"I didn't know you were awake. OK."

And she told him again about finding Girl. Just a puppy dying of starvation and beating on a garbage heap out back of San Jose. How Merilee took her up into her arms though so bad she smelled and so near death she was, and how Merilee whispered to her "we are in this together old Girl" and carried her home and started in to nursing herself and the pup back to health and life.

Why were Sam's tears running onto her breast? It made him cry, he said, to think of his big Merilee spaced out in the era before there was even the word for it. Merilee and Girl living off the pungent food nice people had thrown away, Merilee and Girl wandering barefoot both of them in the mountains beyond Los Gatos.

She tried again to tell him of the efficacy of that period in her life, how she had been born then, but Sam would not believe. His juice flowed steadily into her.

Why wasn't I there to take care of you all? I was a scholarship kid then polishing the shoes of my betters at Wharton-

But it all happened for the best, Sam. If Girl and I hadn't gotten lockjaw from being barefoot we would never have come home, I would never have met Alyosha and joined the South Coast Tribe. I would never have been there watching the stars at Palomar and you would never have found Girl and me hitchhiking to Ceres and-

Sam the esposo-to-be had dropped off again and his head had sunk underwater. Merilee hadn't noticed. She lifted him up by the curly black hair. thus saving his life. He sputtered but didn't wake. Prodigiously-strong Merilee stood him up against the wall and dried him off with a towel and then carried him firemanstyle over her shoulder in to the bed and laid him out. The keeds came