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 b.u.t.tons 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 anything, 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 embarra.s.sing 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 c.o.c.kcrow 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 cla.s.s 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 b.u.t.ton. "Or maybe I a.s.sumed 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 b.u.t.ton. "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 gray 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 maneuvering-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 neighbors. "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 s.p.a.ces-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 b.u.t.ton 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 b.u.t.ton."

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."