Margaret St. Clair by The Best of Margaret St. Clair Page B

away.” For a moment t he 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 nuisanc e s 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 nuisance s 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