“Look, Peewee,” I said earnestly, “I don’t care how you get to sleep. Personally I hit myself over the head with a hammer. But quit yakking. Do you know the layout of these ships?”
She looked around. “I think this is the ship that chased me. But it looks the same as the one I piloted.”
“All right. Should we head for the control room?”
“Huh?”
“You flew the other heap. Can you fly this one?”
“Unh … I guess so. Yes, I can.”
“Then let’s go.” I started in the direction they had lugged me.
“But the other time I had the Mother Thing to tell me what to do! Let’s find her.”
I stopped. “Can you get it off the ground?”
“Well . . . yes.”
“We’ll look for her after we’re in the air-‘in space,’ I mean. If she’s aboard we’ll find her. If she’s not, there’s not a thing we can do.”
“Well … all right. I see your logic; I don’t have to like it.” She tagged along. “Kip? How many gravities can you stand?”
“Huh? I haven’t the slightest idea. Why?”
“Because these things can go lots faster than I dared try when I escaped before. That was my mistake.”
“Your mistake was in heading for New Jersey.”
“But I had to find Daddy!”
“Sure, sure, eventually. But you should have ducked over to Lunar Base and yelled for the Federation Space Corps. This is no job for a popgun; we need help. Any idea where we are?”
“Mmm . . . I think so. If he took us back to their base. I’ll know when I look at the sky.”
“All right. If you can figure out where Lunar Base is from here, that’s where we’ll go. If not- Well, we’ll head for New Jersey at all the push it has.”
The control-room door latched and I could not figure out how to open it. Peewee did what she said should work-which was to tuck her little finger into a hole mine would not enter-and told me it must be locked. So I looked around.
I found a metal bar racked in the corridor, a thing about five feet long, pointed on one end and with four handles like brass knucks on the other. I didn’t know what it was-the hobgoblin equivalent of a fire ax, possibly -but it was a fine wrecking bar.
I made a shambles of that door in three minutes. We went in.
My first feeling was gooseflesh because here was where I had been grilled by him. I tried not to show it. If he turned up, I was going to let him have his wrecking bar right between his grisly eyes. I looked around, really seeing the place for the first time. There was sort of a nest in the middle surrounded by what could have been a very fancy coffee maker or a velocipede for an octopus; I was glad Peewee knew which button to push. “How do you see out?”
“Like this.” Peewee squeezed past and put a finger into a hole I hadn’t noticed.
The ceiling was hemispherical like a planetarium. Which was what it was, for it lighted up. I gasped.
It was suddenly not a floor we were on, but a platform, apparently out in the open and maybe thirty feet in the air. Over me were star images, thousands of them, in a black “sky”-and facing toward me, big as a dozen full moons and green and lovely and beautiful, was Earth!
Peewee touched my elbow. “Snap out of it, Kip.”
I said in a choked voice, “Peewee, don’t you have any poetry in your soul?”
“Surely I have. Oodles. But we haven’t time. I know where we are, Kip -back where I started from. Their base. See those rocks with long jagged shadows? Some of them are ships, camouflaged. And over to the left- that high peak, with the saddle?-a little farther left, almost due west, is Tombaugh Station, forty miles away. About two hundred miles farther is Lunar Base and beyond is Luna City.”
“How long will it take?”
“Two hundred, nearly two hundred and fifty miles? Uh, I’ve never tried a point-to-point on the Moon-but it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”