ad time.  The  system  wasn't
practical.  You still had to wear a garment to protect you from
the heat  and  the  cold,  and  it  had  to  protect  you  from
both--extremes  never  seen  on  Earth--while  at the same time
keeping the vacuum from your skin, bleeding off waste heat, and
a host of other requirements. Such garments were available; I'd
bought two of them within the last year.  They  were  naturally
much  improved  from  the  mummy bags the first space explorers
wore, but they worked on the same principles. And  they  worked
better  than  the  implanted  lungs. If you're going to have to
wear a suit, after all, what's  the  point  of  a  thirtyminute
supply of air in place of a lung? If you plan much of a stay on
the surface you're going to have to back-pack most of your air,
just like Neil Armstrong did.
     And the Heinleiners did, too, for longer stays. But they'd
solved  the  problem  of what to do with the suit: just turn it
off when not in use.
     I supposed they'd also solved the psychological problem of
the suits, which was the panic reflex when one has not breathed
normally for some time, but I suspected the answer was the same
one a child learns in her first swimming lesson. Do it  enough,
and you'll stop being afraid.
     I'd  done  it  for  fifteen  minutes  now, and I was still
frightened. My heart was racing and my palm  was  sweating.  Or
was that Gretel's?
     "You'll  sweat quite a bit," she said, when I asked. "It's
normal. That layer of air will stay pretty hot, but not too hot
to handle. Also, the sweat helps to bleed off  the  heat,  just
like it does inside."
     I'd   been  told  the  suit's  distance  from  one's  body
fluctuated by about a millimeter  in  a  regular  rhythm.  That
varied  the  volume considerably, sucking waste air from inside
you and expelling it into vacuum in  a  bellows  action.  Water
vapor  went  along  with  it,  but a lot just dripped down your
skin.
     "I think I'd like to go back in now," I mouthed, and  must
have done it well enough, because I heard her say "Okay," quite
clearly.  That was the same circuitry the CC used to talk to me
in private, back when I was still speaking to him.  Aside  from
the respirator/air supply/field generator, and a few air ducts,
not  much  had  needed  to be done to prepare me for field suit
use.  Some  of  that's  because  I  was  already  wired  to   a
fare-thee-well,  as  the  CC  had  pointed  out  on  my  direct
interface jaunts. Some adjustments had been made to my eardrums
to keep them from hurting in fluctuating pressures, and  a  new
heads-up  display  had been added so that when I closed my eyes
or just blinked, I saw figures concerning body temperature  and
remaining  air  supply  and so forth. There were warning alarms
I'd been told would sound in various situations, and  I  didn't
intend ever to hear any of them. Mostly, with a field suit, you
just  wore  it.  And  all  but a tiny portion of that, you wore
inside.
     The air lock I'd used to get into the secret  warrens  was
only   for  inanimate  objects,  or  people  wearing  inanimate
objects, like the old-style suit I'd been wearing. If you had a
field suit in, you simply stepped into the wall of  mirror  and
your  own  suit  melted into it, like a drop of mercury falling
into a quicksilver pool. That was the only way to get through a
null-field  barrier  other  than  turning  it  off.  They  were
completely  reflective  on both sides. Nothing got through, not
air, not bullets, not  light  nor  heat  nor  radio  waves  nor
neutrinos. Nothing.
     Well, gravity got through, whatever gravity is. Don't seek
the answer  to  that  one in these pages. But magnetism didn't,
and Merlin was working on the gravity part. Follow-up  on  that
still to come.
     Just before Gretel and I stepped through I saw part of the
mirror wall distorted in the shape of a face. That was the only
way to  see through the wall, just stick your face in, and even
that was tough to get used  to.  Gretel  and  her  brother-what
else?--Hansel did it as naturally as I'd turn my head to glance
out  a  window.  Me,  I had to swallow hard a few times because
every reflex I had was telling me I was going to smash my  nose
against that reflection of myself.
     But I had no trouble this time because I wanted very badly
to be  on  the  other side of that mirror. I was running by the
time I hit it. And of course there was no sensation of  hitting
anything--my suit simply vanished as it went through the larger
field--with  the  result that, because some part of me had been
braced for impact, had been flinching, wincing, bracing myself,
it was like reaching for that non-existent top step, and I  did
a comical cakewalk as if the floor was coated with banana peels
and  came  that  close  to  a pratfall any silent film comedian
would have envied.
     Before you snicker, you go and try it.
     Gretel claimed to be able to  distinguish  people's  faces
when  covered by a null suit. I supposed that if you grew up in
one it would be possible; they  were  still  all  chrome-plated
masks  to  me,  and  probably would be for a long time. But I'd
figured it was Hansel who poked his face through, since  that's
where  we'd  left  him, watching Winston, and it was indeed him
who greeted me after my maiden voyage in the new  suit.  Hansel
was  a  lad  of fifteen, a tall, awkward, rather shy boy with a
shock of blonde hair like his sister's and a  certain  look  in
his eye I'm sure he got from his father. I thought of it as the
mad scientist's gleam. As if he'd like to take you apart to see
how you worked, only he was too polite to ask if he could. He'd
put you back together, I hasten to add, or at least he'd intend
to,  though the skills might not always be up to the intent. He
got that from his father, too. Where the shyness  came  from  I
had no idea. It was not inherited paternally.
     "I  just  got  a  phone call from the ranch," Hansel said.
"Libby says the palomino mare is about to foal."
     "I got it, too," Gretel said. "Let's go."
     They were off while I was still catching my breath. It had
been a long time since I'd tried to keep up with children,  but
I didn't dare let these get out of my sight. I wasn't sure if I
could  find my way back to the Heinlein alone. Sounds unlikely,
doesn't it? If there's one thing Lunarians are  good  at,  it's
negotiating  a  threedimensional maze, or at least we'd like to
think so. But the mazes of King City tend to be of  two  types:
radiating  out  from a central plaza, with circular ring roads,
or a north/south up/down grid. The paths of the  Delambre  Dump
were more like a plate of spaghetti. Two days in Delambre would
have any urban planner ready for a padded cell. It just growed.
     The paths I was now hurrying down had been made by nothing
more mysterious than obsolescent tunneling machines--one of the
other  things  Lunarians  are good at. They usually bored their
way through rock, but the sort  of  techno-midden  stratigraphy
found  in  Delambre  presented  them  no problems; they'd laser
their way through anything. The  Heinleiners  had  a  dozen  of
them,  all  found on site, repaired, and seemingly just sort of
set loose to find their own way. Not really, but anyone who had
tried to find a rhyme or reason in the pathways had  to  figure
an earthworm would have done a tidier job.
     Once  the  wormholes  were  there, human crews came in and
installed the flooring out of whatever plastic panels  were  at
hand.  Since  those  panels  had been a construction staple for
over a century, they weren't hard to find. The last step was to
provide an ALU every hundred meters or so. An ALU  was  an  Air
Lock  Unit,  and consisted of this: a null-field generator with
logics to run their odd locking systems at each end, a big  can
of  air  serviced  weekly  by autobots, and a wire running to a
solar panel on top of the heap of garbage to  power  the  whole
thing. When somebody got around to it glow- and heat-wires were
strung along the top of the tunnel so they wouldn't be too cold
or  dark,  but these were viewed as luxuries, and not all parts
of the tunnels had them.
     A  more  jack-leg,  slip-shod  system   of   keeping   the
Breathsucker  at bay had never been seen on this tired old orb,
and nobody with half a brain would trust her one and only  body
to it for a split second. And with good reason: breakdowns were
frequent,  repairs  were  slow. Heinleiners simply didn't care,
and why should they? If part of the tunnel went down, your suit
would switch on and you'd have plenty of time  to  get  to  the
next segment. They just didn't worry much about vacuum.
     It  made  for  weird travel, and another reason to keep up
with the children. Both  of  them  were  carrying  flashlights,
which  were  almost  mandatory  in  the  tunnels, and which I'd
forgotten again. We came to a dark, cold section and it was all
I could do to keep their darting lights in sight. Sure, I could
call them back if I got lost, but I was determined not  to.  It
wouldn't  have  been fun, you see, and above all kids just want
to have fun. You don't want to get  a  reputation  as  somebody
they have to keep waiting for.
     It  was  cold,  too,  right  up to the point of chattering
teeth, and then my suit switched on automatically and before  I
got out of the dark I was warm again. Winston looked back at me
and barked. He was still in his old-style suit, Hansel carrying
his  helmet. They'd wanted me to let them give him a null-suit,
but I didn't know how to explain it to Liz.
     #
     The first time the children took me to  the  farm,  I  had
been  expecting to see a hydroponic or dirt-based plantation of
the sort most Lunarians know must be out there  somewhere,  but
would  have  to  consult  a  directory  to  find, and had never
actually seen. I'd been to one in the course of  a  story  long
ago--I've  been  most  places  in  my  century--and  since  you
probably haven't I'll say they tend to be quite dull. Not worth
you time. Whether the crop is corn  or  potatoes  or  chickens,
what you see are low rooms with endless rows of cages or stalls
or  furrows  or troughs. Machines bring food or nutrients, haul
away waste, harvest the final product. Most animals are  raised
underground,  most  plants on the surface, under plastic roofs.
All of it is kept distant from  civilization  and  hardly  ever
talked  about,  since  so  many  of  us can't bear to think the
things we eat ever grew  in  dirt,  or  at  one  time  cackled,
oinked, and defecated.
     I  was  expecting  a  food  factory,  albeit  one built to
typical Heinleiner specs, as Aladdin once described them to me:
"Jerry-rigged, about threequarter-assed, and hellishly unsafe."
Later I did see  a  farm  just  like  that,  but  not  the  one
belonging  to  Hansel  and Gretel and their best friend, Libby.
Once again I'd forgotten I was dealing with children.
     The farm was behind a big pressure  door  aboard  the  old
Heinlein  that  said CREW'S MESS #1. Inside a lot of tables had
been shoved  together  and  welded  solid  to  make  waist-high
platforms.  These  had  been  heaped with soil and planted with
mutant grasses and bonsai trees. The scene had been laced  with
little  dirt roads and an HO Gauge railroad layout, dotted with
dollhouses   and   dollbarns   and   little   doll   towns   of
often-incompatible  scales.  The  whole  thing  was  about  one
hundred by fifty meters, and it was here  the  children  raised
their horselets and other things. Lots of other things.
     Being  children, and Heinleiners, it was not as neat as it
might have been. They'd forgotten to provide good drainage,  so
large  parts  suffered  from  erosion. A grandiose plan to make
mountains against the back wall had the look of a project never
finished and long-neglected, with bare orange  plastic  matting
showing  the  bones  of  where the mountains would have been if
they hadn't run out of both enthusiasm and plaster of Paris.
     But if you squinted and used your imagination,  it  looked
pretty  good.  And  your  nose didn't need to be fooled at all.
Walk in the door and you'd immediately know you were in a place
where horses and cattle roamed free.
     Libby called to us from one of the  little  barns,  so  we
climbed  up  a  stile  and  onto  the platform itself. I walked
gingerly, afraid to step on a tree or, worse, a horse.  When  I
got  there the three of them were kneeling beside the red-sided
barn. They had the roof lid raised and  were  peering  down  to
where the mare was lying on her side on a bed of straw.
     "Look! It's coming out!" Gretel squeaked. I did look, then
looked  away,  and  sat  down  beside the barn, knocking over a
section of white rail fence as I did so. Hell,  the  fence  was
just  for show, anyway; the cows and horses jumped over it like
grasshoppers. I lowered my head a  little  and  decided  I  was
going to be all right. Probably.
     "Something  wrong, Hildy?" Libby asked. I felt his hand on
my shoulder and made an effort to look up at him and smile.  He
was  a  red-headed  boy  of  almost eighteen, even lankier than
Hansel, and he had a crush on me. I patted his hand and said  I
was fine and he went back to his pets.
     I'm  not  notably queasy, but I'd been having these spells
associated with pregnancy. I still had a month to go,  far  too
late to change my mind. It was an experience I wasn't likely to
forget.  Trust  me,  when  you  get  up  at  three A.M. with an
insatiable  hunger  for  chocolate-coated  oysters,  you  don't
forget  it.  The  sight  of it coming back up in the morning is
unlikely to slip your mind, either.
     I'd been a little concerned about the pre-natal care I was
getting. There was a problem, in that I could hardly  go  to  a
clinic  in  King  City,  as  the medics were bound to notice my
unorthodox left lung. The Heinleiners had a few  doctors  among
them  and the one I'd been seeing, "Hazel Stone," told me I had
nothing to worry about. Part of me believed her,  and  part  of
me--a new part I was just beginning to understand: the paranoid
mother--  did  not. It didn't seem to surprise her and she took
the time to do what she could to put my mind at ease.
     "It's true the stuff I have out here isn't  as  up-to-date
as  my  equipment  in  King City," she had said. "But we're not
talking trephining and leeches, either. The fact is that you're
doing well enough I could deliver him by hand if I had to, with
just some clean water and rubber gloves. I'll see  you  once  a
week  and  I  guarantee  I'll  spot  any possible complications
instantly." She then offered to "just take him out now and  pop
him  in  a  bottle,  if  you want to. I'll keep him right in my
office, and I'll hook up as many machines as it takes  to  make
you feel better."
     I'd  realized she was just humoring me, but I gave it some
thought. Then I told her, no, I was determined to stick it  out
to  the  end,  since I'd come this far, and I said I realized I
was being silly.
     "It's part of the territory," she had said. "You get  mood
swings,  and  irrational  impulses,  cravings.  If  it gets bad
enough, I can do something about those, too." Maybe it was just
a reaction to all the tampering the CC had recently been  doing
to  me,  but  I  refused  her  mood levelers. I didn't like the
swings, and I'm not a masochist, but  if  you're  going  to  do
this, Hildy, I told myself, you should find out what it's like.
Otherwise, you might as well just read about it.
     But the real source of my nervousness was just as silly as
a plate  of  pickles and ice cream. Since I was still living in
Texas and commuting to Delambre, I had  also  been  seeing  Ned
Pepper  once  a  week,  too.  Ostensibly it was to keep him and
others from getting suspicious, but I'm pretty sure it was also
because I found him oddly reassuring. The thing  is,  while  no
one  held  any  brief for his medical knowledge or skills, most
people felt he was a damn good intuitive diagnostician. Had  he
been  born in a simpler era he might have made quite a name for
himself. And . . .
     "Hildy," he told me, tapping his stethoscope  against  his
lip,  "I  don't  want  to  alarm  you, but something about this
pregnancy makes me nervous as a jacked-off  polecat."  He  took
another  pull  on  his  bottle  and  staggered to his feet as I
settled my skirt back around my legs. That's  the  only  reason
I'd  been  able  to go to him and not the King City sawbones; a
West Texas gynecological exam barely disarranged your clothing.
The Doctor would poke his cold metal heartbeat  disc  under  my
shirt  and  listen to my heart and the fetal one, thump my back
and  my  belly,  take  my  body  temperature   with   a   glass
thermometer,  then  ask  me to swing my feet up into these here
stirrups, my dear. I knew he had a shiny brass speculum he  was
dying to try out but I drew the line at that. Just let him look
and  play  doctor and we'd both go home happy. So what was this
nervous shit? He didn't have any right to be nervous.  He  sure
didn't have the right to tell me about it. He seemed to realize
that as soon as the slug of redeye hit his belly.
     "I  assume  you're  getting  real medical care?" he asked,
sheepishly. When I told him I was, he nodded, and  snapped  his
suspenders.  "Well,  then.  Don't  fret  yourself  none.  He'll
probably come out a ridin' a wild bronc and  dealin'  five-card
stud. Just like his mama."
     Naturally,  I  did  worry.  Pregnancy is insanity, take it
from me.
     #
     When I was sure my nausea had passed I stood  up  and  saw
I'd  been sitting on the hen coop. It had a steel framework but
my weight had loosened a lot of the fake wooden shingles  glued
to  the  sides.  A  rooster  about  the  size  of  a  mouse was
protesting this outrage by pecking at my toes. Inside,  several
dozen hens were . . . well, egging him on. Sorry.
     The  colt  wouldn't  be  standing  on his own for a little
while yet, but the show was basically over. Hansel  and  Gretel
and  Libby  moved  off  to  other  pursuits.  I stayed a little
longer, empathizing with the mare, who looked up at me as if to
say You'll get your turn soon enough, Miss Smarty. I reached in
and stroked the new-born with  my  fingertip,  and  the  mother
tried  to bite my hand. I didn't blame her. I got up, dusted my
knees, and headed over to the farm house.
     I knew the house lid was hinged; I'd seen the kids lift it
up. But I was still ambivalent enough about these pets  that  I
didn't  want  to  do  that.  Instead I bent over and pushed the
little doorbell. In a moment one of the male kewpies  came  out
and looked up expectantly, hoping for a treat.
     If  the  horselets  and mini-kine and dwarfowl were cherry
bombs in a scale of illegal  explosiveness,  then  the  kewpies
were  ten  sticks  of  dynamite. Kewpies were little people, no
more than twenty centimeters tall.
     The children had named them  well.  These  are  not  adult
human beings, done to scale. In an effort to make them smarter,
Libby  had  given  them  bigger  brains, and thus bigger heads.
Perfectly sane reasoning, for a child. It might even be  right,
for  all  I knew about it. But though he assured me the current
generation was much more clever than the  two  preceding  ones,
they  were  no  more intelligent than any of several species of
monkey.
     They were not human, let's get that out of the  way  right
now.  But  they  contained  human  genes,  and that is strictly
forbidden on Luna under laws over two centuries old.  I  didn't
have  any  of  these creepy little baby dolls to ride my little
horselet when I was a nipper. I don't think  anybody  did.  No,
these  were  the result of Libby's enquiring young mind, and no
one else's.
     If you could get over the shock and  horror  almost  every
Lunarian  would  feel  at  first sight of the things, they were
actually quite cute. They smiled a lot, and were eager to grasp
your finger in their tiny little hands. Most of them could  say
a  word  or  two,  things  like "candy!" and "Hi!" A few formed
rudimentary sentences. Possibly they could have been trained to
do more, but the children didn't take the  time.  In  spite  of
their  hands  they  were  not  tool users. They were not little
people. And they were cute.
     Enough of that. The fact is they made  my  skin  crawl  on
some  very  primitive  level. They were bad juju. They were the
forbidden fruit of  the  Tree  of  Science.  They  were  faerie
sprites, and thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
     So  the real truth is I couldn't make up my mind about the
damn things. On the one hand, what  had  attracted  me  to  the
Heinleiners  was  the  fact  that they were doing things no one
else  was  doing.  So  .  .  .  all  reasonable   and   logical
rationalizations aside . . . why did they have to do that?
     While  I  was  still  pondering this question, not for the
first time, someone came up beside me and lifted the lid of the
farm house. I looked in with him,  and  we  both  frowned.  The
inside  of  the  structure was furnished with little chairs and
beds, the former tumbled over and the latter not occupied. Half
a dozen kewpies were curled up here and there,  sleeping  where
the  urge  had  taken  them, and there were piles of what you'd
expect from animals where that urge had taken them. It  went  a
long  way toward helping me believe they weren't little people.
It also recalled documentary horror films  from  the  twentieth
century of homes for the insane and the retarded.
     The  man let the lid drop, looked around, and bellowed for
his children, who came running from where they had been  racing
model  cars,  guilty  looks on their faces. He glowered down at
them.
     "I told you that if you can't keep your  pets  clean,  you
can't have them," he said.
     "We  were gonna clean them up, Dad," Hansel said. "Soon as
we finished the race. Isn't that right, Hildy?"
     The little bastard. Fearing that my  sufferance  here  was
still  very  much  dependent on these precocious brats, I said,
diplomatically I hope, "I'm sure they would have."
     And I said that because I wasn't about to lie to  the  man
standing beside me, father to Hansel and Gretel, and the man on
whose  good  graces my continued presence among the Heinleiners
really relied.
     This is the man  the  media  has  always  referred  to  as
"Merlin,"  since  he  would never reveal his real name. I'm not
even sure if I know his real name, and I think he trusts me  by
now,  as  much  as  he  ever will. But I don't like the name of
Merlin, so in this account I will refer to him as Mister Smith.
Valentine Michael Smith.

        =*= =*= =*= =*=

        CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO








     Mister V.M. Smith, leader of the Heinleiners, was  a  tall
man,  ruggedly  handsome in the mold of some of our more virile
movie stars, with white, even teeth that  flashed  with  little
points of light when he smiled and blue eyes that twinkled with
wisdom and compassion.
     Did I say he was tall? Actually, he was a little shrimp of
a guy.  Or,  come  to  think  of  it,  I'd say he was of medium
height. And by golly, maybe his hair was black and curly.  Ugly
he  was,  with  a snaggled-toothed smile like a dead pig in the
sunshine. Hell, maybe he was bald.
     When you get right down to it, I'm not even going to swear
he was male.
     I think the heat is largely off of him by now, but he  (or
she)   thinks   differently,  so  there  will  not  even  be  a
description  of  him  from  me.  My  portraits  of  the   other
Heinleiners,  children  included,  are  deliberately  vague and
quite possibly misleading. To picture him, do what  I  do  when
reading  a  novel: just pick a famous face you like and pretend
he looks like that. Or make your own  composite.  Try  a  young
Einstein,  with  unruly hair and a surprised expression. You'll
be wrong, although I will swear there was a look in his eyes as
if the universe was  a  much  stranger  place  than  he'd  ever
imagined.
     And  that  business about leading the Heinleiners . . . if
they had a leader, he was it. It was Smith who had  made  their
isolated   way  of  life  possible  with  his  researches  into
forgotten sciences. But the  Heinleiners  were  an  independent
bunch. They didn't go in for town meetings, were unlikely to be
found  on the rosters of service clubs--didn't really hold much
of a brief for democracy,  when  you  get  right  down  to  it.
Democracy,  one  of  them  said to me once, means you get to do
whatever the majority of silly sons of bitches says you have to
do. Which is not to say they favored dictatorship ("getting  to
do  what  one  silly  son  of a bitch says you have to do." op.
cit.). No, what they liked (if I may quote one more  time  from
my  Heinleiner  philosopher) was forgetting about all the silly
sons of bitches and doing what they damn well pleased.
     This is a hazardous way of life  in  a  totally  urbanized
society,  apt to land you in jail--where an embarrassing number
of Heinleiners did live. To live like that you need elbow room.
You need Texas, and I mean the real Texas, before  the  arrival
of  the  iron horse, before the Mexicans, before the Spaniards.
Hell, maybe before the Indians. You needed the Dark  Continent,
the  headwaters  of  the  Amazon,  the  South  Pole,  the sound
barrier,  Everest,  the  Seven  Lost   Cities.   Wild   places,
unexplored  places,  not  good  old stodgy old Luna. You needed
elbow room and adventure.
     A lot of Heinleiners had lived in disneys, some still  did
as  at least a better alternative to the anthill cities. But it
didn't take long to discover what toy frontiers  they  actually
were.  The  asteroid  belt  and  the  outer  planets  had  high
concentrations of these crotchety malcontents, too, but it  had
been  a  long time since either place had been a real challenge
to humanity. A lot of ship's captains were Heinleiners,  a  lot
of  solitary miners. None of them were happy-possibly that type
of person can never be happy-but at least they were  away  from
the  masses  of humanity and less likely to get into trouble if
offered   an   intolerable   insult--like   bad   breath,    or
inappropriate laughter.
     That's   unfair.  While  there  were  quite  a  number  of
antisocial hotheads among them, most had learned  to  socialize
with  the  group, swallow the unpleasantness of daily life, put
up with the thousand small things we  each  endure  every  day.
It's  called civilization. It's making your needs, your dreams,
subservient to the greater good, and we all do it. Some  of  us
do  it  so  well we forget we ever had dreams of adventure. The
Heinleiners did it badly; they  still  remembered.  They  still
dreamed.
     Those  dreams  and five cents will get you a cup of coffee
anywhere in Luna. The Heinleiners realized that,  until  Mister
Smith came along and made them think fairy tales can come true,
if you wish upon a star.
     I  followed  Smith  out  of  the farm, where he'd left his
children and Libby hard  at  work  cleaning  out  the  kewpies'
house.  We  were  in  one  of  the  long  corridors of the R.A.
Heinlein, some of which, like this one, were  coated  with  the
silvery  null-field.  I  was  about  to  go  after  him  when I
remembered Winston. I stuck my head back into the room, snagged
his helmet, and  whistled,  and  he  came  lumbering  out  from
beneath  the  tables.  He was licking his chops and I thought I
saw traces of blood around his mouth.
     "Have you been eating  horses  again?"  I  asked  him.  He
merely gazed up and licked his nose. He knew he wasn't supposed
to  get  up on the tables, but there were always some horselets
that had foolishly jumped off and he felt they were fair  game.
I  didn't  know  what  the kids thought of his hunting, since I
didn't know if they were aware of it; I hadn't told them. But I
know Winston was getting a taste for horsemeat.
     I'd thought I'd have to hurry to catch up with Smith,  but
when  I  looked  up  I  saw  he'd  paused a little way down the
corridor and was waiting for me.
     "So  you're  still  around,  eh?"  he  said.  Yessir,   my
reputation in the old R.A.H. couldn't have been higher.
     "I guess it's because I just love children."
     He  laughed  at  that. I'd only met him three times before
and not talked to him very long on any of those occasions,  but
he  was  one  of those people good at sizing others up on short
acquaintance. Most of us think we are, but he was.
     "I know they're not easy to love," he  said.  "I  probably
wouldn't  love  them  so  much  if  they  were."  It was a very
Heinleinerish thing to say; these folks cherish perversity, you
understand.
     "You're saying only a father could love 'em?"
     "Or a mother."
     "That's what I'm counting  on,"  I  said,  and  patted  my
belly.
     "You'll either love him quick, or drown him." We walked on
for a  while without saying anything. Every once in a while one
of the null-field safety locks would vanish in front of us  and
re-appear  behind us. All automatic, and all happening only for
those with null-suits installed.
     These people didn't engineer anything any better than they
had to, and the reason was simply that they had this  marvelous
back-up system. It's going to be revolutionary, I tell you.
     "I get the feeling you don't approve," he said, at last.
     "Of what? Your kids? Hey, I was just--"
     "Of what they do."
     "Well,  Winston  sure  does. I think he's eaten half their
stock."
     I was thinking fast. I wanted to learn more from this man,
and the way to do that is not by running down his children  and
his  way  of  life.  But one of the things I knew about him was
that he didn't like liars, was good  at  detecting  them,  and,
though  a career in reporting had made me a world-class liar, I
wasn't sure I could get one by him. And I wasn't sure I  wanted
to.  I had hoped I'd put a lot of that behind me. So instead of
answering his question, I  said  something  else,  a  technique
familiar to any journalist or politician.
     And it seemed to have worked. He just grunted, and reached
down to  pet  Winston's  ugly  mug.  Once  more  the hound came
through for me, not taking off the hand  at  the  wrist.  Still
digesting the horselet, probably.
     #
     We  came  to a door marked MAIN DRIVE ROOM, and he held it
open for me. You could have driven a golf ball  into  the  room
and  never  hit a wall, and you could have driven a medium-size
rover race in it. Whether you could drive a spaceship the  size
of the Heinlein was very much an open question. But in front of
me were the signs that someone was trying.
     Most  of  the  cavernous  room  was filled with structures
whose precise description I must  leave  to  your  imagination,
since the drive room of the Heinlein is still a closely-guarded
secret and certainly will be until long after they get the damn
thing  to  work.  I  will  say  this: whatever you imagine will
surely be far off the mark. It is  unexpected,  and  startling,
like  opening the hood of a rover and finding it's powered by a
thousand mice licking a thousand tiny crankshafts,  or  by  the
moral  power  of  virginity.  And  this:  though I could hardly
identify anything as basic as a nut and bolt in the fantastical
mess, it still had the look of Heinleiner engineering,  wherein
nothing is ever any better than it has to be. Maybe if they get
time  to  move  beyond  prototypes they'll get more elegant and
more careful, but in the meantime it's "Don't bend that wrench.
Get a bigger hammer." Heinleiner toolboxes must be filled  with
bubblegum and bobby pins.
     And yes, O good and faithful reader, they were planning to
launch the hulk of the old Robert A. Heinlein into interstellar
space.  You  heard  it  here  first.  They  were  not, however,
planning to do it with an  endless  stream  of  nuclear  cherry
bombs  pooting  out  the  tailpipe.  Just  what principles were
envisioned is still proprietary information, but I can  say  it
was  a  variant technology of the mathematics that produced the
null-field. I can say it because no one but Smith and a handful
of others know what that technology is.
     Just imagine them harnessing the old wreck to  a  team  of
very large swans, and leave it at that.
     "As  you  can  see,"  Smith was saying as we walked down a
long and fairly rickety flight of metal stairs,  "they've  just
about  frabjulated the primary phase of the osmosifractionating
de-hoodooer. And those guys  ratattating  the  willy-nilly  say
they ought to have it whistling Dixie in three days' time."
     No secrecy involved here. I'd have written exactly what he
said,  if  I  had  any  hope of remembering it, and the meaning
would have been the same: nothing. Smith never seemed  to  mind
if  his  audience  was  coming  into the clubhouse two or three
holes behind him; he rattled off his own private jargon without
regard to whether or not it was being  monitored.  Sometimes  I
thought  it  just  helped  him  to  think out loud. Sometimes I
thought he was showing off. Probably a little of both.
     But I can't get away from the subject of the  interstellar
drive without mentioning the one time he made an attempt to put
it  in  layman's  terms.  It stuck in my mind, possibly because
Smith had a way of making "layman" rhyme with "retarded."
     "There are basically three states of matter," he had said.
"I call them wackiness, dogmatism, and perversity. The universe
of our  experience  is  almost  totally  composed  of  dogmatic
matter,  just  as it's mostly what we call 'matter,' as opposed
to 'anti-matter'--though dogmatic matter includes  both  types.
Every  once  in  a great while we get evidence of some perverse
matter. It's when you move into the realm of the wacky that you
have to watch out."
     "I've known that all my life," I had told him.
     "Ah, but the possibilities!" he had said, waving his  hand
at the drive taking shape in the engine room of the Heinlein.
     As  he  did now, providing the sort of segue I hate when a
director does it in a movie, but the fact is Smith had a  habit
of  waving  his hand grandly when coming upon his mighty works.
Hell, he had a right.
     "See what can come from the  backwaters  of  science?"  he
said.  "Physics  is  a  closed  book,  they  all said. Put your
talents to work in something useful."
     "'They jeered me at the Sorbonne!'" I suggested.
     "They  threw  eggs  when  I  presented  my  paper  at  the
Institute!  Eggs!"  He  leered  at  me,  drywashing  his hands,
hunching his shoulders. "The fools! Let them see  who  has  the
last  laugh, ha ha HA!" He dropped the mad scientist impression
and patted a huge machine on its metal flank, a cowboy gentling
a horse. Smith could have been insufferably stuffy  except  for
the fact he'd seen almost as many old movies as I had.
     "No  kidding,  Hildy,  the fools are going to be impressed
when they see what I've wrung out of  the  tired  old  husk  of
physics."
     "You'll  get  no argument from me," I said. "What happened
to physics, anyway? Why was it neglected for so long?"
     "Diminishing returns. They spent an insane amount of money
on the GSA about a century ago, and when they turned it on they
found out they'd hubbled it up. The repairs would have--"
     "The GSA?"
     "Global Supercooled Accelerator. You can still find a  lot
of it, running right around the Lunar equator."
     I remembered it then; I'd followed it part of the way when
I ran in the Equatorial Rover Race.
     "They  built  big  instruments  out  in  space,  too. They
learned  a  lot  about   the   universe,   cosmologically   and
sub-atomically, but very little of it had any practical use. It
got  to where learning any more, in the directions physics kept
going, would cost trillions just to tool up.  If  you  did  it,
when you were done you'd have learned what went on in the first
billionth  of  a  nanosecond  of  creation, and then you'd just
naturally want to know what happened in the first thousandth of
a nano-nano-second, only that'd cost ten times as much.  People
got  tired  of  paying  those kind of bills to answer questions
even less reality-based than theology,  and  the  smart  people
noticed that for peanuts you could find out practical things in
biological science."
     "So all the original research now is in biology," I said.
     "Hah!"  he shouted. "There is no original research, unless
you count some of the things the Central Computer does.  Oh,  a
few people here and there." He waved his hand, dismissing them.
"It's  all engineering now. Take well-known principles and find
a way to make a better toothpaste." His eyes lit up. "That's  a
perfect  example.  A  few  months  back, I woke up and my mouth
tasted like peppermint. I looked into it, turns out it's a  new
sort  of 'bot. Some idiot thought this up, built it, and let it
loose on an unsuspecting public. It's in the water, Hildy!  Can
you imagine?"
     "It's  a crying shame," I muttered, trying not to meet his
eye.
     "Well, I got the  antidote.  Maybe  my  mouth  does  taste
rotten  in the morning, but at least it tastes like me. Reminds
me who I am." Which I guess is a perfect example  of  both  the
perversity  of  Heinleiners  and  the  cultural  passivity they
rebelled against. And the big reason I liked them, in spite  of
their best efforts to thwart my affection.
     "It's  all  handed  down  from  on  high now," he went on.
"We're like savages at an altar, waiting  for  miracles  to  be
handed  down.  We don't envision the miracles we might work, if
we set ourselves to it."
     "Like little people, eight inches high and  smart  as  lab
rats."
     He  winced,  the  first  indication  I'd  had  of  a moral
uncertainty.  Thank  god  for  that;  I  like  people  to  have
opinions, but people with no doubts scare me.
     "You  want  me  to  defend  that? Okay. I've brought those
children up to think for themselves, and to question authority.
It's not unlimited; me or somebody who knows more about it  has
to  approve  their  projects, and we keep an eye on them. We've
created a place where they can be free to make their own rules,
but they're children, they have to follow our rules, and we set
as few as possible. Do you realize this is the  only  place  in
Luna  where  the eyes of our mechanical Big Brother can't look?
Not even the police can come in here."
     "I have no reason to love the Central Computer, either."
     "I didn't think so. I thought you might have  a  story  to
tell  about  that, or I'd never have let you in. You'll tell it
when you're ready. Do you know why Libby makes little people?"
     "I didn't ask him."
     "He might have told you; might not have. It's his solution
to the same problem I'm working on:  interstellar  travel.  His
reasoning  is, a smaller human being requires less oxygen, less
food, a smaller spacecraft. If we were all eight  inches  high,
we could go to Alpha Centauri in a fuel drum."
     "That's crazy."
     "Not  crazy.  Ridiculous,  probably.  Unattainable, almost
certainly. Those kewpies live about three years,  and  I  doubt
they'll  ever  have  much  of  a  brain. But it's an innovative
solution to a problem the rest of Luna isn't even  working  on.
Why  do you think Gretel goes running across the surface in her
birthday suit?"
     "You weren't supposed to know about that."
     "I've forbidden it. It's  dangerous,  Hildy,  but  I  know
Gretel,  and  I  know she's still trying it. And the reason is,
she hopes she'll eventually adapt herself to living  in  vacuum
without any artificial aids."
     I  thought  of  the  fish  stranded on the beach, flopping
around, probably doomed but still flopping.
     "That's not how evolution works," I said.
     "You know it and I know it. Tell it  to  Gretel.  She's  a
child,  and a smart one, but with childish stubbornness. She'll
give it up sooner or later. But  I  can  guarantee  she'll  try
something else."
     "I hope it's less hare-brained."
     "From  your  lips  to  God's ears. Sometimes she . . ." He
rubbed his face, and made a dismissing gesture with  his  hand.
"The  kewpies  make  me uneasy, I'll admit that. You can't help
wondering how human they are, and if they are human, whether or
not they have any rights, or should have any rights."
     "It's experimentation on humans,  Michael,"  I  said.  "We
have some pretty strong laws on that subject."
     "What  we have are taboos. We do plenty of experimentation
on human genes. What  we're  forbidden  to  do  is  create  new
humans."
     "You don't think that's a goo