"Sorry, child."
"But the kids next door are making fun of you!"
"Calling names doesn't hurt me."
He could see her registering that, but she went on. "But you look so silly!"
He shook his head. "Sorry. Can't do it."
"Yes you can! All you have to do is take it off!"
"No, I can't," he said, "because if anything happened to me, you'd think it was your fault."
"No, I won't! That's silly! You're not going to get hurt just because I said to!" Then she stopped, eyes wide, hearing her own words.
"That's a very important thing to realize, Lona," Dr. Ross was carefully sitting upwind of Whitey, and as far away as she could.
"Then Gran'pa can take off the suit now?"
"Yes, but not here, please."
"Do you really realize that just wishing won't make something happen?" Whitey demanded.
And he was appalled that Lona was silent.
"Why do you think it does, Lona?" the doctor said kindly.
" 'Cause they said so on the 3DT," Lona mumbled.
Whitey took a deep breath, and the doctor leaned back in her chair. "But those are just stories, Lona—fairy tales."
"No it's not! It was about Mr. Edison!"
Whitey stared.
"Oh, yes, the genius inventor," the doctor said slowly. "But he didn't just 'wish,' and see his invention appear all of a sudden, did he?"
"No." Lona looked at the floor.
"How did he make his wishes real, Lona?"
"He worked at 'em," the little girl answered. "He worked awful hard, and stayed up nights working a lot, until he'd built a new invention."
"Yes," the doctor said softly, "and later in his life, he drew pictures of new machines he'd thought of, and gave them to other men to make. But it all took work, Lona—work with people's hands, not just their minds."
She nodded.
"What wish do you want to make real, Lona?"
"For no one to ever be hurt again from a dome collapsing!" she said instantly.
Now it was the doctor who took the deep breath, though Whitey joined her. "That's very difficult," Dr. Ross warned.
"I don't care! I want to do it anyway!"
"Look, child," Whitey said, "this isn't just pushing your body, like scrubbing the kitchen floor. This means learning mathematics, and physics, and computer programming, and engineering—grindingly hard work."
"I can do it, Gran'pa!"
"I know you can," Whitey said softly, "but not overnight—or next week, or even next year."
"You mean I can't do it?"
"No, you can," Dr. Ross said quickly. "I'm sure you have the intelligence, and we know you have the industry. But it does take a long time, Lona—years and years. It takes high school, and college, and maybe even graduate studies. You won't be able to invent your fail-safe dome till you're in your twenties or thirties."
"I don't care how long it takes! I'm gonna to do it anyway!"
And Whitey and the doctor could both breathe easily again, finally. At least, Whitey thought, we're safe from suicide.
First, of course, she had to find out why the dome on Homestead had blown. It was touchy, but Dr. Ross had said she was ready for it. Still, she trembled when Whitey managed to get her the printout from the asteroid's systems computer. But the trembling stopped when she looked at it. "What's all this mean, Gran'pa?"
"I don't know, child. I never learned enough about computers to be able to make sense of it."
"Can't you hire somebody to tell you?"
Whitey shook his head. "I don't have that much money—and everybody in the Asteroid Belt is too busy trying to earn enough to stay alive."
She stared. "You mean nobody cared?"
"Oh, they cared, all right. There was an investigation, and I read the report—but all it said, really, was that there had been a horrible accident, and the dome field had collapsed."
"They didn't say how or why?"
Whitey shook his head. "Not that I could tell. Of course, I don't understand all the technical stuff."
"Can't you learn it?"
"I could," Whitey said slowly, "if I didn't have to worry about earning a living."
"Well, then, I'll learn it!" Lona said, with determination, and turned back to the computer screen.
And she did. But before she could begin to learn programming, she had to learn a little about how computers work—and that meant she had to learn math, and a little physics. But when she came to microcircuits, she had to learn enough chemistry to understand silicon—and that meant more physics, and more physics meant more math. Then she began to become interested in mathematics for its own sake, and Whitey pointed out that she had to learn enough history to understand the way people were thinking when they invented programming, and history turned out to be pretty interesting, too.
Meanwhile, of course, Whitey was filling her head with bedtime stories about the Norse gods, and the fall of Troy, and the travels of Don Quixote.
"Isn't there any more, Gran'pa?"
"Well, yes, child, but there isn't time to tell it all."
So, of course, she had to start reading the books, to find out what Gran'pa had left out—and that was more fun than 3DT. Not that she watched it that much, there wasn't time. Oh, Gran'pa insisted that she take a few hours every afternoon to play with the other children, and now she was so full of life that she made friends in no time.
And that, of course, was probably why the Board of Education came knocking on the door.
Whitey wasn't about to let her be locked into six hours a day listening to material she'd already learned, of course. Not that he would have dreamed of claiming he knew better than the education professionals—for normal children. But Lona was a special case, and even they would have had to admit that.
If he had bothered arguing. But there were four school districts in Ceres City, and a dozen more on the asteroids nearby, all close enough to scoot over on a rocket sled and visit her friends every afternoon, and Dr. Ross once a month, and whatever cabaret Whitey was singing at in the evening. Not that she had much contact with any of what went on in the clubs, of course—she brought her notebook computer along.
So Whitey started travelling again, living the lifestyle he preferred, even though he wasn't travelling very far. He developed it into a system—move into town a month after the first semester began, and by the time the School Board realized he was there, he was already packing up to move on. Then three months there, and the school year was almost over, so there was no point in starting—and, of course, by the time the next school year was beginning, he'd already put his apartment on the market and gone to contract on a new one in another town-asteroid.
And Lona learned. And learned. And learned.
By the time she was ten, she knew enough to be able to piece-together the sequence of events from the printout. Not that she needed the hard copy, of course—she was able to access it by herself as she explained it to Whitey in a flat, controlled, emotionless voice.
Only one force-field generator had blown. Only one, but all the force-domes interlocked—so when one went, it disrupted its six neighbors' fields badly enough so that all the air poured out of them into its sector—and gushed out into space in a swirl of snowflakes. Their generators all tried to strengthen their domes, and the whole system overloaded, fields weakening to the point where Terran sea level air pressure could rip through them, gusting in the first and only wind Homestead had ever known, howling around the eaves of all the houses the settlers had built in their cocksure confidence in their dome, around the eaves and down the streets and on into the fieldless sector, then out into space, leaving only vacuum behind.
And bodies.
And, in one house, a little girl whose silly, overprotective daddy had insisted on making his house airtight, even though everybody knew it wasn't necessary, because the dome enveloped the whole asteroid in a force field that could never be punctured by any meteor—a silly daddy and a silly mommy who had put their little girl to bed, then gone outside to hold hands and look at the stars.