("Come in, dear.")
"Sure, Peewee. You are in."
"Don't be captious."
"Look who's talking. Hi, kid!"
"Hi yourself."
The Mother Thing glided away. ("Don't stay long, Peewee. You are not to tire him.")
"I won't, Mother Thing."
("'Bye, dears.")
I said, "What are the visiting hours in this ward?"
"When she says, of course." Peewee stood facing me, fists on hips. She was really clean for the first time in our acquaintance cheeks pink with scrubbing, hair fluffy —maybe she would be pretty, in about ten years. She was dressed as always but her clothes were fresh, all buttons present, and tears invisibly mended.
"Well," she said, letting out her breath, "I guess you're going to be worth keeping, after all."
"Me? I'm in the pink. How about yourself?"
She wrinkled her nose. "A little frost nip. Nothing. But you were a mess."
"I was?"
"I can't use adequate language without being what Mama calls 'unladylike.'"
"Oh, we wouldn't want you to be that."
"Don't be sarcastic. You don't do it well."
"You won't let me practice on you?"
She started to make a Peewee retort, stopped suddenly, smiled and came close. For a nervous second I thought she was going to kiss me. But she just patted the bedclothes and said solemnly, "You bet you can, Kip. You can be sarcastic, or nasty, or mean, or scold me, or any thing, and I won't let out a peep. Why, I'll bet you could even talk back to the Mother Thing."
I couldn't imagine wanting to. I said, "Take it easy, Peewee. Your halo is showing."
"I'd have one if it weren't for you. Or flunked my test for it, more likely."
"So? I seem to remember somebody about your size lugging me indoors almost piggy-back. How about that?"
She wriggled. "That wasn't anything. You set the beacon. That was everything."
"Uh, each to his own opinion. It was cold out there." I changed the subject; it was embarrassing us. Mention of the beacon reminded me of something else. "Peewee? Where are we?"
"Huh? In the Mother Thing's home, of course." She looked around and said, "Oh, I forgot. Kip, this isn't really your—"
"I know," I said impatiently. "It's a fake. Anybody can see that."
"They can?" She looked crestfallen. "I thought we had done a perfect job."
"It's an incredibly good job. I don't see how you did it."
"Oh, your memory is most detailed. You must have a camera eye."
—and I must have spilled my guts, too! I added to myself. I wondered what else I had said—with Peewee listening. I was afraid to ask; a fellow ought to have privacy.
"But it's still a fake," I went on. "I know we're in the Mother Thing's home. But where's that?"
"Oh." She looked round-eyed. "I told you. Maybe you don't remember—you were sleepy."
"I remember," I said slowly, "something. But it didn't make sense. I thought you said we were going to Vega."
"Well, I suppose the catalogs will list it as Vega Five. But they call it—" She threw back her head and vocalized; it recalled to me the cockcrow theme in Le Coq d'Or. "—but I couldn't say that. So I told you Vega, which is close enough."
I tried again to sit up, failed. "You mean to stand there and tell me we're on Vega? I mean, a 'Vegan planet'?"
"Well, you haven't asked me to sit down."
I ignored the Peeweeism. I looked at "sunlight" pouring through the window. "That light is from Vega?"
"That stuff? That's artificial sunlight. If they had used real, bright, Vega light, it would look ghastly. Like a bare arc light. Vega is 'way up the Russell diagram, you know."
"It is?" I didn't know the spectrum of Vega; I had never expected to need to know it.
"Oh, yes! You be careful, Kip—when you're up, I mean. In ten seconds you can get more burn than all winter in Key West—and ten minutes would kill you."
I seemed to have a gift for winding up in difficult climates. What star class was Vega? "A," maybe? Probably "B." All I knew was that it was big and bright, bigger than the Sun, and looked pretty set in Lyra.
But where was it? How in the name of Einstein did we get here? "Peewee? How far is Vega? No, I mean, 'How far is the Sun?' You wouldn't happen to know?"
"Of course," she said scornfully. "Twenty-seven light-years."
Great Galloping Gorillas! "Peewee get that slide rule. You know how to push one? I don't seem to have the use of my hands."
She looked uneasy. "Uh, what do you want it for?"
"I want to see what that comes to in miles."
"Oh. I'll figure it. No need for a slide rule."
"A slipstick is faster and more accurate. Look, if you don't know how to use one, don't be ashamed—I didn't, at your age. I'll show you."
"Of course I can use one!" she said indignantly. "You think I'm a stupe? But I'll work it out." Her lips moved silently. "One point five nine times ten to the fourteenth miles."
I had done that Proxima Centauri problem recently; I remembered the miles in a light-year and did a rough check in my head—uh, call it six times twenty-five makes a hundred and fifty—and where was the decimal point? "Your answer sounds about right." 159,000,000,000,000 weary miles! Too many zeroes for comfort.
"Of course I'm right!" she retorted. "I'm always right."
"Goodness me! The handy-dandy pocket encyclopedia."
She blushed. "I can't help being a genius."
Which left her wide open and I was about to rub her nose in it—when I saw how unhappy she looked.
I remembered hearing Dad say: "Some people insist that 'mediocre' is better than 'best.' They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can't fly. They despise brains because they have none. Pfah!"
"I'm sorry, Peewee," I said humbly. "I know you can't. And I can't help not being one... any more than you can help being little, or I can help being big."
She relaxed and looked solemn. "I guess I was being a show-off again." She twisted a button. "Or maybe I assumed that you understand me like Daddy."
"I feel complimented. I doubt if I do—but from now on I'll try."
She went on worrying the button. "You're pretty smart yourself, Kip. You know that, don't you?"
I grinned. "If I were smart, would I be here? All thumbs and my ears rub together. Look, honey, would you mind if we checked you on the slide rule? I'm really interested." Twenty-seven light-years—why, you wouldn't be able to see the Sun. It isn't any great shakes as a star.
But I had made her uneasy again. "Uh, Kip, that isn't much of a slide rule."
"What? Why, that's the best that money can—"
"Kip, please! It's part of the desk. It's not a slide rule."
"Huh?" I looked sheepish. "I forgot. Uh, I suppose that hall out there doesn't go very far?"
"Just what you can see. Kip, the slide rule would have been real—if we had had time enough. They understand logarithms. Oh, indeed they do!"
That was bothering me—"time enough" I mean. "Peewee, how long did it take us to get here?" Twenty-seven light-years! Even at speed-of-light—well, maybe the Einstein business would make it seem like a quick trip to me—but not to Centerville. Dad could be dead! Dad was older than Mother, old enough to be my grandfather, really. Another twenty-seven years back—Why, that would make him well over a hundred. Even Mother might be dead.
"Time to get here? Why, it didn't take any."
"No, no. I know it feels that way. You're not any older, I'm still laid up by frostbite. But it took at least twenty-seven years. Didn't it?"
"What are you talking about, Kip?"
"The relativity equations, of course. You've heard of them?"
"Oh, those! Certainly. But they don't apply. It didn't take time. Oh, fifteen minutes to get out of Pluto's atmosphere, about the same to cope with the atmosphere here. But otherwise, pht! Zero."
"At the speed of light you would think so."
"No
, Kip." She frowned, then her face lighted up. "How long was it from the time you set the beacon till they rescued us?"
"Huh?" It hit me. Dad wasn't dead! Mother wouldn't even have grey hair. "Maybe an hour."
"A little over. It would have been less if they had had a ship ready... then they might have found you in the tunnel instead of me. No time for the message to reach here. Half an hour frittered away getting a ship ready—the Mother Thing was vexed. I hadn't known she could be. You see, a ship is supposed to be ready."
"Any time she wants one?"
"Any and all the time—the Mother Thing is important. Another half-hour in atmosphere manoeuvring—and that's all. Real time. None of those funny contractions."
I tried to soak it up. They take an hour to go twenty-seven light-years—and get bawled out for dallying. Dr. Einstein must be known as "Whirligig Albert" among his cemetery neighbours. "But how?"
"Kip, do you know any geometry? I don't mean Euclid —I mean geometry."
"Mmm... I've fiddled with open and closed curved spaces—and I've read Dr. Bell's popular books. But you couldn't say I know any geometry."
"At least you won't boggle at the idea that a straight line is not necessarily the shortest distance between two points." She made motions as if squeezing a grapefruit in both hands. "Because it's not. Kip—it all touches. You could put it in a bucket. In a thimble if you folded it so that spins matched."
I had a dizzying picture of a universe compressed into a teacup, nucleons and electrons packed solidly—really solid and not the thin mathematical ghost that even the uranium nucleus is said to be. Something like the "primal atom" that some cosmogonists use to explain the expanding universe. Well, maybe it's both—packed and expanding. Like the "wavicle" paradox. A particle isn't a wave and a wave can't be a particle yet everything is both. If you believe in wavicles, you can believe in anything—and if you don't, then don't bother to believe at all. Not even in yourself, because that's what you are—wavicles. "How many dimensions?" I said weakly.
"How many would you like?"
"Me? Uh, twenty, maybe. Four more for each of the first four, to give some looseness on the corners."
"Twenty isn't a starter. I don t know, Kip; I don't know geometry, either—I just thought I did. So I've pestered them."
"The Mother Thing?"
"Her? Oh, heavens, no! She doesn't know geometry. Just enough to pilot a ship in and out of the folds."
"Only that much?" I should have stuck to advanced finger-painting and never let Dad lure me into trying for an education. There isn't any end—the more you learn, the more you need to learn. "Peewee, you knew what that beacon was for, didn't you?"
"Me?" She looked innocent. "Well... yes."
"You knew we were going to Vega."
"Well... if the beacon worked. If it was set in time."
"Now the prize question. Why didn't you tell me?"
"Well—" Peewee was going to twist that button off. "I wasn't sure how much math you knew and—you might have gone all masculine and common-sensical and father-knows-best. Would you have believed me?"
("I told Orville and I told Wilbur and now I'm telling you—that contraption will never work!") "Maybe not, Peewee. But next time you're tempted not to tell me something 'for my own good,' will you take a chance that I'm not wedded to my own ignorance? I know I'm not a genius but I'll try to keep my mind open—and I might be able to help, if I knew what you were up to. Quit twisting that button."
She let go hastily. "Yes, Kip. I'll remember."
"Thanks. Another thing is fretting me. I was pretty sick?"
"Huh? You certainly were!"
"All right. They've got these, uh, 'fold ships' that go anywhere in no time. Why didn't you ask them to bounce me home and pop me into a hospital?"
She hesitated. "How do you feel?"
"Huh? I feel fine. Except that I seem to be under spinal anesthesia, or something."
"Or something," she agreed. "But you feel as if you are getting well?"
"Shucks, I feel well."
"You aren't. But you're going to be." She looked at me closely. "Shall I put it bluntly, Kip?"
"Go ahead."
"If they had taken you to Earth to the best hospital we have, you'd be a 'basket case.' Understand me? No arms, no legs. As it is, you are getting completely well. No amputations, not even a toe."
I think the Mother Thing had prepared me. I simply said, "You're sure?"
"Sure. Sure both. You're going to be all right." Suddenly her face screwed up. "Oh, you were a mess! I saw."
"Pretty bad?"
"Awful. I have nightmares."
"They shouldn't have let you look."
"They couldn't stop me. I was next of kin."
"Huh? You told them you were my sister or something?"
"What? I am your next of kin."
I was about to say she was cockeyed when I tripped over my tongue. We were the only humans for a hundred and sixty trillion miles. As usual, Peewee was right.
"So I had to grant permission," she went on.
"For what? What did they do to me?"
"Uh, first they popped you into liquid helium. They left you there and the past month they have been using me as a guinea pig. Then, three days ago—three of ours —they thawed you out and got to work. You've been getting well ever since.'
"What shape am I in now?"
"Uh... well, you're growing back. Kip, this isn't a bed. It just looks like it."
"What is it, then?"
"We don't have a name for it and the tune is pitched too high for me. But everything from here on down—," She patted the spread, "—on into the room below, does things for you. You're wired like a hi-fi nut's basement."
"I'd like to see it."
"I'm afraid you can't. You don't know, Kip. They had to cut your space suit off."
I felt more emotion at that than I had at hearing what a mess I had been. "Huh? Where is Oscar? Did they ruin him? My space suit, I mean."
"I know what you mean. Every time you're delirious you talk to 'Oscar'—and you answer back, too. Sometimes I think you're schizoid, Kip."
"You've mixed your terms, runt—that'ud make me a split personality. All right, but you're a paranoid yourself."
"Oh, I've known that for a long time. But I'm a very well adjusted one. You want to see Oscar? The Mother Thing said that you would want him near when you woke up." She opened the closet.
"Hey! You said he was all cut up!"
"Oh, they repaired him. Good as new. A little better than new."
("Time, dear! Remember what I said.")
"Coming, Mother Thing! 'Bye, Kip. I'll be back soon, and real often."
"Okay. Leave the closet open so I can see Oscar."
Peewee did come back, but not "real often." I wasn't offended, not much. She had a thousand interesting and "educational" things to poke her ubiquitous nose into, all new and fascinating—she was as busy as a pup chewing slippers. She ran our hosts ragged. But I wasn't bored. I was getting well, a full-time job and not boring if you are happy—which I was.
I didn't see the Mother Thing often. I began to realize at she had work of her own to do—even though she came to see me if I asked for her, with never more than an hour's delay, and never seemed in a hurry to leave.
She wasn't my doctor, nor my nurse. Instead I had a staff of veterinarians who were alert to supervise every heartbeat. They didn't come in unless I asked them to (a whisper was as good as a shout) but I soon realized that "my" room was bugged and telemetered like a ship in light test—and my "bed" was a mass of machinery, gear that bore the relation to our own "mechanical hearts" and "mechanical lungs" and "mechanical kidneys" that a Lockheed ultrasonic courier does to a baby buggy.
I never saw that gear (they never lifted the spread, unless it was while I slept), but I know what they were doing. They were encouraging my body to repair itself—not scar tissue but the way it had been. Any lobster can do this and starfish do it so well that you
can chop them to bits and wind up with a thousand brand-new starfish.
This is a trick any animal should do, since its gene pattern is in every cell. But a few million years ago we lost it. Everybody knows that science is trying to recapture it; you see articles—optimistic ones in Reader's Digest, discouraged ones in The Scientific Monthly, wildly wrong ones in magazines whose "science editors" seem to have received their training writing horror movies. But we're working on it. Someday, if anybody dies an accidental death, it will be because he bled to death on the way to the hospital.
Here I was with a perfect chance to find out about it—and I didn't.
I tried. Although I was unworried by what they were doing (the Mother Thing had told me not to worry and every time she visited me she looked in my eyes and repeated the injunction), nevertheless like Peewee, I like to know.
Pick a savage so far back in the jungle that they don't even have installment-plan buying. Say he has an I.Q. of 190 and Peewee's yen to understand. Dump him into Brookhaven Atomic Laboratories. How much will he learn? With all possible help?
He'll learn which corridors lead to what rooms and he'll learn that a purple trefoil means: "Danger!"
That's all. Not because he can't; remember he's a supergenius—but he needs twenty years schooling before he can ask the right questions and understand the answers.
I asked questions and always got answers and formed notions. But I'm not going to record them; they are as confused and contradictory as the notions a savage would form about design and operation of atomic equipment. As they say in radio, when noise level reaches a certain value, no information is transmitted. All I got was noise.
Some of it was literally "noise." I'd ask a question and one of the therapists would answer. I would understand part, then as it reached the key point, I would hear nothing but birdsongs. Even with the Mother Thing as an interpreter, the parts I had no background for would turn out to be a canary's cheerful prattle.
Hold onto your seats; I'm going to explain something I don't understand: how Peewee and I could talk with the Mother Thing even though her mouth could not shape English and we couldn't sing the way she did and had not studied her language. The Vegans—(I'll call them "Vegans" the way we might be called "Solarians"; their real name sounds like a wind chime in a breeze. The Mother Thing had a real name, too, but I'm not a colouratura soprano. Peewee used it when she wanted to wheedle her—fat lot of good it did her.) The Vegans have a supreme talent to understand, to put themselves in the other person's shoes. I don't think it was telepathy, or I wouldn't have gotten so many wrong numbers. Call it empathy.
Have Space Suit - Will Travel Page 16
