“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 heard. “Where’s the wind coming from?”
“Canker’s creating a vacuum,” Henry yelled back. “Air rushes in to fill it faster as the canker grows. Get back! Get back!”
The party hurried across the slick green surface of the grass toward safety, breaking at the last into a run. The giant wind kept trying to push them back.
“Further! Further!” Henry yelled. “Get back!”
Abruptly the canker was lapping at the laboratory walls. The stones boiled evilly for a moment and no longer existed. The upper part of the structure fell in, disappeared.
Henry’s face was greenish white. “It’s getting out of control. Run. Run!” he said.
They ran. Shrieking, stumbling, trying to breathe, they ran. The canker was faster than they. With the flowing ease of a creature in a dream it gained on them. It was no more than a yard from them when they reached the site of the cooking fire. Two seconds more and it was lapping at their heels.
Vela collapsed and fell. Denis put his hands under her armpits and wildly tried to drag her along. Mrs. Pettit, her face a mask of terror inside the glazed hood of her coveralls, was screaming inaudibly. The wind was horrible.
Hathor appeared. She was standing in the air eight or ten feet above their heads. Though her eyes still had their uncanny look of remoteness and impassivity, something about her suggested exasperation consciously controlled. Standing securely on nothingness she began to make quick, plucking motions with her hands. Slipping, sliding, twisting, they moved in space and out of it.
There was a terrific lightning flash. The world dissolved in curtains of white light. Henry, staggering back from the impact of the prodigy, was amazed that his retinae had not been burned out. It did not seem possible that the eyes could be flooded with such light and still see.
There was another even vaster flash. Slowly, reluctantly, it died away. Henry looked up at Hathor with his scalded eyeballs. Her hands still moved in their twisting pattern, sliding in and out of visibility, but more deliberately than they had. Tiny veins stood out on her temples. Her lips were compressed. Plainly she was imposing some great exertion on herself. The howling wind had died away.
The earth, the horizon, the air, twanged like a plucked bowstring. In the most horrible moment of the afternoon, Henry perceived that everywhere about him were slowly opening doors. Convulsively he shut his eyes.
When he opened them again Hathor had put down her hands. The air was calm and untroubled. All around the party the grass lay as fresh, as green, as unbroken as it had been before the matter canker was set up. The only sign of its existence that the canker had left was an exceptionally heavy coating of dew. But the laboratory was gone.