David Brown

David Brown is the younger brother of Hilly Brown, whose love and protectiveness make David central to the novel’s most consequential magic trick. When Hilly makes David disappear before an audience, the trick becomes a real disappearance: David is stranded on Altair-4, and his slow decline ultimately gives Ev Hillman a reason to keep fighting when the people around him are close to surrender.

Family and Brotherly Bond

David grows up with an older brother whose restless energy often leads to trouble, but whose intentions are usually affectionate. Hilly’s parents, Marie Brown and Bryant Brown, are initially cautious about leaving the new baby alone with him. Their misgivings gradually ease as Hilly proves his genuine affection and care. Ev Hillman sums up the bond by saying that the brothers could spend two weeks camping together and return safely; David, for his part, worships his older brother.

The contrast between the boys is especially clear in their family life. Hilly is described as a child of fierce, changeable interests, while David is a placid, happy-go-lucky baby. Hilly’s schemes often go wrong, but his relationship with David is the notable exception: with the younger child, he seems to get things right. That trust makes David’s later participation in Hilly’s trick more painful. David does not approach the performance as an eager volunteer; he knows what Hilly intends and quietly says that he does not want to take part.

The Disappearance Trick

During Hilly’s final trick, he calls David forward as the volunteer. David comes reluctantly, with fear and resignation evident to those watching. Hilly completes the trick, and David vanishes. The disappearance briefly breaks through the room’s prevailing apathy: Bryant sits up in shock, Marie stops talking, and Ev looks worried. What had been presented as a performance is no longer an illusion that can simply be applauded away.

Hilly’s immediate response is not triumph for long. He begins to imagine what may have happened to the objects he has made disappear, and whether David can breathe wherever he has gone. In his horrified mental picture, David is alone on a barren, airless world, still dressed in a T-shirt and shorts. The image is Hilly’s fear rather than an independently verified view of David’s surroundings, but it anticipates the truth that David has been sent somewhere far from home and cannot survive there unaided. Hilly faints and does not properly regain consciousness. Meanwhile, more than a hundred people, including Bobbi Anderson and Jim Gardener, search the woods across the road for the missing child. Their search is misdirected: David is not nearby, but on Altair-4.

Stranded on Altair-4

David’s fate becomes explicit later, when Jim Gardener confronts Bobbi about her plan to send him to Altair-4. Gardener understands that the destination would leave him there to care for David until they both died from lack of air, food, or protection from cosmic radiation. Bobbi insists that she will not send Gardener there because she knows he would die slowly and painfully. When Gardener asks whether that is how David is dying, Bobbi says that she had nothing to do with it and places responsibility entirely on David’s brother.

This exchange establishes both the stakes of David’s disappearance and the limits of Bobbi’s denial. David is not merely missing; he is dying in an environment where ordinary human needs cannot be met. The novel’s earlier search through the woods and later explanation of Altair-4 therefore frame the same absence in radically different ways: first as a local mystery, then as a crisis across an unreachable distance.

Ev Hillman’s Call to Action

David’s suffering becomes a decisive pressure on Ev Hillman. Ev receives David’s thoughts clearly at first, but they grow weaker, descending toward unconsciousness and death. Rather than accept that loss, Ev resists his own exhaustion and calls urgently for someone in the sunlight to get up and help. He insists, through the force of his appeal, that David deserves time in the sunlight.

The call reaches Jim Gardener as a relentless thought. Gardener is physically weakened, but he manages to answer and begin moving. David’s condition thus gives Ev’s struggle an immediate human purpose: the appeal is not abstract resistance or a general demand to act, but an effort to save a child who is running out of time. David remains far away and unable to act for himself, yet his fading thoughts connect him to Ev and help move Gardener toward action.

Narrative Significance

David’s story turns Hilly’s performance into a consequence with lasting stakes. The brothers’ established affection explains why David comes forward despite his reluctance, and why his disappearance destroys the apparent safety of their familiar relationship. The trick also reveals the difference between making something vanish for an audience and understanding where it has gone: Hilly has performed an act whose real consequences he cannot control.

David’s absence changes meaning as the plot advances. The searchers initially look in the nearby woods, but the later revelation locates him on Altair-4, where he is slowly dying. His plight then becomes a thread linking Ev’s persistence to Gardener’s response. Although David is physically absent from these scenes, the account of his failing thoughts keeps him present as the measure of what is at stake: the possibility that action may still preserve a life that Hilly’s trick has placed in mortal danger.