But each gadget involved parts she needed herself.
“She sneaked bits and pieces into her pouch,” Peewee told me. “They never knew exactly what she was doing. She would use five of a thing and the sixth would go into her pouch.”
“Her pouch?”
“Of course. That’s where she hid the ‘brain’ the time she and I swiped the ship. Didn’t you know?”
“I didn’t know she had a pouch.”
“Well, neither did they. They watched to see she didn’t carry anything out of the shop-and she never did. Not where it showed.”
“Uh, Peewee, is the Mother Thing a marsupial?”
“Huh? Like possums? You don’t have to be a marsupial to have a pouch. Look at squrrels, they have pouches in their cheeks.”
“Mmm, yes.”
“She sneaked a bit now and a bit then, and I swiped things, too. During rest time she worked on them in our room.”
The Mother Thing had not slept all the time we had been on Pluto. She worked long hours publicly, making things for wormfaces-a stereo-telephone no bigger than a pack of cigarettes, a tiny beetle-like arrangement that crawled all over anything it was placed on and integrated the volume, many other things. But during hours set apart for rest she worked for herself, usually in darkness, those tiny fingers busy as a blind watch-maker’s.
She made two bombs and a long-distance communicator-and-beacon.
I didn’t get all this tossed over Peewee’s shoulder while we raced through the base; she simply told me that the Mother Thing had managed to build a radio-beacon and had been responsible for the explosion I had felt. And that we must hurry, hurry, hurry!
“Peewee,” I said, panting. “What’s the rush? If the Mother Thing is outside, I want to bring her in-her body, I mean. But you act as if we had a deadline.”
“We do!”
The communicator-beacon had to be placed outside at a particular local time (the Plutonian day is about a week-the astronomers were right again) so that the planet itself would not blanket the beam. But the Mother Thing had no space suit. They had discussed having Peewee suit up, go outside, and set the beacon-it had been so designed that Peewee need only trigger it. But that depended on locating Peewee’s space suit, then breaking in and getting it after the wormfaces were disposed of.
They had never located it. The Mother Thing had said serenely, singing confident notes that I could almost hear ringing in my head: (“Never mind, dear. I can go out and set it myself.”)
“Mother Thing! You can’t!” Peewee had protested. “It’s cold out there.”
(“I shan’t be long.”)
“You won’t be able to breathe.”
(“It won’t be necessary, for so short a time.”)
That settled it. In her own way, the Mother Thing was as hard to argue with as Wormface.
The bombs were built, the beacon was built, a time approached when all factors would match-no ship expected, few wormfaces, Pluto faced the right way, feeding time for the staff-and they still did not know where Peewee’s suit was-if it had not been destroyed. The Mother Thing resolved to go ahead.
“But she told me, just a few hours ago when she let me know that today was the day, that if she did not come back in ten minutes or so, that she hoped I could find my suit and trigger the beacon-if she hadn’t been able to.” Peewee started to cry. “That was the f- f- first time she admitted that she wasn’t sure she could do it!”
“Peewee! Stop it! Then what?”
“I waited for the explosions-they came, right together-and I started to search, places I hadn’t been allowed to go. But I couldn’t find my suit!
Then I found you and-oh, Kip, she’s been out there almost an hour!” She looked at her watch. “There’s only about twenty minutes left. If the beacon isn’t triggered by then, she’s had all her trouble and died for n- n- nothing! She wouldn’t like that.” “Where’s my suit!”
We found no more wormfaces-apparently there was only one on duty while the others fed. Peewee showed me a door, air-lock type, behind which was the feeding chamber-the bomb may have cracked that section for gas-tight doors had closed themselves when the owners were blown to bits. We hurried past.