XV
“Igor,” said Marianne Fitch, her lips compressed into a thin line, “he put the cat in the matter converter.”
Igor Fitch turned around slowly in the control seat, and stared at his son. “He put the cat in the matter converter.”
Little Tod stuck out his lower lip and scowled belligerently. He sucked in a deep breath and his voice came out loud and clear:
“I want cat in verter!”
The elder Fitch swore, unbuckled the harness, and started for young Tod. “I told you, damn it, to be good to that cat! And I told you never to get near that converter!”
Tod felt his power flow through him, and raised his voice:
“I want put cat in verter! I put cat in verter! When I want, I go get cat out verter!—No put hand on Tod!”
The room whirled. There was a flash of pain, and another and another.
He screamed in rage, commanding the universe to yield and obey.
The stinging blows continued, one following the other in merciless succession.
He summoned his servant, the extension of his will standing there against the bulkhead, to come at once to his aid.
“You deserve it,” she said.
The screams of rage become howls of pain, of mortification, shock, and a realization of disaster, then pleas for mercy. At length, he wound up in his cot, sobbing:
“Verter eat cat. Verter eat Tod I go near verter. Oh, I not want verter eat cat! I not go near verter. Not till I bigger. I not go near verter . . . Not go near verter . . . Not . . . Not go near verter . . .”
Out in the control room, Igor Fitch drew a deep shuddering breath.
“That cat was going to have kittens. When he killed that cat, he killed it and all the succeeding generations.”
“We have more in stored embryos.”
“Yes, and you know how uncertain that is. But we’ll have to try to bring another along. Where we’re going, you need animals to help you.”
She stroked his head, said, “Are you sorry we left? I mean, left civilization?”
He snarled, “Civilization! Yes, I’m sorry to leave civilization. But connected up with it, like Siamese twins, is artificiality. Soft, easy, cunning traps. You know what some of the fools want to do now? They want to rig gravitor beams so that if somebody jumps out a window, he’ll float gently to the ground. And they’ve come out with this thing they say corrects the distortion in the alsens signal, so the ‘harassed parent’ can stick the kid in it and forget him. You know the name of this thing? ‘Cuddlywomb.’ Nuts! The reason they had the last two blow-ups was that people wanted out. Into reality!”
“There, there,” she said.
“Agh,” he snarled.
She smiled at him, drew him close, but his mind was groping for a meaning just out of reach.
He nodded.
“That’s it. Nobody wants pain. But you don’t even draw breath till you get slapped. And after a long enough time without any pain, any discomfort, pleasure isn’t pleasant, because there’s no ground for comparison. A system aimed at eliminating all pain and all discomfort invites revolt, because it eliminates enjoyment in the process.”
He looked at her, wondering why she looked so particularly alluring now, after this awful day. He checked the controls, scanned the instrument panel, then locked the board for the night. Each day, he rehearsed the approach, practiced the landing procedure, which he would need very soon, and practiced the emergency routines, which he hoped he would never need. If there should be trouble, the alarm would bring him on the run, and he hoped he would know what to do. He got up, and they left the control room.
As the ship became quiet, and the minutes ticked past and grew into hours, there swam onto the view-screen a bright pinpoint, that evolved into a dot, a silver coin, a white-and-blue sphere, and finally, a glowing world. It waited there, serene and unpredictable.
Little Tod, up and traveling around when he was supposed to be asleep, stood wide-eyed, watching the screen. Some exceptionally powerful emotion moved him.
“Daddy!”
Igor Fitch woke up and mumbled, but Marianne, out of long training, got there first.
“Oh, Igor, look!”
He arrived, half-awake, growling, “Now what? What did he do now?” Then he saw the screen. As he stood raptly watching, his son’s urgent voice reached him.
“I want!”
His wife’s voice said soothingly, “There, honey, Mommy and Daddy will get it for you.”
Igor looked at his wife, then at his son staring wide-eyed at the screen.
“Don’t let anybody fool you, Kid,” he said gruffly. “There’s a limit to what Mommy and Daddy can do. If you want anything like that, you have to get it yourself.”
Tod stuck out his lower lip.
On the control panel, the proximity warning woke up and went off.
Igor unlocked the board, shut off the warning, and swung into the control seat. Now, he asked himself, was there anything he could check that he hadn’t checked at least half-a-dozen times already? Never mind what the ship-preparation experts were supposed to have done. Had he done it, himself?
So far as he could remember, he had covered every item on his check-list, and had made his check-list include everything checkable. Soon now, he would find out if that was enough.
Little Todd, meanwhile, looking first at the glowing screen, and then at his father, suddenly had a look of comprehension.
“I get,” he said sturdily. “—Only not put cat in verter.”
Igor smiled.
“That’s the spirit, Kid!”