But it doesn’t cease to exist; it just is no longer where it was. It struck me that the wormfaces were getting off easy. I had halfway expected their planet to be blown up (and I didn’t doubt that Three Galaxies could do so), or something equally drastic. As it was, the wormfaces were to be run out of town and would never find their way back-there are so many, many dimensions-but they wouldn’t be hurt; they were just being placed in Coventry.
But the Mother Thing sounded as if she had taken unwilling part in a hanging.
So I asked her.
(“You do not understand, dear gentle Kip-they do not take their star with them.”)
“Oh-” was all I could say.
Peewee turned white.
Stars are the source of life-planets are merely life’s containers. Chop off the star . . . and the planet gets colder . . . and colder . . . and colder-then still colder.
How long until the very air freezes? How many hours or days to absolute zero? I shivered and got goose pimples. Worse than Pluto-
“Mother Thing? How long before they do this?” I had a queasy misgiving that I should have spoken, that even wormfaces did not deserve this. Blow them up, shoot them down-but don’t freeze them.
(“It is done,”) she sang in that same dirgelike way.
“What?”
(“The agent charged with executing the decision waits for the word … the message goes out the instant we hear it. They were rotated out of our world even before I turned to join you. It is better so.”)
I gulped and heard an echo in my mind: “-’twere well it were done quickly.”
But the Mother Thing was saying rapidly, (“Think no more on ‘t, for now you must be brave!”)
“Huh? What, Mother Thing? What happens now?”
(“You’ll be summoned any moment-for your own trial.”)
I simply stared, I could not speak-I had thought it was all over. Peewee looked still thinner and whiter but did not cry. She wet her lips and said quietly, “You’ll come with us, Mother Thing?”
(“Oh, my children! I cannot. You must face this alone.”)
I found my voice. “But what are we being tried for? We haven’t hurt anybody. We haven’t done a thing.”
(“Not you personally. Your race is on trial. Through you.”)
Peewee turned away from her and looked at me-and I felt a thrill of tragic pride that in our moment of extremity she had turned, not to the Mother Thing, but to me, another human being.
I knew that she was thinking of the same thing I was: a ship, a ship hanging close to Earth, only an instant away and yet perhaps uncounted trillion miles in some pocket of folded space, where no DEW line gives warning, where no radar can reach.
The Earth, green and gold and lovely, turning lazily in the warm light of the Sun-
A flat voice- No more Sun.
No stars.
The orphaned Moon would bobble once, then continue around the Sun, a gravestone to the hopes of men. The few at Lunar Base and Luna City and Tombaugh Station would last weeks or even months, the only human beings left alive. Then they would go-if not of suffocation, then of grief and loneliness.
Peewee said shrilly, “Kip, she’s not serious! Tell me she’s not!”
I said hoarsely, “Mother Thing-are the executioners already waiting?”
She did not answer. She said to Peewee, (“It is very serious, my daughter. But do not be afraid. I exacted a promise before I surrendered you. If things go against your race, you two will return with me and be suffered to live out your little lives in my home. So stand up and tell the truth . . . and do not be afraid.”)
The flat voice entered the closed space: “The human beings are summoned.”
Chapter 11
We walked out onto that vast floor. The farther we went the more I felt like a fly on a plate. Having Peewee with me was a help; nevertheless it was that nightmare where you find yourself not decently dressed in a public place. Peewee clutched my hand and held Madame Pompadour pressed tightly to her. I wished that I had suited-up in Oscar-I wouldn’t have felt quite so under a microscope with Oscar around me.