Duncan Thaw drew a blue line along the top of a sheet of paper and a brown line along the bottom. He drew a giant with a captured princess running along the brown line, and since he couldn't draw the princess lovely enough he showed the giant holding a sack. The princess was in the sack. His father looked over his shoulder and said, "What's that you're drawing?"

Thaw said uneasily, "A miller running to the mill with a bag of corn."
"What's the blue line supposed to be?"
"The sky."
"Do you mean the horizon?"
Thaw stared dumbly at his picture.
"The horizon is the line where the sky and land seem to touch. Is it the horizon?"
"It's the sky."
"But the sky isnae a straight line, Duncan!"
"It would be if you saw it sideways."

Mr Thaw got a golf ball and a table lamp and explained that the earth was like the ball and the sun like the lamp. Thaw was bored and puzzled. He said, "Do people fall off the sides?"
"No. They're kept on by gravity."
"What's ga . . . gavty?"
"Grrrrrravity is what keeps us on the earth. Without it we would fly up into the air."
"And then we would reach the sky?"
"No. No. The sky is just the space above our heads. Without gravity we would fly up into it forever."
"But wouldn't we come to a . . . a thing on the other side?"
"There is no other side, Duncan. None at all."

Thaw leaned over his drawing and drew a blue crayon along the line of the sky, pressing hard. He dreamed that night of flying up through empty air till he reached a flat blue cardboard sky. He rested against it like a balloon against a ceiling until worried by the thought of what was on the other side; then he broke a hole and rose through more empty air till he grew afraid of floating forever. Then he came to another cardboard sky and rested there till worried by the thought of the other side. And so on.

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