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was a lot like you, from what I’ve heard about you. He was always reading books, books, books—everything he could get his hands on. We used to ask him to come fishing or to play baseball, and things like that, and he always had the same answer: ‘No thanks, I just got a new book that looks very interesting.’ Sometimes he’d forget to stop reading for meals. By the time he was fifteen, he knew more about the royal family of Siam and the slum problem in Vladivostok than I knew about the back of my hand. All his teachers swore he was a genius, and said he’d be at least President of the United States when he was thirty-five.” He paused to give Haley a meaningful look.
    Haley attempted to appear as solemn and absorbed as possible. “What finally became of him?” he asked soberly.
    The General seemed satisfied that his story was carrying the proper impact. “When World War II broke out, this man was immediately made an officer. Everybody expected him to win the war single-handedly. But when the going got tough over there in France, he cracked up completely. It turned out he didn’t know the first thing about leadership, and he couldn’t even take care of himself, so he was sick all the time.” The General lowered his voice. “The morale in his company was so bad that all his men had thrown away their gas masks rather than carry them on marches. The first thing you know, the Jerries dropped
mustard-gas shells all over them. Zip! One whole company wiped out! And I’ll always say it was a library card that killed them. See my point?”
    “Yessir, I think so. He was one-sided. Is that it?”
    “That’s it in a nutshell,” said the General, beaming. “You expressed it perfectly. That’s why I brought my whole family out here to the farm to live after the war, to keep us all from getting soft, from getting one-sided. Now spruce up for supper. People with dirty fingernails don’t get to eat around here.”

II.

    II.
    At 2 a.m. Central Standard Time, as reckoned by the parlor mantel clock in the home of Brigadier General William Cooley, retired, a light beam left the burning sun. At 2:08 it glanced from the lip of a moon crater, and a second later died on earth, in the staring eyes of Haley Brandon.
    Haley lay sleepless between cool sheets, his thin arms folded behind his head, his eyes fixed on the window through which the wistful moonlight streamed. He felt wholly a stranger. None of the old, seemingly sweetly reasonable patterns of the past now applied. He was not actively melancholy—it was too soon for that. Rather, he was like a settler on his first day in a foreign land, bemused by his initial contacts with unfamiliar customs, not yet ready to admit that it would be those customs instead of his own that would enable him to remain and prosper.
    “We’ll see to it that you earn your way as best you can—with good, old-fashioned work. Sounds harsh, maybe, but you’ll thank us for it in later years. We’ll put some meat on you, too,” the General had said at supper. The sweat- and sinew-worship that
seemed to pervade life at Ardennes Farm was a great curiosity to Haley. Robust was the password. As a Manhattan cliff-dweller, he had won the loyalty of his small circle of friends—most of them adults and fellow musicians—with the cleverness of his fingers on a piano keyboard, with his promise as a concert pianist. Now, he reflected, the emphasis had been changed to the cleanliness of his fingers, to whether he could move a piano.
    Haley thought about the peculiar man into whose hands he had been delivered for guidance. The General, he knew from having heard his mother talk about him, was a competent manager, a brave soldier, and well off financially, though not given to exhibiting the last-named quality. He had taken over management of the old Cooley farmstead, run by tenants for nearly a generation, after his retirement from the Army. Haley remembered a few discussions between his mother and father as