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Show Lorin slipped through the hedge in his back yard into the neighbors' Victory garden, where hidden among vines he slit open five pea pods with his thumbnail and scooped the tender peas into his cupped palm, leaving the shells hanging. In his haste back through the hedge his grip loosened and a pea escaped, bouncing across his knuckles and into the wilderness of dead leaves under the hedge. He pawed through the leaves but it had vanished, and he sat paralyzed by complexities. He could return to the vine and supply his loss, but he knew the thought would nag him that he might have gone back anyway and thus possessed one more pea than he had begun with. He could of course take two more peas and accomplish that hypothetical advantage, but how could he be sure he would not have taken two without having lost the original, in which case he would still have been one ahead of the best he could hope for now. The image of that spectral self dancing just one step ahead of him, better than himself by one pea which he would be unable to supply though he stripped the neighbors' pea patch to the roots, was a torture. Worse, to get even the one pea he would have to slit open a new pod, and having slit a pod, to take out only one pea and leave the rest was to leave evidence that a thief and not a whim of nature had been at work. He would have to take them all. But this would leave him no better than he was now, because though he opened countless pods and removed countless multiples of peas, he would always be short by one. |