She looked a good deal smaller than she actually was. The integument that covered her streamlined contours was pearly, pinkish, lustrous. And her tall vermillion crest could hardly be considered a deformity. It was something else that caused the reaction, something in the look of her eyes.
Her impersonal gaze moved slowly over the little group. It slowed and came to rest on Henry. The skies of her mind fixed on him.
“You’re Henry,” said the glassy, disembodied voice within his brain. “The one—” (not quite one—what Hathor was thinking was more like semipermeable membrane or assemblage of points) “the one with the laboratory. Yes.
“I’m going to train you—” (a dissolving kaleidoscope of images as thick as snowflakes. From the glittering throng of whirling, evanescent pictures, Henry caught up two which lasted longer than the rest—one of a hawk leaving the falconer’s wrist, the other of a slender key turning in a lock.) “Come along.” Hathor motioned with her two-thumbed hand.
It was the first time she had ever come after him. Henry felt a premonitory shudder run through his limbs. Nonetheless he got obediently to his feet.
It was nearly supper time when he got back. The smoke of Mrs. Pettit’s cooking fire drifted out into the still air and mingled pleasantly with the smell of frying meat.
Henry sank down limply on the grass beside the blaze, shielding his eyes with his hand from the light. It was not until supper had been eaten and the necessary refuse from the meal burned that he could bring himself to speak.
“Vela— Denis,” he said, trying to keep his voice from quivering, “Do you still want to get away from here? If you do I’ll do all I can to help you. I want to get away myself.”
There was a cautious silence. Vela opened her lips and then closed them again. At last Denis spoke.
“Why, yes, we still do. We thought you—Yes, we still want to get away.” For a moment the ruddy flicker of the fire lit up the tight lips of his handsome small-featured face.
Whatever had made him decide to be tactful about Henry’s abrupt volte-face, whether his silence was caused by policy or contempt, Henry was thankful for it. He could not possibly have put into words how hateful Hathor’s recent compulsory extension of his senses had made the world where he now was to him.
He had learned too much ever to consider that world beautiful again. And trying to express it verbally would have been almost as bad as the original experience.
“What was Hathor doing with you today?” Vela asked curiously.
“Training me,” Henry answered briefly. “Training you? How?”
“It’s something she does with her hands,” Henry replied unwillingly. “They disappear. And then I hear what’s going on inside the stones.”
“Oh.” Vela looked rather sick. “Well, are you just going to ask her to send us back to our Earth, or what?”
“Asking her wouldn’t be any use. She let me see that today. Anyhow, she knows we want to go home. But I’ve been thinking.” Henry Perth’s voice was getting back its customary tones. “Why do people get rid of their pets? They get rid of them—”
“I don’t like ‘get rid of’,” Denis cut in sharply. “God knows we aren’t here of our own choice and we want to get back to our own time and place. But we’re alive here and that’s something. We don’t want to get killed trying to get back.”
“We won’t be killed. When people get rid of their pets they don’t murder them. They send them to a friend in the country who has more room or turn them over to an animal shelter or something. They don’t kill them.
“But as I was saying, why do they get rid of them? Basically for one of two reasons. You get rid of a pet when it’s not a good pet—when it sulks, is sullen, uncooperative, disagreeable—or you get rid of it because it makes a nuisance of itself. Like chewing up rugs or howling at the moon. Now if we could only make nuisances of ourselves —”
“How?” Denis asked, frowning. “Hathor isn’t around here much, so being noisy won’t do any good.”
“What about doing something with whatever you’re working on in the laboratory, son?” Mrs. Pettit suggested. “Perhaps we could be nuisances with that.”
“We can’t have anything to do with the laboratory,” Denis announced sternly. “Forbidden research is wrong, here or on Earth.”
“Oh, be quiet, Denis,” Vela said peevishly. Her husband looked as if he could hardly believe his ears. “This is lots too serious for us to be honorable,” she went on as if in explanation. “Henry, if you can do anything with your research, do it.”
“Well— I might try a matter canker. That’s just about the most forbidden research there is. I’d have to be careful not to get a radioactive form of canker, of course.”
“Would that annoy Hathor?”
“A matter canker? Yes. A matter canker would annoy anybody quite a lot.”
“And if she gets mad enough at us, she’ll send us back to our own time and space,” Vela said. She yawned. “Let’s go to bed early and get lots of sleep. And tomorrow we’ll help Henry all we can.”
His lab assistants were willing if not very bright. Clad in lead-impregnated coveralls they weighed, stirred, measured, filtered and proved to be so incompetent that on the second day Henry got rid of all of them except Vela.
Her measurements were more accurate than those of the others, and she didn’t talk so mu ch. Once or twice before he had suspected that she could be intelligent when it suited her to be.
“Listen, Henry, aren’t you afraid Hathor will find out what we’re doing before it’s ready?” she asked late on the second afternoon. “Then she’d make us stop before we got annoying.”
“I doubt it,” Henry replied absently. They were engaged with a difficult bit of titration. “There, that’s enough—She used to visit the lab a good deal at first but not any more. I don’t think she’ll be around until it’s time for me—for me to have another lesson. I hope we’ll be gone before then.”
“Well, what about the canker itself? Won’t it be dangerous? I should think it would give out a lot of heat.”
“No,” Henry replied, “there isn’t any heat with a canker. Nobody knows why. And they can’t find out because it’s been ruled forbidden research. About the only direct danger to us would be if the canker got out of control. Nobody knows why but they do that sometimes.”
He poured the solution into a crucible. “You see that switch down there by the betatron? All right, when I move my hand, depress it. Thanks.”
A matter canker takes time to establish. There were failures in the early stages of Henry’s. It was more than a week after his conversation with Vela that he got the canker into its ultimate form.
He carried it out of the laboratory, Vela following, and showed it to the others, who were sitting listlessly on the grass.
“It doesn’t look like much,” Denis said after a pause. He was turning the big flask critically in his hands. “Except for the color, that is, how could this annoy anyone?”
“It hasn’t been activated yet,” Henry explained. He took the flask back from Denis and set it on the ground. “I want you both to get into your coveralls. The canker isn’t very radioactive but there’s bound to be some radiation. So keep well back from it.”
He adjusted the timing device on the neck of the flask. While Mrs. Pettit and Denis were getting into their long white cover alls he dropped in the gray-sheathed thorium pellets which were the activating charge. Once more he adjusted the timing device. “Get back,” he said. The first—second—third pellets dropped.
The flask dissolved. The gluey viscous stuff it held ran out sluggishly over the grass. Writhing, twisting, boiling, the grass was eaten away from it. The liquid disappeared. The canker was eating in.
“It’s getting started nicely,” Henry said.
A column of steam shot up. It enlarged, grew hollow. Now there was a hole, a growing one, in the ground. The edges curled and bubbled and smoked. The hole widened, grew deeper.
A wind blew over the surface of the grass. It freshened. In a moment the leaves of the trees were in motion. The boughs began to rock. The column of steam broke off, reappeared soaringly, broke off again. The wind was growing to a gale.
“What is this, son?” Mrs. Pettit demanded. She had to put her mouth against Henry’s head to make herself
