The Rolling Stones by Robert A. Heinlein
Dr. Stone received a call by radio while they were there; she came back into the general room looking troubled. “’Smatter?” inquired Hazel.
“Mrs. Silva. I’m not really surprised; it’s her first child.”
“Did you get the co-ordinates and beacon pattern? I’ll run you right over.”
“Lowell?”
“Oh. Oh, yes.” It would be a long time in a suit for a youngster.
Mrs. Eakers suggested that they leave the child with her. Before Lowell could cloud up at the suggestion Dr. Stone said, “Thanks, but it isn’t necessary. Mr. Silva is on his way here. What I was trying to say, Mother Hazel, is that I probably had better go with him and let you and Lowell go back alone. Do you mind?”
“Of course not. Pipe down, Lowell! I’ll have us home in three-quarters of an hour and Lowell can have his nap or his spanking on time, as the case may be.”
She gave Dr. Stone one of two spare oxygen bottles before she left; Dr. Stone refused to take both of them. Hazel worked the new mass figures over; with Edith, her suit, and the spare bottle subtracted she had spare fuel. Better hit it up pretty fast and get home before the brat got cranky—
She lined up on City Hall by flywheel and stereo, spun on that axis to get the sun out of her eyes, clutched her gyros, and gave it the gun.
The next thing she knew she was tumbling like a liner in free fall. She remembered from long habit to cut the throttle but only after a period of aimless acceleration, for she had been chucked around in her saddle, thrown against her belts, and could not at first find the throttle.
When they were in free fall again she remembered to laugh. “Some ride, eh, Lowell?”
“Do it again, Grandma!”
“I hope not.” Quickly she checked things over. There was not much that could go wrong with the little craft, it being only a rocket motor, an open rack with saddles and safety harness, and a minimum of instruments and controls. It was the gyros, of course; the motor had been sweet and hot. They were hunting the least bit, she found, that being the only evidence that they had just tumbled violently. Delicately she adjusted them by hand, putting her helmet against the case so that she could hear what she was doing.
Only then did she try to find where they were and where they were going. Let’s see—the Sun is over there—and that’s Betelgeuse over yonder—so City Hall must be out that way. She ducked her helmet into the hemispherical “eye shade” of the stereo. Yup! there she be!
The Eakers place was the obvious close-by point on which to measure her vector. She looked around for it, was startled to discover how far away it was. They must have coasted quite a distance while she was fiddling with the gyros. She measured the vector in amount and direction, then whistled. There were, she thought, few grocery shops out that way—darn few neighbors of any sort. She decided that it might be smart to call Mrs. Eakers and tell her what had happened and ask her to call City Hall—just in case.
She could not raise Mrs. Eakers. The sloven, she thought bitterly, has probably switched off her alarm so she could sleep. Lazy baggage! Her house looked it—and smelled it, too.
But she kept trying to call Mrs. Eakers, or anyone else in range of her suit radio while she again lined up the ship for City, with offset to compensate for the new vector. She was cautious and most alert this time—in consequence she wasted only a few seconds of fuel when the gyros again tumbled.
She unclutched the gyros and put them out of her mind, then took careful measure of the situation. The Eakers dump was now a planetary light in the sky, shrinking almost noticeably, but it was still the proper local reference point. She did not like the vector she got. As always, they seemed to be standing still in the exact center of a starry globe—but her instruments showed them speeding for empty space, headed clear outside the node.
“What’s the matter, Grandma Hazel?”
“Nothing, son, nothing. Grandma has to stop and look at some road signs, that’s all.” She was thinking that she would gladly swap her chance of eternal bliss for an automatic distress signal and a beacon. She reached over, switched off the child’s receiver, then repeatedly called for help.
No answer. She switched Lowell’s receiver back on. “Why did you do that, Grandma Hazel?”
“Nothing. Just checking it.”
“You can’t fool me! You’re scared! Why?”
“Not scared, pet. Worried a little, maybe. Now shut up; Grandma’s got work to do.”
Carefully she lined up the craft by flywheel; carefully she checked it when it tried to swing past. She aimed both to offset the new and disastrous vector and to create a vector for City Hall. She intentionally left the gyros unclutched. Then she restrapped Lowell in his saddle, checked its position. “Hold still,” she warned. “Move your little finger and Grandma will scalp you.”
Just as carefully she positioned herself, considering lever arms, masses, and angular moments in her head. Without gyros the craft must be balanced just so. “Now,” she said to herself, “Hazel, we find out whether you are a pilot—or just a Sunday pilot.” She ducked her helmet into the eyeshade, picked a distant blip on which to center her crosshairs, and gunned the craft.
The blip wavered; she tried to rebalance by shifting her body. When the blip suddenly slipped off to one side she cut the throttle quickly. Again she checked her vector. Their situation was somewhat improved. Again she called for help, not stopping to cut the child out of hearing. He said nothing and looked grave.
She went through the same routine, cutting power again when the craft “fell off its tail.” She measured the vector, called for help—and did it all again. A dozen times she tried it. On the last try the thrust stopped with the throttle still wide open.
With all fuel gone there was no need to be in a hurry. She measured her vector most carefully on the Eakers’ ship, now far away, then checked the results against the City Hall blip, all the while calling for help. She ran through the figures again; in a fashion she had been successful. They were now unquestionably headed for City Hall, could not miss it by more than a few miles at most—almost jumping distance. But, while the vector was correct in direction, it was annoyingly small in quantity—six hundred and fifty miles at about forty miles an hour; they would be closest in about sixteen hours.
She wondered whether Edith really had needed that other spare oxygen bottle. Her own gauge showed about half full.
She called for help again, then decided to go through the problem once more; maybe she had dropped a decimal in her head. While she was lining up on City Hall, the tiny light in the stereo tank faded and died. Her language caused Lowell to inquire, “What’s the matter now, Grandma?”
“Nothing more than I should have expected, I guess. Some days, hon, it just isn’t worth while to wake up in the morning.” The trouble, she soon found, was so simple as to be beyond repair. The stereo radar would no longer work because all three cartridges in the power pack were dead. She was forced to admit that she had been using it rather continuously—and it took a lot of power.
“Grandma Hazel! I want to go home!” She pulled out of her troubled thoughts to answer the child.
“We’re going home, dear. But it’s going to take quite a while.”
“I want to go home right now!”
“I’m sorry but you can’t.”
“But—”
“Shut it up—or when I get you out of that sack, I’ll give you something to yelp for. I mean it.” She again called for help.
Lowell made one of his lightning changes to serenity. “That’s better,” approved Hazel. “Want to play a game of chess?”
“No.”
“Sissy. You’re afraid I’ll beat you. I’ll bet you three spanks and a knuckle rub.”
Lowell considered this. “I get the white men?”
“Take ’em. I’ll beat you anyhow.”
To her own surprise she did. It was a long drawn-out game; Lowell was not as practiced as she was in visualizing a board and they had had to recoun
“How about another one? Want to get your revenge?”
“No! I want to go home.”
“We’re going home, dear.”
“How soon?”
“Well…it’ll be a while yet. I’ll tell you a story.”
“What story?”
“Well, how about the one about the worm that crawled up out of the mud?”
“Oh, I know that one! I’m tired of it.”
“There are parts I’ve never told you. And you can’t get tired of it, not really, because there is never any end to it. Always something new.” So she told him again about the worm that crawled up out of the slime, not because it didn’t have enough to eat, not because it wasn’t nice and warm and comfortable down there under the water—but because the worm was restless. How it crawled up on dry land and grew legs. How part of it got to be the Elephant’s Child and part of it got to be a monkey, grew hands, and fiddled with things. How, still insatiably restless, it grew wings and reached up for the stars. She spun it out a long, long time, pausing occasionally to call for aid.
The child was either bored and ignored her, or liked it and kept quiet on that account. But when she stopped he said, “Tell me another one.”
“Not just now, dear.” His oxygen gauge showed empty.
“Go on! Tell me a new one—a better one.”
“Not now, dear. That’s the best story Hazel knows. The very best. I told it to you again because I want you to remember it.” She watched his anoxia warning signal turn red, then quietly disconnected the partly filled bottle on her own suit, closing the now useless suit valves, and replaced his empty bottle with hers. For a moment she considered cross-connecting the bottle to both suits, then shrugged and let it stand. “Lowell—”
“What, Grandma?”
“Listen to me, dear. You’ve heard me calling for help. You’ve got to do it now. Every few minutes, all the time.”
“Why?”
“Because Hazel is tired, dear. Hazel has to sleep. Promise me you’ll do it.”
“Well…all right.”
She tried to hold perfectly still, to breathe as little of the air left in her suit as possible. It wasn’t so bad, she thought. She had wanted to see the Rings—but there wasn’t much else she had missed. She supposed everyone had his Carcassonne; she had no regrets.
“Grandma! Grandma Hazel!” She did not answer. He waited, then began to cry, endlessly and without hope.
Dr. Stone arrived back at the Rolling Stone to find only her husband there. She greeted him and added, “Where’s Hazel, dear? And Lowell?”
“Eh? Didn’t they come back with you? I supposed they had stopped in the store.”
“No, of course not.”
“Why ‘of course not’?” She explained the arrangement; he looked at her in stunned astonishment. “They left the same time you did?”
“They intended to. Hazel said she would be home in forty-five minutes.”
“There’s a bare possibility that they are still with the Eakers. We’ll find out.” He lunged toward the door.
The twins returned to find their home and City Hall as well in turmoil. They had been spending an interesting and instructive several hours with old Charlie.
Their father turned away from the Stone’s radio and demanded, “Where have you two been?”
“Just over in Charlie’s hole. What’s the trouble?”
Roger Stone explained. The twins looked at each other. “Dad,” Castor said painfully, “you mean Hazel took Mother out in our scooter?”
“Certainly.” The twins questioned each other wordlessly again. “Why shouldn’t she? Speak up.”
“Well, you see…well, it was like this—”
“Speak up!”
“There was a bearing wobble, or something, in one of the gyros,” Pollux admitted miserably. “We were working on it.”
“You were? In Charlie’s place!”
“Well, we went over there to see what he had in the way of spare parts and, well, we got detained, sort of.”
Their father looked at them for several seconds with no expression of any sort. He then said in a flat voice, “You left a piece of ship’s equipment out of commission. You failed to log it. You failed to report it to the Captain.” He paused. “Go to your room.”
“But Dad! We want to help!”
“Stay in your room; you are under arrest.”
The twins did as they were ordered. While they waited, the whole of Rock City was alerted. The word went out: the doctor’s little boy is missing; the boy’s grandmother is missing. Fuel up your scooters; stand by to help. Stay on this wave length.
“Pol, quit jittering!”
Pollux turned to his brother. “How can I help it?”
“They can’t be lost, not really lost. Why, the stereo itself would stand out on a screen like a searchlight.”
Pollux thought about it. “I don’t know. You remember I said I thought we might have a high-potential puncture in the power pack?”
“I thought you fixed that?”
“I planned to, just as soon as we got the bugs smoothed out in the gyros.”
Castor thought about it. “That’s bad. That could be really bad.” He added suddenly, “But quit jittering, just the same. Start thinking instead. What happened? We’ve got to reconstruct it.”
“‘What happened?’ Are you kidding? Look, the pesky thing tumbles, then anything can happen. No control.”
“Use your head, I said. What would Hazel do in this situation?”
They both kept quiet for some moments, then Pollux said, “Cas, that derned thing always tumbled to the left, didn’t it? Always.”
“What good does that do us? Left can be any direction.”
“No! You asked what Hazel would do. She’d be along her homing line, of course—and Hazel always oriented around her drive line so as to get the Sun on the back of her neck, if possible. Her eyes aren’t too good.”
Castor screwed up his face, trying to visualize it. “Say Bakers’ is off that way and City Hall over here; if the Sun is over on this side, then, when it tumbles, she’d vector off that way.” He acted it with his hands.
“Sure, sure! When you put in the right coordinates, that is. But what else would she do? What would you do? You’d vector back—I mean vector home.”
“Huh? How could she? With no gyros?”
“Think about it. Would you quit? Hazel is a pilot. She’d ride that thing like a broomstick.” He shaped the air with his hands. “So she’d be coming back, or trying to, along here—and everybody will be looking for her ’way over here.”
Castor scowled. “Could be.”
“It had better be. They’ll be looking for her in a cone with its vertex at Eakers’—and they ought to be looking in a cone with its vertex right here, and along one side of it at that.”
Castor said, “Come along!”
“Dad said we were under arrest.”
“Come along!”
City Hall was empty, save for Mrs. Fries who was standing watch, red-eyed and tense, at the radio. She shook her head. “Nothing yet.”
“Where can we find a scooter?”
“You can’t. Everybody is out searching.”
Castor tugged at Pollux’s sleeve. “Old Charlie.”
“Huh? Say, Mrs. Fries, is old Charlie out searching?”
“I doubt if he knows about it.”
They rushed into their suits, cycled by spilling and wasting air, did not bother with safety lines. Old Charlie let them in. “What’s all the fuss about, boys?”
Castor explained. Charlie shook his head. “That’s too bad, that really is. I’m right sorry.”
&nb
“Right now!” added Pollux.
Charlie looked astonished. “Are you fooling? I’m the only one can gun that rig.”
“Charlie, this is serious! We’ve got to have it.”
“You couldn’t gun it.”
“We’re both pilots.”
Charlie scratched meditatively while Castor considered slugging him for his keys—but his keys probably weren’t on him—and how would one find anything in that trash pile? Charlie finally said, “If you’ve just got to, I suppose I better gun it for you.”
“Okay, okay! Hurry up! Get your suit on!”
“Don’t be in such a rush. It just slows you down.”
Charlie disappeared into the underbrush, came out fairly promptly with a suit that seemed to consist mostly of vulcanized patches. “Dog take it,” he complained as he began to struggle with it, “if your mother would stay home and mind her own business, these things wouldn’t happen.”
“Shut up and hurry!”
“I am hurrying. She made me take a bath. I don’t need no doctors. All the bugs that ever bit me, died.”
When Charlie had dug his scooter out of the floating junkyard moored to his home they soon saw why he had refused to lend it. It seemed probable that no one else could possibly pilot it. Not only was it of vintage type, repaired with parts from many other sorts, but also the controls were arranged for a man with four hands. Charlie had been in free fall so long that he used his feet almost as readily for grasping and handling as does an ape; his space suit had had the feet thereof modified so that he could grasp things between the big toe and the second, as with Japanese stockings.
“Hang on. Where we going?”
“Do you know where the Eakers live?”
“Sure. Used to live out past that way myself. Lonely stretch.” He pointed. “Right out there, ’bout half a degree right of that leetle second-magnitude star—say eight hundred, eight hundred ten miles.”