“You said ‘small moving objects,’” said Laurette.
“Compared to the Sun, Earth is a small moving object,” said Hal. “Compared to the galaxy, Earth is a blip. The only reason we think it’s big is because we’re even smaller.”
“Thanks for the info, Science Boy,” said Xena.
“Like he said, everybody knows that,” said Wheeler.
“Oh, you had sixty-seven thousand and eight hundred miles an hour sitting there in your brain?” said Pat.
“No, but I knew that the Earth spins completely around once a day,” said Wheeler. “And I knew it went all the way around the Sun once a year. That means it’s a seriously fast-moving object. Duh.”
“If you’re so smart, how fast is the solar system moving around the center of the galaxy?” Pat asked Hal.
“Four hundred eighty-three thousand miles an hour,” said Hal.
“And how fast is the Milky Way moving toward Andromeda?”
“That’s impossible to say,” said Hal, “because they’re moving toward each other and there’s no stationary point of reference.”
“The whole galaxy is moving one point three million miles an hour, compared to the CBR,” said Pat triumphantly.
“What’s the CBR?” asked Sin.
“Cosmic Background Radiation,” said Hal, “and that’s not what you asked, Pat, you asked about how fast the Milky Way was moving toward Andromeda.”
“This is all so sad,” said Sin. “While other boys were memorizing football players’ stats, Hal was memorizing the stats of astronomical objects.”
“I wonder if Earth will make the playoffs this year,” said Laurette.
“And you girls memorize what George Clooney eats for breakfast,” said Wheeler.
“That walking fossil?” said Xena.
“The cast of Twilight, then,” said Wheeler.
Apparently the girls couldn’t argue with that one.
It was no secret that Hal was smart. And Pat was the smartest of the girls. And Danny knew all this stuff too-he knew everything he had ever read. The difference was that Hal had realized it applied to this situation.
“I get the point,” said Danny. “I’m attaching the gates to a point on the surface of a spinning, moving object, so there’s no reason I can’t attach it to a pebble except that the pebble is smaller.” Danny gazed steadily at the stone, trying to figure out how to attach a gate to it the way he had attached the gate to a spot in the air above the stone.
Meanwhile, Sin had a question. “How do you wizards or whatever you are, how do you know we don’t have magic?”
“Don’t talk to him, he’s making gates,” said Laurette.
“We don’t know you don’t have magic,” said Danny. “Our blood has been mixing with the rest of the human race for thousands of years, so you probably have some Mithermage ancestry.” He tried to hold the image of the stone in his mind and create a gate solely in relation to the stone, not distracted by any other surrounding feature.
“So send us to Westil,” said Sin. “Maybe we’ll come back with superpowers.”
“Yeah,” said Hal.
“Cool,” said Wheeler.
Danny’s concentration broke. He was impatient with himself, but they only saw that he was annoyed.
“Sorry,” said Laurette.
“Stop distracting him!” said Xena protectively.
“Why don’t you hold it in your hand and really focus on it?” asked Pat. “Disconnect it from the ground.”
Laurette handed him a stone. Danny took it, bent over it, stared at it, made a gate.
He moved the stone a little to the left.
The mouth of the gate moved with it.
It was that simple. Remove the pebble from its context, concentrate a little, and he had an enchanted stone.
“You look happy,” said Xena. “Does that mean you’re thinking of me naked?”
“It means he attached a gate to the stone,” said Pat. “We all try not to think of you naked.”
“So … what now?” asked Hal. “You give us each a stone to use if we need to make a quick getaway?”
“A stone’s a lousy idea,” said Laurette.
“Why?” asked Danny. He had thought it was a pretty good idea.
“First,” said Laurette, “what if we drop our stone? How could we tell which one was ours, except by brushing our hand against it and taking off like Hal just did? And then we still don’t have the stone-but maybe whoever was chasing us finds it and follows us.”
“Don’t drop the stone,” said Wheeler.
“Right, like none of us ever drops anything,” said Pat.
“Second,” said Laurette, “suppose somebody handcuffs us and searches us and finds a stone in our pockets or purses or whatever? How many people our age carry rocks around?”
“Okay,” said Danny, “Not a stone. I was just learning how to do it, and there are plenty of stones.”
“A ring,” said Sin.
“A nose ring,” said Xena. “Then every time you blow your nose, you’ll transport somewhere.”
“Or you sniff and you get sent to the moon,” said Wheeler.
“‘One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them,’” intoned Hal. “‘One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.’”
“Are you saying we’re on Sauron’s side?” asked Wheeler, a little angry.
“Sauron doesn’t have a side,” said Danny. “You forget, the Families are all the gods, all the fairies, all the elves and ghosts and werewolves and poltergeists and everything. Good and bad, the Families are on both sides of everything. There’s no good or evil with them. Just … whatever they feel like doing, and have the power to do it.”
“That sounds like as good a definition of evil as I’ve ever heard,” said Pat.
“Well, look what I just did,” said Danny. “I felt like attaching a gate to a stone, and when Xena suggested that I really focus on it, then I could do it. Was that evil?”
Pat shrugged. “Depends on whether you throw the stone at some other high school’s quarterback and jump him ten yards back and drop him on his ass.”
“That’s just a prank,” said Wheeler. “Can you do it?”
“He wouldn’t need a stone,” said Hal. “He could just do it.”
“And it would be evil,” said Pat. “Hurting somebody else just for the fun of it.”
“So was it evil when I messed with Coach Lieder?” asked Danny.
“A little bit maybe,” said Pat.
“But mostly funny,” said Hal.
“And he deserved it,” said Wheeler.
Danny remembered the men he had terrified into submission out over the Atlantic, and then stashed in a jail. They were murderers, or meant to be. They deserved worse than he had done to them. But it didn’t make him feel all that great about the fact that he had the power to torture them like that. And that he had just done it, the moment he thought of it.
“Something you already carry with you,” said Danny. “And I’ll try to put the gate on it in such a way that you don’t just accidentally pop through it. So don’t give me your wallet.”
“Wheeler can give you the condom he always carries,” said Hal. “He’s never going to use that.”
Wheeler glared at him. “They gave it to me in fifth grade. It’s like a rabbit’s foot, I’m not going to use it, it’s older than my dick by now.”
“Ew,” said Laurette. “You made me think of your weenie.”
“Said the girl with the constant cleavage,” said Wheeler.
“Please,” said Danny. “Something you carry but you don’t touch, but you could get to it in an emergency.”
Pat already had a tampon out of her purse.
“Our turn to say ‘ew,’” said Hal.
“Every girl carries them and nobody thinks anything about it,” said Pat.
“I don’t,” said Sin.
“I carry extras,” said Laurette, getting two tampons out of her purse.