SUNDAY ROUTINE - meditation, study, and recreation. Make & Mend in afternoon.
Hazel looked it over. "Where are we headed, Rog? Botany Bay? You forgot to set a time to flog the peasants."
"It seems very reasonable to me."
"Possibly. Six gets you ten it won't last a week."
"Done. Let's see your money."
The twins had read it with dismay. Pollux blurted out, "But Dad! You haven't left us any time to repair our bikes - do you want us to lose our investment?"
"I've assigned thirty hours of study a week. That leaves one hundred and thirty-eight other hours. How you use them is your business as long as you keep our agreement about studying."
Castor said, "Suppose we want to start math at eight-thirty and again right after lunch? Can we get out of school that much earlier?"
"I see no objection."
"And suppose we study evenings sometimes? Can we work up some velvet?"
Their father shrugged. "Thirty hours a week - any reasonable variations in the routine will be okay, provided you enter in the log the exact times."
"Now that that's settled," Hazel commenced, "I regret to inforrn you, Captain, that there is one other little item on that Procrustean program that will have to be canceled for the time being at least. Much as I would enjoy inducing our little blossom into the mysteries of astrogation I don't have the time right now. You'll have to teach her yourself."
"Why?"
"'Why" the man asks? You should know better than anyone. The Scourge ofthe Spaceways, that's why. I've got to hole up and write like mad for the next three or four weeks; I've got to get several months of episodes ahead before we get out of radio range."
Roger Stone looked at his mother sadly. "I knew it was bound to come, Hazel, but I didn't expect it to hit you so young. The mental processes dull, the mind tends to wander, the -"
"Whose mind does what? Why you young -"
"Take it easy. If you'll look over your left shoulder out the starboard port and squint your eyes, you might imagine that you see a glint on the War God. It can't be much over ten thousand miles away."
"What's that got to do with me?" she demanded suspiciously.
"Poor Hazel! We'll take good care of you, Mother, we're riding in orbit with several large commercial vessels; every one of them has burners powerful enough to punch through to Earth. We won't ever be out of radio contact with Earth."
Hazel stared out the port as if she could actually spot the War God. "Well, I'll be dogged," she breathed. "Roger, lead me to my room - that's a good boy. It's senile decay, all right You'd better take back your show; I doubt if I can write it."
"Huh, uh! You let them pick up that option; you've got to write it. Speaking of The Scum of the Waste Spaces, I've been meaning to ask you a couple of questions about it and this is the first spare moment we've had. In the first place, why did you let them sign us up again?"
"Because they waved too much money under my nose, as you know full well. It's an aroma we Stones have hardly ever been able to resist."
"I just wanted to make you admit it. You were going to get me off the hook - remember? So you swallowed it yourself."
"More bait."
"Surely. Now the other point: I don't see how you dared to go ahead with it, no matter how much money they offered. The last episode you showed me, while you had killed off the Galactic Overlord you had also left Our Hero in a decidedly untenable position. Sealed in a radioactive sphere, if I remember correctly, at the bottom of an ammonia ocean on Jupiter. The ocean was swarming with methane monsters, whatever they are, each hypnotised by the Overlord's mind ray to go after John Sterling at the first whiff - and him armed only with his Scout knife. How did you get him out of it?"
"We found a way," put in Pol. "If you assume -"
"Quiet infants. Nothing to it, Roger. By dint of superhuman effort Our Hero extricated himself from his predicament and-"
"That's no answer."
"You don't understand. I open the next episode on Ganymede. John Sterling is telling Special Agent Dolores O'Shanahan about his adventure. He's making light of it, see? He's noble so he really wouldn't want to boast to a girl. Just as he is jokingly disparaging his masterly escape the next action starts and it's so fast and so violent and so bloody that our unseen audience doesn't have time to think about it until the commercial. And by then they've got too much else to think about."
Roger shook his head. "That's literary cheating."
"Who said this was literature? It's a way to help corporations take tax deductions. I've got three new sponsors."
"Hazel," asked Pollux, "where have you got them now? What's the situation?"
Hazel glanced at the chronometer. "Roger, does that schedule take effect today? Or can we start fresh tomorrow?"
He smiled feebly. "Tomorrow, I guess."
"If this is going to degenerate into a story conference, I'd better get Lowell. I get my best ideas from Lowell; he's just the mental age of my average audience."
"If I were Buster, I would resent that."
"Quiet!" She slithered to the hatch and called out, "Edith! May I borrow your wild animal for a while?"
Meade said, "I'll get him, Grandmother. But wait for me."
She returned quickly with the child. Lowell said, "What do you want, Grandma Hazel? Bounce tag?"
She gathered him in an arm. "No, son - blood. Blood and gore. We're going to kill off some villains."
"Swell!
"Now as I recall it - and mind you, I was only there once - I left them lost in the Dark Nebula. Their food is gone and so is the Q-fuel. They've made a temporary truce with their Arcturian prisoners and set them free to help - which is safe enough because they are silicon-chemistry people and can't eat humans. Which is about what they are down to; the real question is - who gets barbecued for lunch? They need the help of the Arcturian prisoners because the Space Entity they captured in the last episode and imprisoned in an empty fuel tank has eaten its way through all but the last bulkhead and itdoesn't have any silly previous prejudices about body chemistry. Carbon or silicon; it's all one to it."
"I don't believe that's logical," commented Roger stone. "If its own chemistry was based-"
"Out of order," ruled Hazel. "Helpful suggestions only, please. Pol? You seem to have a gleam in your eye"
"This, Space Entity jigger can he stand up against radar wave lengths?"
"Now we're getting somewhere. But we've got to complicate it a bit Well, Meade?"
The twins started moving their bicycles outside the following day. The suits they wore were the same ones they had worn outdoors on the Moon, With the addition of magnetic boots and small rocket motors. These latter were strapped to their backs with the nozzles sticking straight out from their waists. An added pressure bottle to supply the personal rocket motor was mounted on the shoulders of each boy but, being weightless, the additional mass was little handicap.
"Now remember," their father warned them, "those boost units are strictly for dire emergency. Lifelines at all times. And don't depend on your boots when you shift lines, snap on the second line before you loose the first."
"Shucks, Dad, we'll be careful."
"No doubt. But you can expect me to make a surprise inspection at any time. One slip on a safety precaution and it's the rack and thumb screws, plus fifty strokes of bastinado."
"No boiling oil?"
"Can't afford it. See here, you think I'm joking. If one of you should happen to get loose and drift away from the ship, don't expect me to come after you. One of you is a spare anyway."