I had been brooding earlier that morn over my most probable future, which had seemed so dim that I would probably need night vision goggles to see my way through it.

MRS PEARCE. Mr Higgins: youre tempting the girl. It’s not right. She should think of the future.
HIGGINS. At her age! Nonsense! Time enough to think of the future when you havnt any future to think of.

He died of a breaking heart," Pete said, making a stout log fence of his hands around the glove compartment and leaning forward to peer at the luminous clock, "but he was an old man. He was the king of his Yaquis down there and he couldn't live any more when they took the land away. He couldn't live up in the mountains that way. He hid all the treasures - you understand treasures? - in the mountains down there and he died. Now I'm the king of my Yaquis and someday I'll go down there and dig up the treasures again - maybe soon if they don't catch me too much. Then I buy the land back and we will live in the future like in the past only better." Pete let the fence fall, and sunlight showed the clock to be hours wrong, if not years.

It was amazing how you could get so far from where you'd planned, and yet find it was exactly were you needed to be.

Was that what it meant to be alive - moving from a brightly lit corridor into a darkened room at every step? Sometimes it felt that way.

They drove out of the driveway and onto the road, venturing forth into the horizon, spacious and empty, hanging before them blackly, and offering little else but the promise of the red morning sun.