Young Bleys - Childe Cycle 09 by Gordon R. Dickson Read Free Book Online

in a second and maybe we ought to give you a different pair of shoes. They'll be old ones of mine, which means they'll be too big but we can stuff them with some cloth. Your shoes won't stand up for five days out here. Hurry now, it's almost dinner time."
    CHAPTER 4
    The clothes felt strange, heavy and stiff upon Bleys, even though the elbows of the shirt and the knees of the pants had been worn smooth by use. Happily the pants had belt loops.
    "You'll need a belt—oh, you've got one," said Joshua, digging further into the chest.
    Bleys indeed had a belt. This was by deliberate intent, since such things were ornaments nowadays, worn with the type of clothes he usually wore. But, even though he was still young, he had read a great many stories in which the hero, about to go into strange territory, worries about having enough funds with him to buy whatever he might turn out to need. He had been hoarding all the money he could get his hands on since his decision to challenge his mother; and in that profligate household had gathered together a surprising amount.
    He had used it all to buy interstellar credits—good anywhere. The belt he now wore had a magnetic seal along the inside that opened up into a long thin envelope, in which he had folded bearer certificates for about fifteen hundred inter
    stellar units—enough to buy him passage on a spaceship off this world, if it came to that.
    Also, in the two weeks it had taken his mother to arrange for his being sent to where he was now, he had managed to get a bank to supply him with some small denomination Association currency, most of which he kept with the bonds. Now, he threaded the belt through the loops of the pants he had just been given, and pulled the oversize waist tight around him, before latching the buckle.
    "You'll find a chest under your bunk, too," said Joshua, nodding at the single bunk on the wall opposite to the two beside which he knelt. "You can keep these spare socks and underwear there. I'll show you how to fold them. Father likes things neat."
    He was about to close the chest and shove it back under the bed when he saw that Bleys was still standing, now dressed in the new clothes and shoes, but with his arms wrapped around him.
    "You're cold?" asked Joshua. He reached into the chest and threw something dark and soft into Bleys' hands. "Here, you can have this sweater. It's a little worn out at the elbows, but I'll help you patch that. Do you knit? You don't? We all knit here, in the wintertime when there's nothing else to do and we're rained in. I'll teach you how."
    He closed the chest and pushed it back under the bunk out of sight. Bleys had struggled into the sweater, finding it, as he had expected, too large for him, so that he had to roll back the sleeves from both wrists. It was a pullover sweater that clung to him fairly well, in spite of the fact that it was large for him; its knitted fabric fitting itself to his slim body. It was a dark blue in color.
    "Now, we'd better be getting out to the dinner table," said Joshua. "Will is going to have it set and ready to dish up by now; and Father will have finished his prayers. He went into his room to pray when we came here, because he had to miss a couple of prayer times going in to get you."
    "Prayer times?" asked Bleys.
    "Yes." Joshua stared at him, almost as much at a loss as Bleys.
    "Didn't they call them that, where you come from?" Joshua asked. "We pray four times a day. Morning, at getting up, at our midmorning break, just before lunch, and at bedtime. Some churches have their people praying six or even seven times a day; but that's not what our church is like. It's terrible how many apostate churches there are, Father says. But it can't be helped. We stick to the true gospel and the true way."
    For a moment Joshua's last words echoed in Bleys' mind. ". . . True gospel . . ."— "true way." His heart bounded at the prospect of possibly finding something for which he had longed. To believe in a