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observation with the other bases so that observations in the future would yield a little more information
than had been secured before.
Gail kept a quasi-maternal eye on the children until they dozed off. But she watched Soames' expression,
too. She and Soames and Captain Moggs rode in the passenger section of the transport a few seats
behind the children.
"I wish I could understand," said Gail, in a low tone to Soames. "The other children know everything I've
taught Zani, and there's been no way for them to know! They know things they weren't in the room to
learn, and Zani didn't have time to tell them! Yet it doesn't seem like telepathy. If they were telepaths they
could exchange thoughts without speaking. But they chatter all the time!"
"If they'd been telepaths," said Soames, "they'd have known I was going to burn their signalling
apparatus. They could have stopped me, or tried to, anyhow."
Captain Moggs had paid no attention. Now she asked, "Why does the public insist on details of matters
the military think should be kept secret?"
"Because," said Gail briefly, "it's the public that gets drowned by a tidal wave or killed by a cyclone. If
strangers from space discover Earth, it's the public that will suffer."
"But," said Captain Moggs querulously, "it is necessary for this to be kept secret!"
"Unfortunately," said Soames. "The story broke before that decision was made."
He thought how inevitable it was that everybody should see the situation from their own viewpoint only.
Captain Moggs from the military; Gail had a newspaper-woman's angle tempered with feminine
compassion. And he was fascinated by the innumerable possibilities the technology of the children's race
suggested. He yearned for a few days alone with some low-temperature apparatus. The hand-tool of
Fran's bothered him.
He told Gail.
"What has low temperature to do?" she asked.
"They've got some wire that's a superconductor at room temperature. We can't have superconductors
above 18° Kelvin, which is colder than liquid hydrogen. But a superconductor acts like a magnetic shield,
no, not exactly. But you can't touch a magnet to one. Induced currents in the superconductor fight its
approach. I'd like to know what happens to the magnetic field. Does it cancel, or bounce, or what?
Could it, for instance, be focussed?"
"I don't see ..."
"Neither do I," said Soames. "But I've got a hunch that the little pocket gadget Fran carries has some
superconductor in it. I think I could make something that wouldn't be his instrument, at all it would do
different things but that gadget does suggest some possibilities I fairly ache to try out."
"And I," said Gail, with a faint smile, "I want to try to write something that nobody would print. I'd like to
write the real story as I see it, the children from a viewpoint nobody will want to see."
He looked at her, puzzled.
"My syndicate wants a story about the children that nobody will have to think about. No recognition of a
problem in plain decency with the children considered as human as they are, but just a story that
everybody could read without thinking anything but what they wanted to. They're nice children.
Somebody raised them very well. But with most people nowadays thinking that if children aren't ill-bred
they're frustrated...."
She made a helpless gesture as the plane bellowed onward.
Presently the moon shone on Fran's face. He moved in his sleep. After a little he opened his eyes and
gasped a little. He looked startledly around, an instinct of anyone waking in a strange place. Then he
turned back. He saw the moon.
He uttered a little cry. His face worked. He stared at the misshapen, incompletely round companion of
Earth as if its appearance had some extraordinary, horrifying meaning for him. His hands clenched.
Behind him, Gail whispered:
"Brad! He's horrified! Does that mean that he and the other children need to signal to someone ..."
"I doubt it very much," said Soames. "If his parents and companions had landed on the moon, and I
stopped him from signalling to them, he might look hopefully at it, or longingly, but not the way he does." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]