“There’s your weapon,” she said.
“Huh?”
“On the floor. Just beyond where I dropped Madame Pompadour. The gadget.” She went over, picked up her dolly, brushed away bits of ruined wormface, then took the camera-like thing and handed it to me. “Be careful. Don’t point it toward you. Or me.”
“Peewee,” I said faintly, “don’t you ever have an attack of nerves?”
“Sure I do. When I have leisure for it. Which isn’t now. Do you know how to work it?”
“No. Do you?”
“I think so. I’ve seen them and the Mother Thing told me about them.” She took it, handling it casually but not pointing it at either of us. “These holes on top-uncover one of them, it stuns. If you uncover them all, it kills. To make it work you push it here.” She did and a bright blue light shot out, splashed against the wall. “The light doesn’t do anything,” she added. “It’s for aiming. I hope there wasn’t anybody on the other side of that wall. No, I hope there was. You know what I mean.”
It looked like a cockeyed 35 mm. camera, with a lead lens-one built from an oral description. I took it, being very cautious where I pointed it, and looked at it. Then I tried it-full power, by mistake.
The blue light was a shaft in the air and the wall where it hit glowed and began to smoke. I shut it off.
“You wasted power,” Peewee chided. “You may need it later.”
“Well, I had to try it. Come on, let’s go.”
Peewee glanced at her Mickey Mouse watch-and I felt irked that it had apparently stood up when my fancy one had not. “There’s very little time. Kip. Can’t we assume that only this one escaped?”
“What? We certainly cannot! Until we’re sure that all of them are dead, we can’t do anything else. Come on.”
“But- Well, I’ll lead. I know my way around, you don’t.”
“No.”
“Yes!”
So we did it her way; she led and carried the blue-light projector while I covered the rear and wished for a third eye, like a wormface. I couldn’t argue that my reflexes were faster when they weren’t, and she knew more than I did about our weapon.
But it’s graveling, just the same.
The base was huge; half that mountain must have been honeycombed. We did it at a fast trot, ignoring things as complicated as museum exhibits and twice as interesting, simply making sure that no wormface was anywhere. Peewee ran with the weapon at the ready, talking twenty to the dozen and urging me on.
Besides an almost empty base, no ships in, and the wormfaces feeding, the Mother Thing’s plan required that all this happen shortly before a particular hour of the Plutonian night.
“Why?” I panted.
“So she could signal her people, of course.”
“But-” I shut up. I had wondered about the Mother Thing’s people but didn’t even know as much about her as I did about Wormface- except that she was everything that made her the Mother Thing. Now she was dead-Peewee said that she was outside without a space suit, so she was surely dead; that little soft warm thing wouldn’t last two seconds in that ultra-arctic weather. Not to mention suffocation and lung hemorrhage. I choked up.
Of course, Peewee might be wrong. I had to admit that she rarely was- but this might be one of the times … in which case we would find her. But if we didn’t find her, she was outside and- “Peewee, do you know where my space suit is?”
“Huh? Of course. Right next to where I got this.” She patted the nylon rope, which she had coiled around her waist and tied with a bow.
“Then the second we are sure that we’ve cleaned out the wormfaces I’m going outside and look for her!”
“Yes, yes! But we’ve got to find my suit, too. I’m going with you.”
No doubt she would. Maybe I could persuade her to wait in the tunnel out of that bone-freezing wind. “Peewee, why did she have to send her message at night? To a ship in a rotation-period orbit? Or is there-“
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