Unk laid his pack down, then laid himself down to rest.
Unk dreamed about colors other than yellow and aquamarine.
Then he dreamed that his good friend Stony Stevenson was waiting for him around the next bend. His mind became lively with the things he and Stony would say when they met. Unk’s mind still had no face to go with the name of Stony Stevenson, but that didn’t matter much.
“What a pair,” Unk said to himself. By that he meant that he and Stony, working together, would be invincible.
“I tell you,” Unk said to himself with satisfaction, “that is one pair they want to keep apart at all costs. If old Stony and old Unk ever get together again, they better watch out. When old Stony and old Unk get together, anything can happen, and it usually does.”
Old Unk chuckled.
The people who were supposedly afraid of Unk’s and Stony’s getting together were the people in the big, beautiful buildings up above. Unk’s imagination had done a lot in three years with the glimpses he’d had of the supposed buildings — of what were in fact solid, dead, dumb-cold crystals. Unk’s imagination was now certain that the masters of all creation lived in those buildings. They were Unk’s and Boaz’s and maybe Stony’s jailers. They were experimenting with Unk and Boaz in the caves. They wrote the messages in harmoniums. The harmoniums didn’t have anything to do with the messages.
Unk knew all those things for sure.
Unk knew a lot of other things for sure. He even knew how the buildings up above were furnished. The furniture didn’t have any legs on it. It just floated in air, suspended by magnetism.
And the people never worked at all, and they never worried about a thing.
Unk hated them.
He hated the harmoniums, too. He peeled a harmonium from the wall and tore it in two. It shriveled at once — turned orange.
Unk flipped the two-piece corpse at the ceiling. And, looking up at the ceiling, he saw a new message written there. The message was disintegrating, because of the music. But it was still legible.
The message told Unk in five words how to escape surely, easily, and swiftly from the caves. He was bound to admit, when given the solution to the puzzle that he had failed to solve in three years, that the puzzle was simple and fair.
Unk scuttled down through the caves until he came upon Boaz’s concert for the harmoniums. Unk was wild and bug-eyed with big news. He could not speak in a vacuum, so he hauled Boaz to the space ship.
There, in the inert atmosphere of the cabin, Unk told Boaz of the message that meant escape from the caves.
It was now Boaz’s turn to react numbly. Boaz had thrilled to the slightest illusion of intelligence on the part of the harmoniums — but now, having heard the news that he was about to be freed from his prison, Boaz was strangely reserved.
“That — that explains that other message,” said Boaz softly.
“What other message?” asked Unk.
Boaz held up his hands to represent a message that had appeared on the wall outside his home four Earthling days before. “Said, ‘BOAZ, DON’T GO!'” said Boaz. He looked down self-consciously. “‘WE LOVE YOU, BOAZ.’ That’s what it said.”
Boaz ‘dropped his hands to his side, turned away as though turning away from unbearable beauty. “I saw that,” he said, “and I had to smile. I looked at them sweet, gentle fellers on the wall there, and I says to myself, ‘Boys — how’s old Boaz ever going to go anywhere? Old Boaz, he going to be stuck here for quite some time yet!'”
“It’s a trap!” said Unk.
“It’s a what?” said Boaz.
“A trap!” said Unk. “A trick to keep us here!”
The comic book called Tweety and Sylvester was open on the table before Boaz. Boaz didn’t answer Unk right away. He leafed through the ragged book instead. “I expect,” he said at last.
Unk thought about the crazy appeal in the name of love. He did something he hadn’t done for a long time. He laughed. He thought it was an hysterical ending for the nightmare — that the brainless membranes on the walls should speak of love.