Dad looked surprised and the Brat made a face at me and said, “Smarty, you have not. Nobody can go up there.”
I think girls should be raised in the bottom of a deep, dark sack until they are old enough to know better. Then when it came time, you could either let them out or close the sack and throw them away, whichever was the best idea.
Molly said, “Hush, Peggy.”
I said, “You can just ask Hank. He was with me. We—” I looked around but Hank was gone. So I told them what had happened, all but the part about pirates.
When I finished the Brat said, “I want to go into the control room, too.”
Dad said he didn’t think it could be arranged. The Brat said, “Why not? Bill went.”
Molly said hush again. “Bill is a boy and older than you are.” The Brat said it wasn’t fair.
I guess she had something there—but things hardly ever are. Dad went on, “You should feel flattered, Bill, being entertained by the famous Captain DeLongPre.”
“Huh?”
“Maybe you are too young to remember it. He let himself be sealed into one of the robot freighters used to jump thorium ore from the lunar mines—and busted up a ring of hijackers, a gang the newscasters called the ‘Ore Pirates.'”
I didn’t say anything.
I wanted to see the Mayflower from space, but they made us strap down before I could locate it. I got a pretty good view of Supra-New-York though; the Mayflower was in the 24-hour orbit the space station rides in and we were closing almost directly on it when the word came to strap down.
Captain DeLongPre was quite some pilot. He didn’t fiddle around with jockeying his ship into the new groove; he gave one long blast on the jet, the right time, the right amount, and the right direction. As it says in the physics book, “every one-plane correction-of-orbit problem which can be solved at all, can be solved with a single application of acceleration”—provided the pilot is good enough.
He was good enough. When we went weightless again, I looked over my shoulder out a port and there was the Mayflower, with the Sun gleaming on her, large as life and not very far away. There was the softest sort of a correction bump and the loudspeaker sang out, “Contact completed. You may unstrap.”
I did and went to the port from which we could see the Mayflower. It was easy to see why she could never land; she had no airfoils of any sort, not even fins, and she was the wrong shape—almost spherical except that one side came out to a conical point.
She looked much too small—then I realized that a little bulge that was sticking out past her edge at one point was actually the bow of the Icarus, unloading on the far side. Then suddenly she was enormous and the little flies on her were men in space suits.
One of them shot something at us and a line came snaking across. Before the knob on the end of it quite reached us there was a bright purple brush discharge from the end of it and every hair on my head stood straight up and my skin prickled. A couple of the women in the compartment squealed and I heard Miss Andrews soothing them down and telling them that it was just the electrical potential adjusting between the two ships. If she had told them it was a bolt of lightning she would have been just as correct, but I don’t suppose that would have soothed them.
I wasn’t scared; any kid who had fooled around with radio or any sort of electronics would have expected it.
The knob on the line clunked against the side of the ship and after a bit the little line was followed by a heavier line and then they warped us together, slowly. The Mayflower came up until she filled the port.
After a bit my ears popped and the loudspeaker said, “All hands—prepare to disembark.”
Miss Andrews made us wait quite a while, then it was our deck’s turn and we pulled ourselves along to the deck we had come in by. Mrs. Tarbutton didn’t come along; she and her husband were having some sort of a discussion with Miss Andrews.