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the injured party, for sure. I wish I could—well, make up for it, part way.”
    “Perhaps we’d just better not talk about it.”
    “No, wait.” He studied me. “Chip, I’m going to tell you about it. I’m going to tell you how a man like me could do what he’s done, how he could find something more important than all the Institutes running. But—”
    I waited.
    “—I don’t expect you to believe it. Want to hear it anyway? It’s the truth.”
    I thought about it. If I left him now, the Chair waiting for me, my personal and academic futures assured—wouldn’t that content me?
    It wouldn’t, I answered myself. Because Grantham wouldn’t return or resign. I’d lost two years, almost. I should know why I’d lost them. I
had
to know. I’d lost them because Grantham was callous and didn’t care; or because Grantham was crazy; or because of something much bigger “than all the Institutes running.” Which?
    “Tell me, then.”
    He hesitated, then rose. “I will.” He thumped his chest, and it sounded like the grumble you hear sometimes after heat lightning. “But I’ll tell it my way. Come on.”
    “Where?”
    He tossed a thumb toward the west. “The forest.”
    The “forest” was the heavy growth of Draconaenoideae I’d seen down in the valley. It was quite a haul and I was still tired, but I got up anyway. Grantham gave me an approving look. He went outside and unstrapped my pack from the burro. “We’ll let Big Horn hold this.” He took it inside and emerged a moment later.
    “Why don’t you leave your pouch?”
    Grantham twinkled. “They call me Buttons, remember? I never leave this anywhere.”
    We walked for nearly an hour in silence. The yucca appeared along the trail in ones and twos, then in clusters and clumps with spaces between. Their presence seemed to affect Grantham in some way. He began to walk with his head up, instead of fixing his eyes on the path, and his mind God knows where.
    “See there?” he said once. He pointed to what was left of a shack, weed-grown and ruined. I nodded but he had nothing more to offer.
    A little later, as we passed a fine specimen of melocactus, the spiny “barrel,” Grantham murmured, “It’s easy to fall under the spell of the cacti. You know. It caught you a thousand miles away from here. Ever smell the cereus blooming at night, Chip? Ever wonder what makes the Turk’s-head wear a fez? Why can’t a chinch-bug make cochineal out of anything but nopal? And why the spines, why? When most of ’em would be safe from everyone and everything even sliced up with gravy on …”
    I answered none of his questions, because at first I thought them foolish. I thought, it’s like asking why hair grows on a cat’s back but not on its nose—then gradually I began to yield, partly because it seemed after all that a cactus is indeed a stranger thing than a cat—or a human, for that matter; and partly because it was Grantham,
the
Grantham, who murmured these things.
    “This will do,” he said suddenly, and stopped.
    The trail had widened and then disappeared, to continue three hundred yards down the valley where again the yucca grew heavily. Flash floods had cut away the earth to leave an irregular sandy shelf on the north side, and Grantham swung up on this and squatted on his heels. I followed slowly and sat beside him.
    He bowed his head and pressed his heavy eyebrow ridges against his knees, hugging his legs hard. He radiated tension, and, just as noticeably, the tension went away. He raised his head slowly and looked off down the valley. I followed his gaze. The bald hills were touched to gold by the dropping sun, and their convoluted shadows were a purple that was black, or a black that was purple. Grantham began to talk.
    “Back there. That shack.”
    He paused. I recalled it.
    He said, “Used to be a family there. Mexican. Miguel, face as hard and bald as those hills, and a great fat wife like a suet pudding with a toupee. Inside Miguel