Have space suit-- will travel (25 page)

There were real birds, too, long and slender and brilliantly colored, with two sets of wings in tandem-which looked aerodynamically unsound but seemed to suit them.

The sky was blue and fair but broken by three towering cumulous anvils, blinding white in the distance.

“Let’s go on the roof,” said Peewee.

“How?”

“Over here.”

It was a scuttle hole reached by staggered slender brackets the Vegans use as stairs. “Isn’t there a ramp?”

“Around on the far side, yes.”

“I don’t think those things will hold me. And that hole looks small for Oscar.”

“Oh, don’t be a sissy,” Peewee went up like a monkey.

I followed like a tired bear. The brackets were sturdy despite their grace; the hole was a snug fit.

Vega was high in the sky. It appeared to be the angular size of our Sun, which fitted since we were much farther out than Terra is from the Sun, but it was too bright even with full polarization. I looked away and presently eyes and polarizers adjusted until I could see again. Peewee’s head was concealed by what appeared to be a polished chrome basketball. I said, “Hey, are you still there?”

“Sure,” she answered. “I can see out all right. It’s a grand view. Doesn’t it remind you of Paris from the top of the Arc de Triomphe?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never done any traveling.”

“Except no boulevards, of course. Somebody is about to land here.”

I turned the way she was pointing-she could see in all directions while I was hampered by the built-in tunnel vision of my helmet. By the time I was turned around the Vegan was coming in beside us.

(“Hello, children!”)

“Hi, Mother Thing!” Peewee threw her arms around her, picking her up.

(“Not so hasty, dear. Let me shed this.”) The Mother Thing stepped out of her harness, shook herself in ripples, folded the flying gear like an umbrella and hung it over an arm. (“You’re looking fit, Kip.”)

“I feel fine, Mother Thing! Gee, it’s nice to have you back.”

(“I wished to be back when you got out of bed. However, your therapists have kept me advised every minute.”) She put a little hand against my chest, growing a bit to do so, and placed her eyes almost against my face plate. (“You are well?”)

“I couldn’t be better.”

“He really is, Mother Thing!”

(“Good. You agree that you are well, I sense that you are, Peewee is sure that you are and, most important, your leader therapist assures me that you are. We’ll leave at once.”)

“What?” I asked. “Where, Mother Thing?”

She turned to Peewee. (“Haven’t you told him, dear?”)

“Gee, Mother Thing, I haven’t had a chance.”

(“Very well.”) She turned to me. (“Dear Kip, we must now attend a gathering. Questions will be asked and answered, decisions will be made.”) She spoke to us both. (“Are you ready to leave?”)

“Now?” said Peewee. “Why, I guess so-except that I’ve got to get Madame Pompadour.”

(“Fetch her, then. And you, Kip?”)

“Uh-“ I couldn’t remember whether I had put my watch back on after I washed and I couldn’t tell because I can’t feel it through Oscar’s thick hide. I told her so.

(“Very well. You children run to your rooms while I have a ship fetched. Meet me here and don’t stop to admire flowers.”)

We went down by ramp. I said, “Peewee, you’ve been holding out on me again.”

“Why, I have not!”

“What do you call it?”

“Kip-please listen! I was told not to tell you while you were ill. The Mother Thing was very firm about it. You were not to be disturbed-that’s what she said!-while you were growing well.”

“Why should I feel disturbed? What is all this? What gathering? What questions?”

“Well ... the gathering is sort of a court. A criminal court, you might say.”

“Huh?” I took a quick look at my conscience. But I hadn’t had any chance to do anything wrong-I had been helpless as a baby up to two hours ago. That left Peewee. “Runt,” I said sternly, “what have you done now?”

“Me? Nothing.”

“Think hard.”

“No, Kip. Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you at breakfast! But Daddy says never to break any news until after his second cup of coffee and I thought how nice it would be to take a little walk before we had any worries and I was going to tell you”

“Make it march.”

“-as soon as we came down. I haven’t done anything. But there’s old Wormface.”

“What? I thought he was dead.”

“Maybe so, maybe not. But, as the Mother Thing says, there are still questions to be asked, decisions to be made. He’s up for the limit, is my guess.”

I thought about it as we wound our way through strange apartments toward the air lock that led to our Earth-conditioned rooms. High crimes and misdemeanors . . . skulduggery in the spaceways-yes, Wormface was probably in for it. If the Vegans could catch him. “Had caught him” apparently, since they were going to try him. “But where do we come in? As witnesses?”

“I suppose you could call it that.”

What happened to Wormface was no skin off my nose-and it would be a chance to find out more about the Vegans. Especially if the court was some distance away, so that we would travel and see the country.

“But that isn’t all,” Peewee went on worriedly.

“What else?”

She sighed. “This is why I wanted us to have a nice sight-see first. Uh . . .”

“Don’t chew on it. Spit it out.”

“Well . . . we have to be tried, too.”

“What?”

“Maybe ‘examined’ is the word. I don’t know. But I know this: we can’t go home until we’ve been judged.”

“But what have we done?” I burst out.

“I don’t know!”

My thoughts were boiling. “Are you sure they’ll let us go home then?”

“The Mother Thing refuses to talk about it.”

I stopped and took her arm. “What it amounts to,” I said bitterly, “is that we are under arrest. Aren’t we?”

“Yes-“ She added almost in a sob, “But, Kip, I told you she was a cop!”

“Great stuff. We pull her chestnuts out of the fire-and now we’re arrested-and going to be tried-and we don’t even know why! Nice place, Vega Five. ‘The natives are friendly.’ “ They had nursed me-as we nurse a gangster in order to hang him.

“But, Kip-“ Peewee was crying openly now. “I’m sure it’ll be all right. She may be a cop-but she’s still the Mother Thing.”

“Is she? I wonder.” Peewee’s manner contradicted her words. She was not one to worry over nothing. Quite the contrary.

My watch was on the washstand. I ungasketed to put it in an inside pocket. When I came out, Peewee was doing the same with Madame Pompadour. “Here,” I said, “I’ll take her with me. I’ve got more room.”

“No, thank you,” Peewee answered bleakly. “I need her with me. Especially now.”

“Uh, Peewee, where is this court? This city? Or another one?”

“Didn’t I tell you? No, I guess I didn’t. It’s not on this planet.”

“I thought this was the only inhabited-“

“It’s not a planet around Vega. Another star. Not even in the Galaxy.”

“Say that again?”

“It’s somewhere in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.”

I didn’t put up a fight-a hundred and sixty trillion miles from nowhere, I mean. But I didn’t speak to the Mother Thing as I got into her ship.

It was shaped like an old-fashioned beehive and it looked barely big enough to jump us to the space port. Peewee and I crowded together on the floor, the Mother Thing curled up in front and twiddled a shiny rack like an abacus; we took off, straight up.

In a few minutes my anger grew from sullenness to a reckless need to settle it. “Mother Thing!”

(“One moment, dear. Let me get us out of the atmosphere.”) She pushed something, the ship quivered and steadied.

“Mother Thing,” I repeated.

(“Wait until I lower us, Kip.”)

I had to wait. It’s as silly to disturb a pilot as it is to snatch the wheel of a car. The little ship took a buffeting; the upper winds must have been dillies. But she could pilot.

Presently there was a gentle bump and I figured we must be at the space port. The Mother Thing turned her head. (“All right, Kip. I sense your fear and resentment. Will it help to say that you two are in no danger? That I would protect you with my body? As you protected mine?”)

“Yes, but-“

(“Then let be. It is easier to show than it is to explain. Don’t clamp your helmet. This planet’s air is like your own.”)

“Huh? You mean we’re there?”

“I told you,” Peewee said at my elbow. “Just poof! and you’re there.”

I didn’t answer. I was trying to guess how far we were from home.

(“Come, children.”)

It was midday when we left; it was night as we disembarked. The ship rested on a platform that stretched out of sight. Stars in front of me were in unfamiliar constellations; slaunchwise down the sky was a thin curdling which I spotted as the Milky Way. So Peewee had her wires crossed-we were far from home but still in the Galaxy-perhaps we had simply switched to the night side of Vega Five.

I heard Peewee gasp and turned around.

I didn’t have strength to gasp.

Dominating that whole side of the sky was a great whirlpool of millions, maybe billions, of stars.

You’ve seen pictures of the Great Nebula in Andromeda?-a giant spiral of two curving arms, seen at an angle. Of all the lovely things in the sky it is the most beautiful. This was like that.

Only we weren’t seeing a photograph nor even by telescope; we were so close (if “close” is the word) that it stretched across the sky twice as long as the Big Dipper as seen from home-so close that I saw the thickening at the center, two great branches coiling around and overtaking each other. We saw it from an angle so that it appeared elliptical, just as M31 in Andromeda does; you could feel its depth, you could see its shape.

Then I knew I was a long way from home. That was home, up there, lost in billions of crowded stars.

It was some time before I noticed another double spiral on my right, almost as wide-flung but rather lopsided and not nearly as brilliant-a pale ghost of our own gorgeous Galaxy. It slowly penetrated that this second one must be the Greater Magellanic Cloud-if we were in the Lesser and if that fiery whirlpool was our own Galaxy. What I had thought was “The Milky Way” was simply a milky way, the Lesser Cloud from inside.

I turned and looked at it again. It had the right shape, a roadway around the sky, but it was pale skim milk compared with our own, about as our Milky Way looks on a murky night. I don’t know how it should look, since I’d never seen the Magellanic Clouds; I’ve never been south of the Rio Grande. But I did know that each cloud is a galaxy in its own right, but smaller than ours and grouped with us.

I looked again at our blazing spiral and was homesick in a way I hadn’t been since I was six.

Peewee was huddling to the Mother Thing for comfort. She made herself taller and put an arm around Peewee. (“There, there, dear! I felt the same way when I was very young and saw it for the first time.”)

“Mother Thing?” Peewee said timidly. “Where is home?”

(“See the right half of it, dear, where the outer arm trails into nothingness? We came from a point two-thirds the way out from the center.”

“No, no! Not Vega. I want to know where the Sun is!”

(“Oh, your star. But, dear, at this distance it is the same.”)

We learned how far it is from the Sun to the planet Lanador 167,000 light-years. The Mother Thing couldn’t tell us directly as she did not know how much time we meant by a “year”-how long it takes Terra to go around the Sun (a figure she might have used once or not at all and as worth remembering as the price of peanuts in Perth). But she did know the distance from Vega to the Sun and told us the distance from Lanador to Vega with that as a yardstick-six thousand one hundred and ninety times as great. 6190 times 27 light-years gives 167,000 light-years. She courteously gave it in powers of ten the way we figure, instead of using factorial five (1x2x3x4x5 equals 120) which is how Vegans figure. 167,000 light-years is 9.82 x 1017 miles. Round off 9.82 and call it ten. Then -1,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles -is the distance from Vega to Lanador (or from the Sun to Lanador; Vega and the Sun are back-fence neighbors on this scale.)

A thousand million billion miles.

I refuse to have anything to do with such a preposterous figure. It may be “short” as cosmic distances go, but there comes a time when the circuit breakers in your skull trip out from overload.

The platform we were on was the roof of an enormous triangular building, miles on a side. We saw that triangle repeated in many places and always with a two-armed spiral in each corner. It was the design the Mother Thing wore as jewelry.

It is the symbol for “Three Galaxies, One Law.”

I’ll lump here things I learned in driblets: The Three Galaxies are like our Federated Free Nations, or the United Nations before that, or the League of Nations still earlier; Lanador houses their offices and courts and files-the League’s capital, the way the FFN is in New York and the League of Nations used to be in Switzerland. The cause is historical; the people of Lanador are the Old Race; that’s where civilization began.