I should have used force. But I am handicapped by training from early childhood never to strike a female, no matter how richly she deserves it. So the opportunity and Peewee both slid past while I was torn between common sense and upbringing. I simply groaned helplessly.
Then I became aware of an unbearably attractive odor. I was holding that can. It contained boiled shoe leather and gray gravy and smelled ambrosial.
Peewee had eaten half; I ate the rest while looking at what she had found. There was a coil of nylon rope which I happily put with the air bottles; Oscar had fifty feet of clothesline clipped to his belt but that had been a penny-saving expedient. There was a prospector’s hammer which I salvaged, and two batteries which would do for headlamps and things.
The only other items of interest were a Government Printing Office publication titled Preliminary Report on Selenology, a pamphlet on uranium prospecting, and an expired Utah driver’s license for “Timothy Johnson”-I recognized the older man’s mean face. The pamphlets interested me but this was no time for excess baggage.
The main furniture was two beds, curved like contour chairs and deeply padded; they told me that Skinny and Fatty had ridden this ship at high acceleration.
When I had mopped the last of the gravy with a finger, I took a big drink, washed my hands-using water lavishly because I didn’t care if that pair died of thirst-grabbed my plunder and headed for the room where the space suits were.
As I got there I ran into Peewee. She was carrying the crowbar and looking overjoyed. “I found her!”
“Where?”
“Come on! I can’t get it open, I’m not strong enough.”
I put the stuff with our suits and followed her. She stopped at a door panel farther along the corridor than my vandalism had taken me. “In there!”
I looked and I listened. “What makes you think so?”
“I know! Open it!”
I shrugged and got to work with the nutpick. The panel went sprung! and that was that.
Curled up in the middle of the floor was a creature.
So far as I could tell, it might or might not have been the one I had seen in the pasture the night before. The light had been poor, the conditions very different, and my examination had ended abruptly. But Peewee was in no doubt. She launched herself through the air with a squeal of joy and the two rolled over and over like kittens play-fighting.
Peewee was making sounds of joy, more or less in English. So was the Mother Thing, but not in English. I would not have been surprised if she had spoken English, since Wormface did and since Peewee had mentioned things the Mother Thing had told her. But she didn’t.
Did you ever listen to a mockingbird? Sometimes singing melodies, sometimes just sending up a joyous noise unto the Lord? The endlessly varied songs of a mockingbird are nearest to the speech of the Mother Thing.
At last they held still, more or less, and Peewee said, “Oh, Mother Thing, I’m so happy!”
The creature sang to her. Peewee answered, “Oh. I’m forgetting my manners. Mother Thing, this is my dear friend Kip.”
The Mother Thing sang to me-and I understood.
What she said was: “I am very happy to know you, Kip.” It didn’t come out in words. But it might as well have been English. Nor was this half-kidding self-deception, such as my conversations with Oscar or Peewee’s with Madame Pompadour-when I talk with Oscar I am both sides of the conversation; it’s just my conscious talking to my subconscious, or some such. This was not that.
The Mother Thing sang to me and I understood.
I was startled but not unbelieving. When you see a rainbow you don’t stop to argue the laws of optics. There it is, in the sky.
I would have been an idiot not to know that the Mother Thing was speaking to me because I did understand and understood her every time. If she directed a remark at Peewee alone, it was usually just birdsongs to me-but if it was meant for me, I got it.