You see, the two weeks bracketing our change-over from boost to deceleration, during which time we reached our peak speed, amounted to about ten years Earthside. That’s 250 to 1 on the average. But it wasn’t all average; at the middle of that period the slippage was much greater, I asked Mr. O’Toole what the maximum was and he just shook his head. There was no way to measure it, he told me, and the probable errors were larger than the infinitesimal values he was working with.
“Let’s put it this way,” he finished. “I’m glad there is no hay fever in this ship, because one hard sneeze would push us over the edge.”
He was joking, for, as Janet Meers pointed out, as our speed approached the speed of light, our mass approached infinity.
But we fell out of phase again for a whole day.
At the end of one of those peak “watches” (they were never more than a couple of minutes long, S-time) Pat told me that he and Maudie were going to get married. Then he was gone before I could congratulate him. I started to tell him that I thought Maudie was a little young and wasn’t he rushing things and missed my chance. He was off our band.
I was not exactly jealous. I examined myself and decided that I was not when I found out that I could not remember what Maudie looked like. Oh, I knew what she looked like-blonde, and a little snub nose with a tendency to get freckles across it in the summertime. But I couldn’t call up her face the way I could Pru’s face, or Janet’s. All I felt was a little left out of things.
I did remember to check on the Greenwich, getting Janet to relate it back to the exact time of my last watch. Then I saw that I bad been foolish to criticize. Pat was twenty-three and Maudie was twenty-one, almost twenty-two.
I did manage to say, “Congratulations,” on my next linkage but Pat did not have a chance to answer. Instead he answered on the next. “Thanks for the congratulations. We’ve named her after Mother but I think she is going to look like Maudie.”
This flabbergasted me. I had to ask for Janet’s help again and found that everything was all right-I mean, when a couple has been married two years a baby girl is hardly a surprise, is it? Except to me.
All in all, I had to make quite a few readjustments those two weeks. At the beginning Pat and I were the same age, except for an inconsequential slippage. At the end of that period (I figure the end as being the time when it was no longer necessary to use extreme measures to let us telepairs talk) my twin was more than eleven years older than I was and had a daughter seven years old.
I stopped thinking about Maudie as a girl, certainly not as one I had been sweet on. I decided that she was probably getting fat and sloppy and very, very domestic-she never could resist that second chocolate éclair. As a matter of fact; Pat and I had grown very far apart, for we had little in common now. The minor gossip of the ship, so important to me, bored him; on the other hand, I couldn’t get excited about his flexible construction units and penalty dates. We still telecommunicated satisfactorily but it was like two strangers using a telephone. I was sorry, for I had grown to like him before he slipped away from me.
But I did want to see my niece. Knowing Sugar Pie had taught me that baby girls are more fun than puppies and even cuter than kittens. I remembered the idea I had had about Sugar Pie and braced Dusty on the subject.
He agreed to do it; Dusty can’t turn down a chance to show how well he can draw. Besides, he had mellowed, for him; he no longer snarled when you tried to pet him even though it might be years before he would learn to sit up and beg.
Dusty turned out a beautiful picture. All Baby Molly lacked was little wings to make her a cherub. I could see a resemblance to myself-to her father, that is. “Dusty, this is a beautiful picture. Is it a good likeness?”