Free Have space suit-- will travel by Robert A. Heinlein Page B

finger into a hole mine would not enter-and told me it must be locked. So I looked around.
    I found a metal bar racked in the corridor, a thing about five feet long, pointed on one end and with four handles like brass knucks on the other. I didn’t know what it was-the hobgoblin equivalent of a fire ax, possibly -but it was a fine wrecking bar.
    I made a shambles of that door in three minutes. We went in.
    My first feeling was gooseflesh because here was where I had been grilled by him. I tried not to show it. If he turned up, I was going to let him have his wrecking bar right between his grisly eyes. I looked around, really seeing the place for the first time. There was sort of a nest in the middle surrounded by what could have been a very fancy coffee maker or a velocipede for an octopus; I was glad Peewee knew which button to push. “How do you see out?”
    “Like this.” Peewee squeezed past and put a finger into a hole I hadn’t noticed.
    The ceiling was hemispherical like a planetarium. Which was what it was, for it lighted up. I gasped.
    It was suddenly not a floor we were on, but a platform, apparently out in the open and maybe thirty feet in the air. Over me were star images, thousands of them, in a black “sky”-and facing toward me, big as a dozen full moons and green and lovely and beautiful, was Earth!
    Peewee touched my elbow. “Snap out of it, Kip.”
    I said in a choked voice, “Peewee, don’t you have any poetry in your soul?”
    “Surely I have. Oodles. But we haven’t time. I know where we are, Kip -back where I started from. Their base. See those rocks with long jagged shadows? Some of them are ships, camouflaged. And over to the left- that high peak, with the saddle?-a little farther left, almost due west, is Tombaugh Station, forty miles away. About two hundred miles farther is Lunar Base and beyond is Luna City.”
    “How long will it take?”
    “Two hundred, nearly two hundred and fifty miles? Uh, I’ve never tried a point-to-point on the Moon-but it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”
    “Let’s go! They might come back any minute.”
    “Yes, Kip.” She crawled into that jackdaw’s nest and bent over a sector.
    Presently she looked up. Her face was white and thin and very little-girlish. “Kip ... we aren’t going anywhere. I’m sorry.”
    I let out a yelp. “What! What’s the matter? Have you forgotten how to run it?”
    “No. The ‘brain’ is gone.”
    “The which?”
    “The ‘brain.’ Little black dingus about the size of a walnut that fits in this cavity.” She showed me. “We got away before because the Mother Thing managed to steal one. We were locked in an empty ship, just as you and I are now. But she had one and we got away.” Peewee looked bleak and very lost. “I should have known that he wouldn’t leave one in the control room-I guess I did and didn’t want to admit it. I’m sorry.”
    “Uh . . . look, Peewee, we won’t give up that easily. Maybe I can make something to fit that socket.”
    “Like jumping wires in a car?” She shook her head. “It’s not that simple. Kip. If you put a wooden model in place of the generator in a car, would it run? I don’t know quite what it does, but I called it the ‘brain’ because it’s very complex.”
    “But-“ I shut up. If a Borneo savage had a brand-new car, complete except for spark plugs, would he get it running? Echo answers mournfully. “Peewee, what’s the next best thing? Any ideas? Because if you haven’t, I want you to show me the air lock. I’ll take this-“ I shook my wrecking bar “-and bash anything that comes through.”
    “I’m stumped,” she admitted. “I want to look for the Mother Thing. If she’s shut up in this ship, she may know what to do.”
    “All right. But first show me the air lock. You can look for her while I stand guard.” I felt the reckless anger of desperation. I didn’t see how we were ever going to get out and I was beginning to believe that we