The Vice President sighed softly. Aunt Eve took pity on her. "The red, white, and blue is for you, for sure," she said. "Now, do you want to see how this thing works?"
There was a sudden air of tension in the ship. "You mean go up for a flight?" Darien asked after a moment.
"Sure, why not?"
But the Amish woman looked so startled and worried that the Vice President shook her head. Jimbo would kill her, but she said, "No, really, I mean thanks a lot but no. Do you think you could tell us a little bit about how it runs, though?"
Jeron reached back and pulled young Bill forward. The boy instantly piped, "Well, those are the seats we sit in. It's pretty easy to fly this thing, but sometimes your delta-Vs get pretty hairy if you're operating in an atmosphere, so we tied ourselves in." He frowned as he noticed an expression of incomprehension on the faces peering at him, and Darien McCullough cut in:
"That doesn't exactly explain what makes it go."
"Oh, that." He patted a white enamel cylinder about the size of a domestic hot-water tank. "It's just thermonuke, inside here. There's a plasma cord in there about the size of my finger, and it's real hot. Ski says it's about a million Kelvins—of course, it's turned off now."
"I think they mean how do we contain that much energy," Aunt Eve offered. She sighed and scratched her head. "Let's see. I helped draw up that Godel message that explained the whole thing, but it's a long time ago. . . . The first thing to do is renormalization. Do you people know what that means?"
Obviously they did not; Darien was looking intent but unsure, the Amish lady skeptical and somewhat unhappy, only the Vice President seemed comfortable. "Good lord, no," she said, "but I do like hearing those words, so go right ahead and explain it."
"All right." Eve thought for a second. "Well, everybody knows that quantum field theory says even empty space has to contain infinite energy, right? That's just Heisenberg. In a practical sense that does not usually make any difference, because you don't get work done from energy, you get work from changes in energy states or differences between energy states. So when the old physicists wanted to do mathematics about energy in space they dropped out the term for the infinite energy; that was called renormalizing it."
Darien raised a hand. "Are you saying that you, what is it, renormalize equations?"
"No, no, no! We renormalize space." Eve looked around to the children for help, but they were as perplexed as she. None of them had ever been exposed to human beings, at least to human beings over the age of two, who did not understand simple physics. She said, unsure of herself but unable to find a better way, "If you read the Godel message, you probably remember something Ski put in; it was a quotation from John Wheeler. It went like this: 'Geometry bent one way describes gravitation. Rippled another way somewhere else it manifests all the qualities of an electro magnetic wave. Excited at still another place, the magic material that is space shows itself as a particle.' Do you see? It's all geometry. All we have to do is arrange the geometry properly and the rest takes care of itself; space is renormalized, energy flows, and we move."
Jeromolo Bill giggled, "Look at them, Aunt Eve!" he squeaked. "They're not taking in a word of it, are they?"
The Vice President could find it in heart to love even bratty kids; she patted Bill on the head, looked at her Mickey Mouse watch, and sighed, "Oh, my goodness! Look at the time! Thanks for the tour, but if you folks are going to get any lunch I better be getting back to the White House."
Lunch was only Chesapeake Bay oyster chowder and a nice salad from the Vice President's own kitchen garden. Her KPs didn't need to be supervised for that, so what she said was not true; and as she walked back to the White House she was worrying.
Little bitty untruths, of course, never worried the Vice President. Social lies rested lightly on her; she was not a theoretician, and abstract arguments in that area were as meaningless to her as what that John Wheeler, whoever he was, had said about gravitation, whatever he meant by that. She knew what gravitation was—it was what made you puff when you went up a flight of stairs. It wasn't geometry, and neither was matter, and what difference did it all make, for heaven's sake? Mae Tupelo did not deny that in some theoretical sense all that stuff might be true—but who cared?—or even that there might be some abstract rule requiring truth-telling rather than falsehood, say when you were testifying under oath. None of that affected her life. It often turned out that the truth hurt people, and a pleasant lie left them at peace.
The truths she was carrying around right now were very likely to hurt. The truthful thing to have said to the visitors was, "My husband's up to something tricky and I have to find out what it is," but a person couldn't say that. And the truthful thing to say to her husband, when she saw him, was, "You're never in this world going to be able to handle that ship, so forget it." And maybe she would say that; but before she tried any truths on James B. she was going to find out what falsehoods he had been laying on her.
Mae Tupelo did not expect her husband to have no secrets at all. He had plenty. She could name three of them right off—their names were Rose and Diane, and that little Marine orderly, Sylvia. That didn't mean anything. That was just the dog in any man. No, the kind of secrets she didn't want Jimbo keeping from her were like that bad thing with Dieter von Knefhausen—Mae Tupelo was sure she could have kept him alive, good thick stews and fresh greens, instead of whatever he got in that silly old dungeon—and, most especially, whatever it was that was going on now.
The question was, what could she do about it?
One way was to ask him. That was the wrong way. The Vice President had better ones, and so by the time the President was up in the Lincoln Room digging out his ears and buttoning his shirt to be ready for lunch, she had already had a few words with her own personal CIA. "Jimbo," she said, "you got to have the White House Guard off practicing commando tactics in Rock Creek Park, and it's not going to work."
He scowled like a thundercloud. "What's not going to work?" he demanded dangerously, but she stood up to him.
"Hijacking that spaceship. That's what's not going to work. Not counting it's a really mean thing to do, you can't get away with it."
He sat down and reached for a Fresca, his gaze calculating as he looked at his wife. "You think not?" he inquired.
"I know it, James B!"
He shook his head. "How they going to stop me, Mae? They've got no guns. You see any guns there anywhere?"
"There's worse things than guns! Besides, how do you know what they've got up in that big ship up in orbit?"
"Up in orbit's not here. Besides, once we get this one, we could just run up there and take that one too, right? What's to stop us?"
"We-don't-know-how is to stop us, for one thing."
He grinned. "They do, honey."
"Jimbo! They're company! How's it going to look if you make slaves out of them?"
He finished the Fresca and tossed the bottle out onto the overgrown lawn. "You know," he said sweetly, "you might be right at that, Mae. I'm going to have to think this over, but right now it's about time to eat lunch."
The President joined his guests for the drinks on the porch and then wandered off for a private word with the guard commandant, and that was all the Vice President needed. She had not moved more than five yards from Jeron, waiting for her chance. Of course he was talking real close with that Puget woman—same dog in every man —but there might not be another chance. "Mr. Jeron, honey," she said, low and fast, "by this time tomorrow night my husband's going to have armed men in your ship, and you're not going to get in it until you do what he wants you to."