"Well ... if the beacon worked. If it was set in time."

"Now the prize question. Why didn't you tell me?"

"Well-" Peewee was going to twist that button off. "I wasn't sure how much math you knew and-you might have gone all masculine and common-sensical and father-knows-best. Would you have believed me?"

("I told Orville and I told Wilbur and now I'm telling you-that contraption will never work!") "Maybe not, Peewee. But next time you're tempted not to tell me something ‘for my own good,' will you take a chance that I'm not wedded to my own ignorance? I know I'm not a genius but I'll try to keep my mind open-and I might be able to help, if I knew what you were up to. Quit twisting that button."

She let go hastily. "Yes, Kip. I'll remember."

"Thanks. Another thing is fretting me. I was pretty sick?"

"Huh? You certainly were!"

"All right. They've got these, uh, ‘fold ships' that go anywhere in no time. Why didn't you ask them to bounce me home and pop me into a hospital?"

She hesitated. "How do you feel?"

"Huh? I feel fine. Except that I seem to be under spinal anesthesia, or something."

"Or something," she agreed. "But you feel as if you are getting well?"

"Shucks, I feel well."

"You aren't. But you're going to be." She looked at me closely. "Shall I put it bluntly, Kip?"

"Go ahead."

"If they had taken you to Earth to the best hospital we have, you'd be a ‘basket case.' Understand me? No arms, no legs. As it is, you are getting completely well. No amputations, not even a toe."

I think the Mother Thing had prepared me. I simply said, "You're sure?"

"Sure. Sure both. You're going to be all right." Suddenly her face screwed up. "Oh, you were a mess! I saw."

"Pretty bad?"

"Awful. I have nightmares."

"They shouldn't have let you look."

"They couldn't stop me. I was next of kin."

"Huh? You told them you were my sister or something?"

"What? I am your next of kin."

I was about to say she was cockeyed when I tripped over my tongue. We were the only humans for a hundred and sixty trillion miles. As usual, Peewee was right.

"So I had to grant permission," she went on.

"For what? What did they do to me?"

"Uh, first they popped you into liquid helium. They left you there and the past month they have been using me as a guinea pig. Then, three days ago-three of ours-they thawed you out and got to work. You've been getting well ever since."

"What shape am I in now?"

"Uh... well, you're growing back. Kip, this isn't a bed. It just looks like it."

"What is it, then?"

"We don't have a name for it and the tune is pitched too high for me. But everything from here on down-" She patted the spread. "-on into the room below, does things for you. You're wired like a hi-fi nut's basement."

"I'd like to see it."

"I'm afraid you can't. You don't know, Kip. They had to cut your space suit off."

I felt more emotion at that than I had at hearing what a mess I had been. "Huh? Where is Oscar? Did they ruin him? My space suit, I mean."

"I know what you mean. Every time you're delirious you talk to ‘Oscar' -and you answer back, too. Sometimes I think you're schizoid, Kip."

"You've mixed your terms, runt-that'ud make me a split personality. All right, but you're a paranoid yourself."

"Oh, I've known that for a long time. But I'm a very well adjusted one. You want to see Oscar? The Mother Thing said that you would want him near when you woke up." She opened the closet.

"Hey! You said he was all cut up!"

"Oh, they repaired him. Good as new. A little better than new."

("Time, dear! Remember what I said.")

"Coming, Mother Thing! ‘Bye, Kip. I'll be back soon, and real often."

"Okay. Leave the closet open so I can see Oscar."

Peewee did come back, but not "real often." I wasn't offended, not much. She had a thousand interesting and "educational" things to poke her ubiquitous nose into, all new and fascinating-she was as busy as a pup chewing slippers. She ran our hosts ragged. But I wasn't bored. I was getting well, a full-time job and not boring if you are happy-which I was.

I didn't see the Mother Thing often. I began to realize that she had work of her own to do-even though she came to see me if I asked for her, with never more than an hour's delay, and never seemed in a hurry to leave.

She wasn't my doctor, nor my nurse. Instead I had a staff of veterinarians who were alert to supervise every heartbeat. They didn't come in unless I asked them to (a whisper was as good as a shout) but I soon realized that "my" room was bugged and telemetered like a ship in flight test-and my "bed" was a mass of machinery, gear that bore the relation to our own "mechanical hearts" and "mechanical lungs" and "mechanical kidneys" that a Lockheed ultrasonic courier does to a baby buggy.

I never saw that gear (they never lifted the spread, unless it was while I slept), but I know what they were doing. They were encouraging my body to repair itself-not scar tissue but the way it had been. Any lobster can do this and starfish do it so well that you can chop them to bits and wind up with a thousand brand-new starfish.

This is a trick any animal should do, since its gene pattern is in every cell. But a few million years ago we lost it. Everybody knows that science is trying to recapture it; you see articles-optimistic ones in Reader's Digest, discouraged ones in The Scientific Monthly, wildly wrong ones in magazines whose "science editors" seem to have received their training writing horror movies. But we're working on it. Someday, if anybody dies an accidental death, it will be because he bled to death on the way to the hospital.

Here I was with a perfect chance to find out about it-and I didn't.

I tried. Although I was unworried by what they were doing (the Mother Thing had told me not to worry and every time she visited me she looked in my eyes and repeated the injunction), nevertheless like Peewee, I like to know.

Pick a savage so far back in the jungle that they don't even have installment-plan buying. Say he has an I.Q. of 190 and Peewee's yen to understand. Dump him into Brookhaven Atomic Laboratories. How much will he learn? With all possible help?

He'll learn which corridors lead to what rooms and he'll learn that a purple trefoil means: "Danger!"

That's all. Not because he can't; remember he's a supergenius-but he needs twenty years schooling before he can ask the right questions and understand the answers.

I asked questions and always got answers and formed notions. But I'm not going to record them; they are as confused and contradictory as the notions a savage would form about design and operation of atomic equipment. As they say in radio, when noise level reaches a certain value, no information is transmitted. All I got was "noise."

Some of it was literally "noise." I'd ask a question and one of the therapists would answer. I would understand part, then as it reached the key point, I would hear nothing but birdsongs. Even with the Mother Thing as an interpreter, the parts I had no background for would turn out to be a canary's cheerful prattle.

Hold onto your seats; I'm going to explain something I don't understand: how Peewee and I could talk with the Mother Thing even though her mouth could not shape English and we couldn't sing the way she did and had not studied her language. The Vegans-(I'll call them "Vegans" the way we might be called "Solarians"; their real name sounds like a wind chime in a breeze. The Mother Thing had a real name, too, but I'm not a coloratura soprano. Peewee used it when she wanted to wheedle her -fat lot of good it did her.) The Vegans have a supreme talent to understand, to put themselves in the other person's shoes. I don't think it was telepathy, or I wouldn't have gotten so many wrong numbers. Call it empathy.