aren't any colour. It's blue." She took her hand off the glass slowly, as if she had been leaning on something alive. "I was going to take it out. I had the pencil on it."
35"So did we all," said Lucy, though she could not have said just then what she meant.
36She looked at it a long time. She tried to think that the iron hills were in it, and the mine, and the kitchen where her mother was at that moment washing a cup. She could not do it. The mind would not go through so small a door. What came to her was a plainer thing. She thought: it is lit. Nothing else out there has a colour. In all that black there is one small lamp, and it is lit.
37Voss came and stood behind them. He looked for some time. He was an honest man.
38"Well," he said. "I was right. There is nothing to learn from it." He cleared his throat. "I would like a copy for my wife."
39Lucy had a print made that evening on stiff paper, the size of a page. In the morning she drove down to the hospital at the foot of the hills. It was not a Sunday. The nurse at the desk looked at her face and let her through.
40Haskell was awake. He was the colour of the pillow, and his hands lay outside the blanket and did not move. But his eyes came round to her, and then to what she carried.
41She held it up before him. She did not point. He had read the faces of worlds for thirty years, and he found it without help.
42He looked at it so long that she thought he had gone to sleep with his eyes open.
43"That is all of it," he said.
44"Yes."
45"My father and I did not speak for eleven years," said Haskell. He spoke slowly, with a breath between the pieces. "Over a strip of land. I could not now tell you which of us was in the right. All that time he was there, and I was there." His eyes did not leave the page. "Both of us on that. Not speaking. You would think, on a thing that size, we could hardly have helped bumping into each other."
46Lucy laughed, and then found that she was crying, and did both.
47"Prop it up," he said. "There. Where I can see it without the neck."
48She stood it against the water jug on the table by his bed. He looked at it, and after a while he slept. She sat with him till noon. He died two nights later, without waking. The nurse told her that the picture was still standing against the jug, and that he had asked for the lamp to be left on over it.
49In the early summer the picture was shown to the people. It was printed in the newspapers, very small, and most who saw it turned the page, for there was nothing in it. Some did not turn the page.
50Carl Sagan stood up and spoke of it. Four years afterward he wrote down what he saw in it, in a book that is still read. His words are his own, and I will not put mine in his mouth. Go and find them. He went through the Last Door two years after the book, at sixty-two.
51Lucy telephoned her mother on the night the picture was printed. Nell was sixty-four. She had the newspaper open on her knees, and had been going over it for an hour with her reading glass.
52"I can't find us," she said.
53"The bar of light on the right. Halfway down. It's smaller than a pinprick."
54There was a silence on the wire. Then: "Oh," said Nell. And then: "Lucy. Is that the whole house?"
55"The whole house. Papa's poles and Grandpa's station. Tom."
56"And the ones Tom was sent to fight." Nell said it without bitterness. She was only looking. "All under the one roof. And it has a single light." She was quiet again. "Your grandfather would have liked to know it could be seen. That someone went out past everything, and looked back, and the lamp was lit."
57Listen. Seven winters before, a machine in a house under the woods had put five false lights on a wall, and a hundred men had sat and waited to learn whether they were alive. If the word had gone up the wire that night, there would have been no picture. Or there would have been a picture, and the point in it would not have been blue.
58That is not written on the print. Nothing is written on it. It is three pale bars and a point. But Lucy kept a copy over her desk for the rest of her years in that house, and when the young ones asked her what it was, she would say, "Look for it yourself." Most of them, when they found it, put a finger to the glass to see whether it would wipe away.
59It did not wipe away. But it had been a near thing, and more than once.
60Now in that same year, in a house of learning under the mountains of the old world, a man was making a new kind of thread, to tie together all that the people on that small point knew. That is the next story.