Have space suit-- will travel (6 page)

I snapped my head around. A kid about ten years old was seated on the floor, leaning against a wall. He-I corrected myself. Boys don’t usually clutch rag dolls. This kid was the age when the difference doesn’t show much and was dressed in shirt, shorts and dirty tennis shoes, and had short hair, so I didn’t have much to go on but the rag dolly.

“Hi, yourself,” I answered. “What are we doing here?”

“I’m surviving. I don’t know about you.”

“Huh?”

“Surviving. Pushing my breath in and out. Conserving my strength. There’s nothing else to do at the moment; they’ve got us locked in.”

I looked around. The room was about ten feet across, four-sided but wedge-shaped, and nothing in it but us. I couldn’t see a door; if we weren’t locked, we might as well be. “Who locked us in?”

“Them. Space pirates. And him.”

“Space pirates? Don’t be silly!”

The kid shrugged. “Just my name for them. But better not think they’re silly if you want to keep on surviving. Are you ‘Junebug’?”

“Huh? You sound like a junebug yourself. Space pirates, my aunt!” I was worried and very confused and this nonsense didn’t help. Where was Oscar? And where was I?

“No, no, not a junebug but ‘Junebug’-a radio call. You see, I’m Peewee.”

I said to myself, Kip old pal, walk slowly to the nearest hospital and give yourself up. When a radio rig you wired yourself starts looking like a skinny little girl with a rag doll, you’ve flipped. It’s going to be wet packs and tranquilizers and no excitement for you-you’ve blown every fuse.

“You’re ‘Peewee’?”

“That’s what I’m called-I’m relaxed about it. You see, I heard, ‘Junebug, calling Peewee,’ and decided that Daddy had found out about the spot I was in and had alerted people to help me land. But if you aren’t ‘Junebug,’ you wouldn’t know about that. Who are you?”

“Wait a minute, I am ‘Junebug.’ I mean I was using that call. But I’m Clifford Russell-‘Kip’ they call me.”

“How do you do. Kip?” she said politely.

“And howdy to you, Peewee. Uh, are you a boy or a girl?”

Peewee looked disgusted. “I’ll make you regret that remark. I realize I am undersized for my age but I’m actually eleven, going on twelve. There’s no need to be rude. In another five years I expect to be quite a dish-you’ll probably beg me for every dance.”

At the moment I would as soon have danced with a kitchen stool, but I had things on my mind and didn’t want a useless argument. “Sorry, Peewee. I’m still groggy. You mean you were in that first ship?”

Again she looked miffed. “I was piloting it.”

Sedation every night and a long course of psychoanalysis. At my age. “You were-piloting?”

“You surely don’t think the Mother Thing could? She wouldn’t fit their controls. She curled up beside me and coached. But if you think it’s easy, when you’ve never piloted anything but a Cessna with your Daddy at your elbow and never made any kind of landing, then think again. I did very well!-and your landing instructions weren’t too specific. What have they done with the Mother Thing?”

“The what?”

“You don’t know? Oh, dear!”

“Wait a minute, Peewee. Let’s get on the same frequency. I’m ‘Junebug’ all right and I homed you in-and if you think that’s easy, to have a voice out of nowhere demand emergency landing instructions, you better think again, too. Anyhow, a ship landed and another ship landed right after it and a door opened in the first ship and a guy in a space suit jumped out-“

“That was I.”

“-and something else jumped out-“

“The Mother Thing.”

“Only she didn’t get far. She gave a screech and flopped. I went to see what the trouble was and something hit me. The next thing I know you’re saying, ‘Hi, there.’ “ I wondered if I ought to tell her that the rest, including her, was likely a morphine dream because I was probably lying in a hospital with my spine in a cast.

Peewee nodded thoughtfully. “They must have blasted you at low power, or you wouldn’t be here. Well, they caught you and they caught me, so they almost certainly caught her. Oh, dear! I do hope they didn’t hurt her.”

“She looked like she was dying.”

“As if she were dying,” Peewee corrected me. “Subjunctive. I rather doubt it; she’s awfully hard to kill-and they wouldn’t kill her except to keep her from escaping; they need her alive.”

“Why? And why do you call her ‘the Mother Thing’?”

“One at a time, Kip. She’s the Mother Thing because . . . well, because she is, that’s all. You’ll know, when you meet her. As to why they wouldn’t kill her, it’s because she’s worth more as a hostage than as a corpse-the same reason the kept me alive. Although she’s worth incredibly more than I am-they’d write me off without a blink if I became inconvenient. Or you. But since she was alive when you saw her, then it’s logical that she’s a prisoner again. Maybe right next door. That makes me feel much better.”

It didn’t make me feel better. “Yes, but where’s here?”

Peewee glanced at a Mickey Mouse watch, frowned and said, “Almost halfway to the Moon, I’d say.”

“What?!”

“Of course I don’t know. But it makes sense that they would go back to their nearest base; that’s where the Mother Thing and I scrammed from.”

“You’re telling me we’re in that ship?”

“Either the one I swiped or the other one. Where did you think you were, Kip? Where else could you be?”

“A mental hospital.”

She looked big-eyed and then grinned. “Why, Kip, surely your grip on reality is not that weak?”

“I’m not sure about anything. Space pirates-Mother Things.”

She frowned and bit her thumb. “I suppose it must be confusing. But trust your ears and eyes. My grip on reality is quite strong, I assure you- you see, I’m a genius.” She made it a statement, not a boast, and somehow I was not inclined to doubt the claim, even though it came from a skinny-shanked kid with a rag doll in her arms.

But I didn’t see how it was going to help.

Peewee went on: “ ‘Space pirates’ . . . mmm. Call them what you wish. Their actions are piratical and they operate in space-you name them. As for the Mother Thing . . . wait until you meet her.”

“What’s she doing in this hullabaloo?”

“Well, it’s complicated. She had better explain it. She’s a cop and she was after them-“

“A cop?”

“I’m afraid that is another semantic inadequacy. The Mother Thing knows what we mean by cop and I think she finds the idea bewildering if not impossible. But what would you call a person who hunts down miscreants? A cop, no?”

“A cop, yes, I guess.”

“So would I.” She looked again at her watch. “But right now I think we had better hang on. We ought to be at halfway point in a few minutes- and a skew-flip is disconcerting even if you are strapped down.”

I had read about skew-flip turn-overs, but only as a theoretical maneuver; I had never heard of a ship that could do one. If this was a ship. The floor felt as solid as concrete and as motionless. “I don’t see anything to hang on to.”

“Not much, I’m afraid. But if we sit down in the narrowest part and push against each other, I think we can brace enough not to slide around. But let’s hurry; my watch might be slow.”

We sat on the floor in the narrow part where the angled walls were about five feet apart. We faced each other and pushed our shoes against each other, each of us bracing like an Alpinist inching his way up a rock chimney-my socks against her tennis shoes, rather, for my shoes were still on my workbench, so far as I knew. I wondered if they had simply dumped Oscar in the pasture and if Dad would find him.

“Push hard, Kip, and brace your hands against the deck.”

I did so. “How do you know when they’ll turn over, Peewee?”

“I haven’t been unconscious-they just tripped me and carried me inside-so I know when we took off. If we assume that the Moon is their destination, as it probably is, and if we assume one gravity the whole jump -which can’t be far off; my weight feels normal. Doesn’t yours?”

I considered it. “I think so.”

“Then it probably is, even though my own sense of weight may be distorted from being on the Moon. If those assumptions are correct, then it is almost exactly a three-and-a-half-hour trip and-“ Peewee looked at her watch. “-E.T.A. should be nine-thirty in the morning and turn-over at seven-forty-five. Any moment now.”

“Is it that late?” I looked at my watch. “Why, I’ve got a quarter of two.”

“You’re on your zone time. I’m on Moon time-Greenwich time, that is. Oh, oh! Here we go!”

The floor tilted, swerved, and swooped like a roller coaster, and my semicircular canals did a samba. Things steadied down as I pulled out of acute dizziness.

“You all right?” asked Peewee.

I managed to focus my eyes. “Uh, I think so. It felt like a one-and-a-half gainer into a dry pool.”

“This pilot does it faster than I dared to. It doesn’t really hurt, after your eyes uncross. But that settles it. We’re headed for the Moon. We’ll be there in an hour and three quarters.”

I still couldn’t believe it. “Peewee? What kind of a ship can gun at one gee all the way to the Moon? They been keeping it secret? And what were you doing on the Moon anyhow? And why were you stealing a ship?”

She sighed and spoke to her doll. “He’s a quiz kid, Madame Pompadour. Kip, how can I answer three questions at once? This is a flying saucer, and-“

“Flying saucer! Now I’ve heard everything.”

“It’s rude to interrupt. Call it anything you like; there’s nothing official about the term. Actually it’s shaped more like a loaf of pumpernickel, an oblate spheroid. That’s a shape defined-“

“I know what an oblate spheroid is,” I snapped. I was tired and upset from too many things, from a cranky air conditioner that had ruined a good pair of pants to being knocked out while on an errand of mercy. Not to mention Ace Quiggle. I was beginning to think that little girls who were geniuses ought to have the grace not to show it.

“No need to be brisk,” she said reprovingly. “I am aware that people have called everything from weather balloons to street lights ‘flying saucers.’ But it is my considered opinion-by Occam’s Razor-that-“

“Whose razor?”

“Occam’s. Least hypothesis. Don’t you know anything about logic?”

“Not much.”

“Well ... I suspected that about every five-hundredth ‘saucer sighting’ was a ship like this. It adds up. As for what I was doing on the Moon-“ She stopped and grinned. “I’m a pest.”

I didn’t argue it.

“A long time ago when my Daddy was a boy, the Hayden Planetarium took reservations for trips to the Moon. It was just a publicity gag, like that silly soap contest recently, but Daddy got his name on the list. Now, years and years later, they are letting people go to the Moon-and sure enough, the Hayden people turned the list over to American Express- and American Express notified the applicants they could locate that they would be given preference.”

“So your father took you to the Moon?”

“Oh, heavens, no! Daddy filled out that form when he was only a boy. Now he is just about the biggest man at the Institute for Advanced Study and hasn’t time for such pleasures. And Mama wouldn’t go if you paid her. So I said I would. Daddy said ‘No!’ and Mama said Good gracious, no!’ . . . and so I went. I can be an awful nuisance when I put my mind on it,” she said proudly. “I have talent for it. Daddy says I’m an amoral little wretch.”

“Uh, do you suppose he might be right?”

“Oh, I’m sure he is. He understands me, whereas Mama throws up her hands and says she can’t cope. I was perfectly beastly and unbearable for two whole weeks and at last Daddy said ‘For Blank’s sake let her go! -maybe we’ll collect her insurance!’ So I did.”

“Mmmmm . . . that still doesn’t explain why you are here.”

“Oh, that. I was poking around where I shouldn’t, doing things they told us not to. I always get around; it’s very educational. So they grabbed me. They would rather have Daddy but they hope to swap me for him. I couldn’t let that happen, so I had to escape.”

I muttered, “ The butler did it.’ “

“What?”

“Your story has as many holes as the last Chapter of most whodunits.”

“Oh. But I assure you it is the simple-oh, oh! here we go again!”

All that happened was that the lighting changed from white to blue. There weren’t any light fixtures; the whole ceiling glowed. We were still sprawled on the floor. I started to get up-and found I couldn’t.

I felt as if I had just finished a cross-country race, too weak to do anything but breathe. Blue light can’t do that; it’s merely wavelengths 4300 to 5100 angstroms and sunlight is loaded with it. But whatever they used with the blue light made us as limp as wet string.

Peewee was struggling to tell me something. “If . . . they’re coming for us ... don’t resist . . . and . . . above all-“

The blue light changed to white. The narrow wall started to slide aside.

Peewee looked scared and made a great effort. “-above all ... don’t antagonize . . . him.”

Two men came in, shoved Peewee aside, strapped my wrists and ankles and ran another strap around my middle, binding my arms. I started to come out of it-not like flipping a switch, as I still didn’t have energy enough to lick a stamp. I wanted to bash their heads but I stood as much chance as a butterfly has of hefting a bar bell.