"Huh?"
"On the floor. Just beyond where I dropped Madame Pompadour. The gadget." She went over, picked up her dolly, brushed away bits of ruined wormface, then took the camera-like thing and handed it to me. "Be careful. Don"t point it toward you. Or me."
"Peewee," I said faintly, "don"t you ever have an attack of nerves?"
"Sure I do. When I have leisure for it. Which isn"t now. Do you know how to work it?"
"No. Do you?"
"I think so. I"ve seen them and the Mother Thing told me about them." She took it, handling it casually but not pointing it at either of us. "These holes on top-uncover one of them, it stuns. If you uncover them all, it kills. To make it work you push it here." She did and a bright blue light shot out, splashed against the wall. "The light doesn"t do anything," she added. "It"s for aiming. I hope there wasn"t anybody on the other side of that wall. No, I hope there was. You know what I mean."
It looked like a c.o.c.keyed 35 mm. camera, with a lead lens-one built from an oral description. I took it, being very cautious where I pointed it, and looked at it. Then I tried it-full power, by mistake.
The blue light was a shaft in the air and the wall where it hit glowed and began to smoke. I shut it off.
"You wasted power," Peewee chided. "You may need it later."
"Well, I had to try it. Come on, let"s go."
Peewee glanced at her Mickey Mouse watch-and I felt irked that it had apparently stood up when my fancy one had not. "There"s very little time. Kip. Can"t we a.s.sume that only this one escaped?"
"What? We certainly cannot! Until we"re sure that all of them are dead, we can"t do anything else. Come on."
"But- Well, I"ll lead. I know my way around, you don"t."
"No."
"Yes!"
So we did it her way; she led and carried the blue-light projector while I covered the rear and wished for a third eye, like a wormface. I couldn"t argue that my reflexes were faster when they weren"t, and she knew more than I did about our weapon.
But it"s graveling, just the same.
The base was huge; half that mountain must have been honeycombed. We did it at a fast trot, ignoring things as complicated as museum exhibits and twice as interesting, simply making sure that no wormface was anywhere. Peewee ran with the weapon at the ready, talking twenty to the dozen and urging me on.
Besides an almost empty base, no ships in, and the wormfaces feeding, the Mother Thing"s plan required that all this happen shortly before a particular hour of the Plutonian night.
"Why?" I panted.
"So she could signal her people, of course."
"But-" I shut up. I had wondered about the Mother Thing"s people but didn"t even know as much about her as I did about Wormface- except that she was everything that made her the Mother Thing. Now she was dead-Peewee said that she was outside without a s.p.a.ce suit, so she was surely dead; that little soft warm thing wouldn"t last two seconds in that ultra-arctic weather. Not to mention suffocation and lung hemorrhage. I choked up.
Of course, Peewee might be wrong. I had to admit that she rarely was- but this might be one of the times ... in which case we would find her. But if we didn"t find her, she was outside and- "Peewee, do you know where my s.p.a.ce suit is?"
"Huh? Of course. Right next to where I got this." She patted the nylon rope, which she had coiled around her waist and tied with a bow.
"Then the second we are sure that we"ve cleaned out the wormfaces I"m going outside and look for her!"
"Yes, yes! But we"ve got to find my suit, too. I"m going with you."
No doubt she would. Maybe I could persuade her to wait in the tunnel out of that bone-freezing wind. "Peewee, why did she have to send her message at night? To a ship in a rotation-period orbit? Or is there-"
My words were chopped off by a rumble. The floor shook in that loose-bearing vibration that frightens people and animals alike. We stopped dead. "What was that?" Peewee whispered.
I swallowed. "Unless it"s part of this rumpus the Mother Thing planned-"
"It isn"t. I think."
"It"s a quake."
"An earthquake?"
"A Pluto quake. Peewee, we"ve got to get out of here!"
I wasn"t thinking about where-you don"t in a quake. Peewee gulped. "We can"t bother with earthquakes; we haven"t time. Hurry, Kip, hurry!" She started to run and I followed, gritting my teeth. If Peewee could ignore a quake, so could I-though it"s like ignoring a rattlesnake in bed.
"Peewee . . . Mother Thing"s people ... is their ship in orbit around Pluto?"
"What? Oh, no, no! They"re not in a ship."
"Then why at night? Something about the Heavyside layers here? How far away is their base?" I was wondering how far a man could walk here. We had done almost forty miles on the Moon. Could we do forty blocks here? Or even forty yards? You could insulate your feet, probably. But that wind- "Peewee, they don"t live here, do they?"
"What? Don"t be silly! They have a nice planet of their own. Kip, if you keep asking foolish questions, we"ll be too late. Shut up and listen."
I shut up. What follows I got in s.n.a.t.c.hes as we ran, and some of it later. When the Mother Thing had been captured, she had lost ship, s.p.a.ce clothing, communicator, everything; Wormface had destroyed it all. There had been treachery, capture through violation of truce while parleying. "He grabbed her when they were supposed to be under a King"s "X" " was Peewee"s indignant description, "and that"s not fair! He had promised."
Treachery would be as natural in Wormface as venom in a Gila monster; I was surprised that the Mother Thing had risked a palaver with him. It left her a prisoner of ruthless monsters equipped with ships that made ours look like horseless carriages, weapons which started with a "death ray" and ended heaven knows where, plus bases, organization, supplies.
She had only her brain and her tiny soft hands.
Before she could use the rare combination of circ.u.mstances necessary to have any chance at all she had to replace her communicator (I think of it as her "radio" but it was more than that) and she had to have weapons. The only way she could get them was to build them.
She had nothing, not a bobby pin-only that triangular ornament with spirals engraved on it. To build anything she had to gain access to a series of rooms which I would describe as electronics labs-not that they looked like the bench where I jiggered with electronics, but electron-pushing has its built-in logic. If electrons are to do what you want them to, components have to look pretty much a certain way, whether built by humans, wormfaces, or the Mother Thing. A wave guide gets its shape from the laws of nature, an inductance has its necessary geometry, no matter who the technician is.
So it looked like an electronics lab-a very good one. It had gear I did not recognize, but which I felt I could understand if I had time. I got only a glimpse.
The Mother Thing spent many, many hours there. She would not have been permitted there, even though she was a prisoner-at-large with freedom in most ways and anything she wanted, including private quarters with Peewee. I think that Wormface was afraid of her, even though she was a prisoner-he did not want to offend her unnecessarily.
She got the run of their shops by baiting their cupidity. Her people had many things that wormfaces had not-gadgets, inventions, conveniences. She began by inquiring why they did a thing this way rather than another way which was so much more efficient? A tradition? Or religious reasons?
When asked what she meant she looked helpless and protested that she couldn"t explain-which was a shame because it was simple and so easy to build, too.
Under close chaperonage she built something. The gadget worked. Then something else. Presently she was in the labs daily, making things for her captors, things that delighted them. She always delivered; the privilege depended on it.
But each gadget involved parts she needed herself.
"She sneaked bits and pieces into her pouch," Peewee told me. "They never knew exactly what she was doing. She would use five of a thing and the sixth would go into her pouch."
"Her pouch?"
"Of course. That"s where she hid the "brain" the time she and I swiped the ship. Didn"t you know?"
"I didn"t know she had a pouch."
"Well, neither did they. They watched to see she didn"t carry anything out of the shop-and she never did. Not where it showed."
"Uh, Peewee, is the Mother Thing a marsupial?"
"Huh? Like possums? You don"t have to be a marsupial to have a pouch. Look at squirrels, they have pouches in their cheeks."
"Mmm, yes."
"She sneaked a bit now and a bit then, and I swiped things, too. During rest time she worked on them in our room."
The Mother Thing had not slept all the time we had been on Pluto. She worked long hours publicly, making things for wormfaces-a stereo-telephone no bigger than a pack of cigarettes, a tiny beetle-like arrangement that crawled all over anything it was placed on and integrated the volume, many other things. But during hours set apart for rest she worked for herself, usually in darkness, those tiny fingers busy as a blind watch-maker"s.
She made two bombs and a long-distance communicator-and-beacon.
I didn"t get all this tossed over Peewee"s shoulder while we raced through the base; she simply told me that the Mother Thing had managed to build a radio-beacon and had been responsible for the explosion I had felt. And that we must hurry, hurry, hurry!
"Peewee," I said, panting. "What"s the rush? If the Mother Thing is outside, I want to bring her in-her body, I mean. But you act as if we had a deadline."
"We do!"
The communicator-beacon had to be placed outside at a particular local time (the Plutonian day is about a week-the astronomers were right again) so that the planet itself would not blanket the beam. But the Mother Thing had no s.p.a.ce suit. They had discussed having Peewee suit up, go outside, and set the beacon-it had been so designed that Peewee need only trigger it. But that depended on locating Peewee"s s.p.a.ce suit, then breaking in and getting it after the wormfaces were disposed of.
They had never located it. The Mother Thing had said serenely, singing confident notes that I could almost hear ringing in my head: ("Never mind, dear. I can go out and set it myself.") "Mother Thing! You can"t!" Peewee had protested. "It"s cold out there."
("I shan"t be long.") "You won"t be able to breathe."
("It won"t be necessary, for so short a time.") That settled it. In her own way, the Mother Thing was as hard to argue with as Wormface.
The bombs were built, the beacon was built, a time approached when all factors would match-no ship expected, few wormfaces, Pluto faced the right way, feeding time for the staff-and they still did not know where Peewee"s suit was-if it had not been destroyed. The Mother Thing resolved to go ahead.
"But she told me, just a few hours ago when she let me know that today was the day, that if she did not come back in ten minutes or so, that she hoped I could find my suit and trigger the beacon-if she hadn"t been able to." Peewee started to cry. "That was the f- f- first time she admitted that she wasn"t sure she could do it!"
"Peewee! Stop it! Then what?"
"I waited for the explosions-they came, right together-and I started to search, places I hadn"t been allowed to go. But I couldn"t find my suit!
Then I found you and-oh, Kip, she"s been out there almost an hour!" She looked at her watch. "There"s only about twenty minutes left. If the beacon isn"t triggered by then, she"s had all her trouble and died for n- n- nothing! She wouldn"t like that." "Where"s my suit!"
We found no more wormfaces-apparently there was only one on duty while the others fed. Peewee showed me a door, air-lock type, behind which was the feeding chamber-the bomb may have cracked that section for gas-tight doors had closed themselves when the owners were blown to bits. We hurried past.
Logical as usual, Peewee ended our search at my s.p.a.ce suit. It was one of more than a dozen human-type suits-I wondered how much soup those ghouls ate. Well, they wouldn"t eat again! I wasted no time; I simply shouted, "Hi, Oscar!" and started to suit up.
("Where you been, chum?") Oscar seemed in perfect shape. Fats" suit was next to mine and Tim"s next to it; I glanced at them as I stretched Oscar out, wondering whether they had equipment I could use. Peewee was looking at Tim"s suit. "Maybe I can wear this."
It was much smaller than Oscar, which made it only nine sizes too big for Peewee. "Don"t be silly! It"d fit you like socks on a rooster. Help me. Take off that rope, coil it and clip it to my belt."
"You won"t need it. The Mother Thing planned to take the beacon out the walkway about a hundred yards and sit it down. If she didn"t manage it, that"s all you do. Then twist the stud on top."
"Don"t argue! How much time?"
"Yes, Kip. Eighteen minutes."
"Those winds are strong," I added. "I may need the line." The Mother Thing didn"t weigh much. If she had been swept off, I might need a rope to recover her body. "Hand me that hammer off Fats" suit."
"Right away!"
I stood up. It felt good to have Oscar around me. Then I remembered how cold my feet got, walking in from the ship. "I wish I had asbestos boots."
Peewee looked startled. "Wait right here!" She was gone before I could stop her. I went on sealing up while I worried-she hadn"t even stopped to pick up the projector weapon. Shortly I said, "Tight, Oscar?"
("Tight, boy!") Chin valve okay, blood-color okay, radio-I wouldn"t need it-water- The tank was dry. No matter, I wouldn"t have time to grow thirsty. I worked the chin valve, making the pressure low because I knew that pressure outdoors was quite low.
Peewee returned with what looked like ballet slippers for a baby elephant. She leaned close to my face plate and shouted, "They wear these. Can you get them on?" It seemed unlikely, but I forced them over my feet like badly fitting socks. I stood up and found that they improved traction; they were clumsy but not hard to walk in.
A minute later we were standing at the exit of the big room I had first seen. Its air-lock doors were closed now as a result of the Mother Thing"s other bomb, which she had placed to blow out the gate-valve panels in the tunnel beyond. The bomb in the feeding chamber had been planted by Peewee who had then ducked back to their room. I don"t know whether the Mother Thing timed the two bombs to go off together, or triggered them by remote-control-nor did it matter; they had made a shambles of Wormface"s fancy base.
Peewee knew how to waste air through the air lock. When the inner door opened I shouted, "Time?"
"Fourteen minutes." She held up her watch.
"Remember what I said, just stay here. If anything moves, blue-light it first and ask questions afterwards."
"I remember."
I stepped in and closed the inner door, found the valve in the outer door, waited for pressure to equalize.
The two or three minutes it took that big lock to bleed off I spent in glum thought. I didn"t like leaving Peewee alone. I thought all wormfaces were dead, but I wasn"t sure. We had searched hastily; one could have zigged when we zagged-they were so fast.
Besides that, Peewee had said, "I remember," when she should have said, "Okay, Kip, I will." A slip of the tongue? That flea-hopping mind made "slips" only when it wanted to. There is a world of difference between "Roger" and "Wilco."
Besides I was doing this for foolish motives. Mostly I was going out to recover the Mother Thing"s body-folly, because after I brought her in, she would spoil. It would be kinder to leave her in natural deep-freeze.
But I couldn"t bear that-it was cold out there and I couldn"t leave her out in the cold. She had been so little and warm ... so alive. I had to bring her in where she could get warm.
You"re in bad shape when your emotions force you into acts which you know are foolish.
Worse still, I was doing this in a reckless rush because the Mother Thing had wanted that beacon set before a certain second, now only twelve minutes away, maybe ten. Well, I"d do it, but what sense was it? Say her home star is close by-oh, say it"s Proxima Centauri and the wormfaces came from somewhere farther. Even if her beacon works-it still takes over four years for her S.O.S. to reach her friends!
This might have been okay for the Mother Thing. I had an impression that she lived a very long time; waiting a few years for rescue might not bother her. But Peewee and I were not creatures of her sort. We"d be dead before that speed-of-light message crawled to Proxima Centauri. I was glad that I had seen Peewee again, but I knew what was in store for us. Death, in days, weeks, or months at most, from running out of air, or water, or food-or a wormface ship might land before we died-which meant one unholy sabbat of a fight in which, if we were lucky, we would die quickly.
No matter how you figured, planting that beacon was merely "carrying out the deceased"s last wishes"-words you hear at funerals. Sentimental folly.
The outer door started to open. Ave, Mother Thing! Nos morituri.