‘What’s a clambake?’ Lowell wanted to know.
‘Keep your child quiet, Edith.’
‘Yes, dear.’
‘I’m going on a picnic, a wanderjahr. Anyone who wants to come along is invited. But I refuse to deviate by as much as a million miles from whatever trajectory suits me. I bought this ship from money earned in spite of the combined opposition of my whole family; I did not touch one thin credit of the money I hold in trust for our two young robber barons — and I don’t propose to let them run the show.’
Dr Stone said quietly, ‘They merely asked where we were going. I would like to know, too.’
‘So they did. But why? Castor, you want to know so that you can figure a cargo, don’t you?’
‘Well — yes. Anything wrong with that? Unless we know what market we’re taking it to, we won’t know what to stock.’
‘True enough. But I don’t recall authorising any such commercial ventures. The Rolling Stone is a family yacht.’
Pollux cut in with, ‘For the love of Pete, Dad! With all that cargo space just going to waste, you’d think that —’
‘An empty hold gives us more cruising range.’
‘But -‘
‘Take it easy. This subject is tabled for the moment. What do you two propose to do about your educations?’
Castor said, ‘I thought that was settled. You said we could go along.’
‘That part is settled. But we’ll be coming back this way in a year or two. Are you prepared to go down to Earth to school then — and stay there — until you get your degrees?’
The twins looked at each other; neither one of them said anything. Hazel butted in: ‘Quit being so offensively orthodox, Roger. I’ll take over their educations. I’ll give them the straight data. What they taught me in school durn near ruined me, before I got wise and started teaching myself.’
Roger Stone looked bleakly at his mother. ‘You would teach them, all right. No, thanks, I prefer a somewhat more normal approach.’
‘ “Normal!” Roger, that’s a word with no meaning.’
‘Perhaps not, around here. But I’d like the twins to grow up as near normal as possible.’
‘Roger, have you ever met any normal people? I never have. The so-called normal man is a figment of the imagination; every member of the human race, from Jojo the cave man right down to that final culmination of civilisation, namely me, has been as eccentric as a pet coon — once you caught him with his mask off.’
‘I won’t dispute the part about yourself.’
‘It’s true for everybody. You try to make the twins “normal” and you’ll simply stunt their growth.’
Roger Stone stood up. ‘That’s enough. Castor, Pollux — come with me. Excuse us, everybody.’
‘Yes, dear.’
‘Sissy,’ said Hazel. ‘I was just warming up to my rebuttal.’
He led them into his study, closed the door. ‘Sit down.’
The twins did so. ‘Now we can settle this quietly. Boys, I’m quite serious about your educations. You can do what you like with your lives — turn pirate or get elected to the Grand Council. But I won’t let you grow up ignorant.’
Castor answered, ‘Sure, Dad, but we do study. We study all the time. You’ve said yourself that we are better engineers than half the young snots that come up from Earth.’
‘Granted. But it’s not enough. Oh, you can learn most things on your own but I want you to have a formal, disciplined, really sound grounding in mathematics.’
‘Huh? Why, we cut our teeth on differential equations!’
Pollux added, “We know Hudson’s Manual by heart. We can do a triple integration in our heads faster than Hazel can. If there’s one thing we do know, it’s mathematics.’
Roger Stone shook his head sadly. ‘You can count on your fingers but you can’t reason. You probably think that the interval from zero to one is the same as the interval from ninety-nine to one hundred.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘Is it? If so, can you prove it?’ Their father reached up to the spindles on the wall, took down a book spool, and inserted it in the to his study projector. He spun the selector, stopped with a page displayed on the wall screen. It was a condensed chart of fields of mathematics invented, thus far by the human mind. ‘Let’s see you find your way around that page.’