After several tries, I had drawn what was reasonably recognizable as a fist seen palm on, holding a long, clean arrow. I’m no artist and I’d had to keep sneaking looks at my own hand to get even a moderately accurate picture. The arrow I’d managed to draw without benefit of a model.
I made a grab for it, but Riggy held it out of reach. “Uh-uh,” he said, passing it on to Venie farther down the table. She looked at it with a frown, making sure at the same time that I wasn’t able to grab it back.
I shrugged and said, “It’s a picture with a meaning, if you must know. It’s sort of a pictorial pun.”
“A rebus?” Attila suggested.
“I guess it is.”
“Let me see it,” he said, and took it from Venie.
“I don’t get it,” Venie said. “An arrow held in a hand.”
“A fist,” Riggy said. “The hand’s closed.”
Tiredly I said, “It’s my name. ‘Have arrow’ — Havero.”
“Oh, no,” Venie said. “That’s pretty poor.”
Helen said, “I don’t think it’s too bad. I think it’s a pretty clever idea.”
“‘An ill-favoured thing, but mine own,’” I quoted tartly.
Venie gave me a disgusted look. “You are a show-off, aren’t you? What was that supposed to be?”
“Mia’s reading Shakespeare for her tutor,” Helen said. “That’s all. She’s been memorizing lines.”
Riggy took the doodle back and gave it another look. “You know, this is a good idea. I wonder if I could work my name out somehow.”
We spent some time trying, working on all our names. It didn’t come out terribly well. By stretching we got “pack,” a little knapsack for Helen — but that wasn’t truly homonymous. “Szabody” and “Allen” were pretty well unworkable.
“I’ve got one,” Riggy said, after some moments of concentration during which he wouldn’t show anybody what he was doing. Triumphantly he held up a sheet with a series of locks drawn on it. “ ‘More-lock,’ ” he said. “Get it?”
We got it, but we didn’t like it. He had covered the whole sheet with his drawings, which is hardly what you’d call concise.
I’d been working on the same name myself. I came up with a fair-to-middling troglodyte.
“What’s that?” Attila asked.
“It’s Morlock again.”
Venie didn’t look pleased, and Riggy immediately challenged, “How do you get Morlock out of that thing?”
“It’s from an old novel called The Time Machine. There’s a group of underground monsters in it called Morlocks.”
“You’re making that up,” Venie said.
“I’m not either,” I said. “You can look the book up for yourself. I read it when I was in Alfing, so all you have to do is call for the facsimile.”
Venie looked at the drawing again. Then she said, “All right, I’ll look it up. I may even use it.”
I almost liked her for saying that, since I hadn’t been very kind in bringing the subject up. If my name had been Morlock, I might have used the troglodyte idea myself, but I hadn’t really expected Venie to stomach the idea. It took more… not quite objectivity — but detachment from herself — than I thought she had.
Just then Attila said, “Here comes Jim.”
Jimmy Dentremont came between the tables, snaked up a free chair from the next table over and plunked it down beside me.
“Hi,” he said.
“Where have you been?” Helen asked for all of us. Helen is a very striking girl. She has blonde hair and oriental eyes — eyes with an epicanthic fold — and it’s a wild combination.
Jimmy just shrugged and pointed at our various little doodles. “What’s all this?”
We explained it to him.
“Oh,” he said. “That’s easy. I can get one for me with no trouble.” He picked up a pencil and sketched two mountains, and then put a little stick figure man between them.
I looked blankly at him and so did the others.
“My name means ‘between mountains,’ ” he explained.
“It does?” Riggy asked.
“In French.”
“I didn’t know you knew French,” I said.
“I don’t. I just looked my name up because I knew it was originally French.”
“How about that?” Attila said. “I wonder if my name means something in Hungarian.”
Jimmy cleared his throat, looked around at us, and then said to me, “Mia, do you remember our bet about my finding an adventure?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’ve found one. That’s what I’ve been working on the past few days.”
Helen immediately asked for an explanation of what we were talking about, and I had to wait to ask Jimmy just what it was that I was in for until he had finished explaining.
“If this was a bet, what were the stakes involved?” Riggy asked.
Jimmy looked at me questioningly. Then he said, “I don’t think we settled that. I assumed it was that if I found an adventure, Mia would have to go along.”
Everybody looked at me, and I said, “All right. I guess so.”
“Okay,” Jimmy said. “This is it: we’re going to go outside the Ship. On the outside of the Ship.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Helen asked.
“It’s an adventure,” Jimmy said. “Adventures are supposed to have an element of danger, be fraught with peril and all that.”
“Is it dangerous outside the Ship?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Jimmy admitted. “I don’t know what it’s like out there. I couldn’t find out. I did try. Finding out should be part of the fun. Besides, even if that’s easy, there are some hard parts. We’ve got to have suits to go outside, and we’ve got to get ourselves outside. Neither of those will be easy.”
“I want to go, too,” Riggy said.
Jimmy shook his head. “This is just Mia and me. We are going to need help, though, and if you want to help us you’re welcome.”
The kids looked at each other around the table, and then they all nodded. We were a group, after all, and this was just too good to miss.
The six of us walked in a body through a corridor on the First Level. Jimmy walked a step or two ahead of us, leading the way. There is something to being a part of a group busy on purposes of its own, something exciting. Even if it is melodramatic, even if it is 90 % hokum, it is fun. I was enjoying myself, and so were the others. I could hardly restrain myself from practicing surreptitious glances behind us, simply because they seemed in keeping with the part we were playing.
Jimmy turned half around and pointed ahead and to the left. “It’s around here.”
There was a little foyer there a couple of feet deep, and then a blank black door, completely featureless. In our world that is unusual — people ordinarily lavish considerable care in making their surroundings lively and personal. Consequently the Ship is quite a colorful place to live in. A black door like this with neither design nor decoration was obviously meant to say “Stay Out” to anybody who came by.
“The air lock to the outside is in the room behind the door there,” Jimmy said.
The door had no obvious button, knob, slide, latch or handle, only a single hole for an electronic key — this sort of key when inserted would emit an irregular signal of an established frequency and the door would open.
Attila and Jimmy were the two of us that knew something about electronics and they looked the door over carefully together.
After a moment Attila said, “It’s just a token lock.”
“What’s that?” I asked. We were standing in a halfcircle around the two boys and the door.
He said, “This lock is just to keep the door closed and to let people know the door is supposed to be closed, and that’s about all. I’ll have to work on it a couple of times and I can get through.”