The Girl With the Jade Green Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page A

devastating than looking at Myra. Now, it’s harmless and useless.”
    She spilled the ash through the spokes to the ground below and screwed the halves back together, holding aloft the small pink ball. “This is all the shield I’ll need for my uranium.”
    She handed it to him to hold while she reinserted the manhole cover.
    Tossing the ball in his palm, Breedlove said, “You’d better make yourself a woman’s shoulder bag to carry this in or the first child who sees it might make off with your pretty pink ball. And we have another problem. I can attest to what you’ve shown and told me, but I’ll not be able to explain anything when the technical people start asking questions. They’ll never believe us.”
    Straightening, she said, “You believe me.”
    “Yes, but I trust you.”
    “And why do you trust me?”
    She spoke in the manner of a schoolteacher probing the knowledge of her star pupil, and he groped for an answer to a suddenly difficult question. Finding none, he seized on a playful ambiguity. “Because you’re so cute.”
    She had watched him seek an answer and she laughed at his evasion, but before he spoke he saw a premonitory play of mirth in her eyes. Again he had the impression that she interpreted his words before he voiced them. If she could read his mind, he thought, she had advanced beyond any conceivable level of mere technology.
    “Breedlove, you are ‘they.’ If you believe me, they will also. I’ll reveal enough to your technicians to persuade them I speak the truth, but no more. Knowledge acquired too soon can be dangerous. What I say is no reflection on you as a person. Your native intelligence is as great as mine. It is simply that I am more informed on methods. I can tell from your sun that your race is newly born, and adults have to protect children from their own folly. Now, what is a shoulder bag?”
    He explained with gestures. Listening, she nodded, and asked, “Is pink a fashionable color?”
    “I suppose so.”
    “I must make me a shoulder bag while you survey the trout population of Jones Creek.”
    “Will you join me for lunch at midday?”
    “No, the sunlight feeds me, but we will all join you at twilight. Now begone, or I’ll set Myra on you.”
    She was laughing as she spoke, ushering him toward the door, but even her playful mention of the sentry made him emerge from the spaceship with a feeling of relief.
    Later, as he fished along the creek, Breedlove’s mind entertained the implications of Kyra’s arrival. In the past winter he had read the works of Father Teilhard de Chardin, and it occurred to him that this visitor to earth supported the Jesuit’s hypothesis that mankind was evolving toward the Godhead. Her similarity to the human species indicated that the logic of evolution for higher species was cosmic, and it was benign, that her race had survived the ultimate holocaust, the death of its planet, testified that her fellow mortals of earth held within themselves the key to practical immortality. Kyra synthesized religion and science.
    Gradually he forced himself to grapple with the practical problems her appearance and her request for uranium would create. He foresaw no mass hysteria arising from the visit of such an appealing space pilgrim, but if her presence became publicly known, her progress would become as dignified as a traveling freak show, and he wanted his fellow human beings to be on their best behavior for this girl—he could not think of her as other than a girl—who combined regality with such airy grace.
    Peterson would have to be informed of her presence because the chief ranger was the station’s helicopter pilot. Peterson would see the reason for flying the girl to the Breedlove farm, near Spokane, and concealing her there. Once at the farm Kyra could borrow dresses from his sister, and his mother could find a wig to conceal her green hair.
    He had misgivings about turning her over to the officials with a “take her, she’s