"That's silly," said Jeron scornfully. "He can't do that!" But the Puget girl put her hand on his arm.
"Yes, he can, Jeron. Listen to Mrs. Tupelo—what should Jeron do?"
The Vice President smiled and bobbed her head as though they were talking about the drinks or the other guests or the weather, her eyes never off the door her husband had left through. "Though it gravels me to say it," she said, "I think you ought to take that little flight you were talking about, and don't come back for a while. Do it soon. Do it before he gets up tomorrow morning, because after he's had his coffee it's going to be too late."
27
WITHOUT DARIEN McCULLOUGH'S HELP THE ALPHA-ALEPHS would never have made it to the spacecraft, much less succeeded in sneaking past the dozing guards, but even so by the time they got there they were pitiably exhausted. Eve Barstow's Earth-born muscles were beginning to come back into shape and she was the least damaged, but even Eve plopped herself into a seat and croaked, "Let's get away from here, Bill."
Darien looked around. "—Five, six, seven," she counted. "Is that all of you?"
"Close enough. Go!" grunted Jeron, and Darien barely had time to seat herself when little Jeromolo Bill expertly whipped the ship off the ground and up.
The kind of thrust involved was entirely out of Darien's experience. She weighed twice, three times what she had ever weighed before, and when she turned her head as it leaned against the back of her seat she thought her eyes would be twisted out of their sockets. She knew in theory that sharp acceleration produced G-thrusts, but theory did not persuade her body that everything was proceeding normally. For a moment she thought she would throw up— but couldn't—and then the pressure eased and she could, but didn't any longer need to.
There was a shrill gabble of children's voices to celebrate the fact that they could now get up again. Darien winced at the noise, and then realized that the reason she could hear it was that there was no noise from the ship itself. No roar of motors, not even a scream of air passing around the ship itself. How very strange! She was near enough to the white cylinder that held the power plant to reach out a hesitant finger to touch it. Cool. Also strange. Everything strange; and strangest of all the people, who did not know how strange they were.
Although they had some very grownup ways, most of them were still children, and you could see that in the strain on their faces, the pouting lips, the way they flew at each other. The youngest of all was the child who seemed to be flying the ship! Not yet three feet tall, with sweet, plump skin and eyebrows almost invisibly blond—how could he be trusted with such a thing?
Perhaps it was good for him. He seemed calm enough, whereas the two youngest of the girls—their names seemed to be Ringo and Tudeasy—were shrieking at each other, and close to tears. The older girl, Molomy, and the boy called Quittyyx were trying to quiet them down, while Jeron cursed them all impartially.
It was Eve Barstow who restored order, with a simple, "Shut up, everybody." They obeyed. "Bill, where are we going?" she asked.
"North Pole, Aunt Eve," said the six-year-old.
"Why?"
"Want to see what it looks like," he offered. He hesitated, baby teeth nibbling at baby lip, then grinned. "Also it's the only place I could think of that I know how to go to."
"That's ridiculous," said Jeron scornfully, and the hubbub broke out again until Darien McCullough called over it:
"I have a suggestion. Come stay with us in Puget for a while."
Silence, with everyone looking at her, then another burst of raucous noise until Jeron quelled it. "I think that sounds interesting," he said, and his eyes said why he thought so.
"Hell with that," cried Molomy strongly. "You can get sex anywhere, Jeron, you don't have to go among the savages to get it. You! Darien-McCulloughl You're not supposed to be here in the first place, so be quiet."
There was enough truth in that to slow Darien down. She'd sneaked them through the sleeping city of Washington, but when they got to the ship there was no invitation to come inside. It wasn't until the argument threatened to wake the guards that Jeron pulled her in and shut the door. Eve quieted the new outbreak and said, "I don't want to be offensive, but how do we know we won't get into the same problem in Puget?"
"Well, you don't," Darien conceded. "But you can leave one person in the ship all the time if you like— Or maybe just one or two come out with me at a time until you get a look at us— Or you could just trust me? Listen. I knew you were coming, and that's why I made that whole damned long trek to Washington. It's important!"
"Trust you!" sniffed Molomy; but the little pilot piped up:
"I trust her." Everybody was talking at once again until Eve's deeper, slower voice cut through.
"The best way to make up our minds," she said, "is to roll the bones."
There was a silence. Then Molomy said, "We don't do that anymore, Aunt Eve. Only the old folks do it."
"The old folks made some pretty good decisions with the I Ching, Molomy. I say let's read the hexagram and see what it says."
"We don't have any bones," Jeron objected. "Could use a coin, I guess, if we had a coin. Have you got a coin?" he asked Darien. Talk about strange—! But she found a coin, or at least a Puget retail token that had both heads and tails, and Molomy was elected to flip it. First flip: Heads. Jeron drew two short lines with his thumbnail on the skin of his knee. Second flip: Heads again. Jeron nodded. "Pride stirred up because of somebody else's transgressions," he said, making the same mark just below the first. Third flip: Heads again. Fourth flip: Heads. "You walk in the midst of others, but you return alone," Molomy sighed. Fifth flip: Heads. Darien was watching in fascination. "In Puget," she said, "when they do that, they do it the other way. From bottom to top." "On our ship," Jeron said, "we do it our way. Shut up." Sixth flip, tails—and the hexagram was complete as Jeron drew a solid line at the bottom:
Eve straightened up. "It's K'un over Chen," she said. "It's The Turning Point.' " Jeron rubbed at his knee and nodded, but Molomy cried indignantly, "Same old garbage! You can read it either way —see why we don't cast the hexagrams anymore?" Eve sat down in her chair and began to belt herself in. "Dear Molomy, that's the nature of the hexagram. But the nature of important decisions is that you have to decide them. One way or the other. If we don't go to Puget we haven't made a decision, we've just postponed one." "But—" "But, but, butt out," Jeron interrupted. "We cast the hexagram and it's over. Bill! Take us to Puget."
By the time they had made their decision the craft, according to Jeromolo Bill's built-in navigation aids, was somewhere over Lake Erie. He studied a map for a moment —strange map, north was not at the north and it had no political markings at all, only coasts and mountain ranges— and then nodded negligently. "Belt up," he piped, and barely gave them time to settle in before he whipped the ship around in a sharp left-hand turn. Then he unstrapped himself and began to play a game with his chief pilot, Quittyyx, using Darien's coin. He didn't need to guide the ship anymore; it was going in the right direction. It was not a difficult sum—there were no relativistic factors to be considered—but it made Darien nervous. She didn't want to criticize the boy's piloting, so she said instead, "Isn't that an awfully wasteful way to travel?"
He looked up. "Wasteful of what? Oh, I see. Energy." He laughed, and called: "Aunt Eve, is there anything to eat?"