"Nonsense!" Joyce said sharply. "Earthmen don't make friends with
aliens. And that's nothing but a--a blob!"
"Fweep?" queried the raspberry lips. "Fweep?"
"If it's Four's friend," Reba said firmly, "it can stay. If you don't
like to be around it, Grammy, you can always go to your own room."
Joyce stood up indignantly. "Well! And don't call me 'Grammy!' It makes
me sound as old as that old goat over there!" She glared malignantly
at Grampa. "If you'd rather have that blob than me--well!" She swept
grandly out of the central cabin and into one of the private rooms that
opened out from it.
"Fweep?" asked the blob.
"Sure," Four said. "Go ahead, fweep--I mean sweep."
Swiftly the sphere rolled across the floor. Behind it was left a
narrow path of sparkling clean tile.
Grampa glanced warily at Joyce's door to make sure it was completely
closed and then cocked a white eyebrow at Reba. "Good for you, Reba!"
he said admiringly. "For forty years now, I've wanted to do that. Never
had the nerve."
"Why, thanks, Grampa," Reba said, surprised.
"I like you, gal. Never forget it."
"I like you, too, Grampa. If you'd been a few years younger, Junior
would have had competition!"
"You bet he would!" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned
over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, "Beats me why you ever
married a jerk like Junior, anyhow."
Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. "Maybe I saw
something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been
submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you
and to himself, too." Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. "And maybe I
thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather."
* * * * *
Grampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring
intently at Fweep. "What you doing, Four?"
"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings," Four said
absently. "The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then
slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle."
"That's the idea, Four. You'll be a Peppergrass yet. How about building
me a pircuit?"
"You get the other one figured out?"
"It was easy," Grampa said breezily, "once you understood the
principle. The player who moved second could always win if he used the
right strategy. Dividing the thirteen lights into three sections of
four each--"
"That's right," Four agreed. "I can make you a new one by cannibalizing
the other pircuit, but I'll need a few extra parts."
Grampa pushed the wall beside his chair and a drawer slid out of it.
Inside were row after row of nipple-topped, flat-sided, flexible
free-fall bottles and a battered cigar box. "Thought you'd say that,"
he said, picking out the box. "Help yourself." With the other hand, he
lifted out one of the bottles and took a long drag on it. "Ahhh!" he
sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and carefully put
the bottle away.
"What is that stuff you drink, Grampa?" Four asked.
"Tonic, boy. Keeps me young and frisky. Now about that pircuit--"
"Did you ever work on Niccolò Tartaglia's puzzle about the three lovely
brides, the three jealous husbands, the river and the two-passenger
rowboat?"
"Yep," Grampa said. "Too easy."
Four thought a moment. "There's a modern variation with three
missionaries and three cannibals. Same river, same rowboat and only one
of the cannibals can row. If the cannibals outnumber the missionaries--"
"Sounds good, boy," Grampa said eagerly. "Whip it up for me."
"Okay, Grampa." Four looked at Fweep again. The translucent sphere had
paused at Grampa's feet.
Grampa reached down to pat it. For an instant, his hand disappeared
into Fweep, and then the alien creature rolled away. This time its path
seemed crooked.
Its gelatinous form jiggled. "Hic!" it said.
* * * * *
As if in response, the flivver vibrated. Grampa looked querulously
toward the airlock. "Flivver shouldn't shake like that. Not with the
polarizer turned on."
The airlock door swung inward. Through the oval doorway walked Fred,
followed closely by Junior. They were sweat-stained and weary,
scintillation counters dangling heavily from their belts.
"Any luck?" Reba asked brightly.
"Do we look it?" Junior grumbled.
"Where's Joyce?" asked Fred. "Might as well get everybody in on this at
once. Joyce!"
The door to his wife's room opened instantly. Behind it, Joyce was
regal and slim. The pose was spoiled immediately by her avid question:
"Any uranium? Radium? Thorium?"
"No," Fred said slowly, "and no other heavy metals, either. There's a
few low-grade iron deposits and that's it."
"Then what makes this planet so heavy?" Reba asked.
Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. "Your guess is
as good as anybody's."
"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock," Joyce complained.
She turned savagely on Fred. "This was going to make us all filthy
rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like
billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this
cramped old flivver--and we don't have many of them to spare!" She
glared venomously at Grampa.
"We've still got Fweepland," Four said solemnly.
"Fweepland?" Reba repeated.
"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As
real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium."
"A good thing, too," Junior said glumly, "because this looks like the
end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our
lives right here--involuntary colonists."
Joyce spun on him. "You're joking!" she screeched.
"I wish I were," Junior said. "But the polarizer won't work. Either
it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that
just won't polarize."
"It's these '23 models," Grampa put in disgustedly. "They never were
any good."
* * * * *
The land of the Fweep turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and
rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable
spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that
the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either.
Grampa looked up from his pircuit and said, "If I were you, Junior, I
would take a good look at the TV repairman when we get back to Earth.
_If_ we get back to Earth," he amended. "You can't be Four's father.
All over the Universe, gravity is the same, and if it's gravity, the
polarizer will polarize it."
"That's just supposition," Junior said stubbornly. "The fact is, it
isn't because it doesn't. Q.E.D."
"Maybe the polarizer is broken," Fred suggested.
Grampa snorted. "Broken-shmoken. Nothing to break, Young Fred. Just a
few coils of copper wire and they're all right. We checked. We know
the power plant is working: the lights are on, the air and water
recirculation systems are going, the food resynthesizer is okay. And,
anyway, the polarizer could work from the storage battery if it had to."
"Then it goes deeper," Junior insisted. "It goes right to the principle
of polarization itself. For some reason, it doesn't work here. Why?
Before we can discover the answer to that, we'll have to know more
about polarization itself. How does it work, Grampa?"
Grampa gave him a sarcastic grin. "Now you're curious, eh? Couldn't
be bothered with Grampa's invention before. Oh, no! Too busy. Accept
without question the blessings that the Good Lord provideth--"
"Let's not get up on any pulpits," Fred growled. "Come on, Grampa,
what's the theory behind polarization?"
Grampa looked at the four faces staring at him hopefully and the
jeering grin turned to a smile. "Well," he said, "at last. You know
how light is polarized, eh?" The smile faded. "No, I guess you don't."
* * * * *
He cleared his throat professorially. "Well, now, in ordinary light
the vibrations are perpendicular to the ray in all directions. When
light is polarized by passing through crystals or by reflection or
refraction at non-metallic surfaces, the paths of the vibrations are
still perpendicular to the ray, but they're in straight lines, circles
or ellipses."
The faces were still blank and unillumined.
"Gravity is similar to light," he pressed on. "In the absence of
matter, gravity is non-polarized. Matter polarizes gravity in a circle
around itself. That's how we've always known it until the invention of
spaceships and later the polarizer. The polarizer polarizes gravity
into a straight line. That makes the ship take off and continue
accelerating until the polarizer is shut off or its angle is shifted."
The faces looked at him silently. Finally Joyce could endure it no
longer. "That's just nonsense! You all know it. Grampa's no genius.
He's just a tinkerer. One day he happened to tinker out the polarizer.
He doesn't know how it works any more than I do."
"Now wait a minute!" Grampa protested. "That's not fair. Maybe
I didn't figure out the theory myself, but I read everything the
scientists ever wrote about it. Wanted to know myself what made the
blamed thing work. What I told you is what the scientists said, near
as I remember. Now me--I'm like Edison. I do it and let everybody else
worry over 'why.'"
"The only thing you ever did was the polarizer," Joyce snapped.
"And then you spent everything you got from it on those fool
perpetual-motion machines and those crazy longevity schemes when any
moron would know they were impossible."
Grampa squinted at her sagely. "That's what they said about the gravity
polarizer before I invented it."
"But you don't really know why it works," Junior persisted.
"Well, no," Grampa admitted. "Actually I was just fiddling around with
some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling,
dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out
near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound
it."
"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?" Joyce demanded
ironically.
"Well, now," Grampa said in bafflement, "it rightly should, you know."
* * * * *
"We're stuck," Reba said softly. "We might as well admit it. All we can
do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call--"
"Which," Joyce interrupted, "might get picked up in a few centuries."
"And make the best of what we've got," Reba went on, unheeding. "If we
look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world.
Earth gravity. The flivver--even if the polarizer won't work, there's
the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By
then, we should have a good-sized community built up, because out here
we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we
want."
"You know the law: one child per couple," Joyce reminded her frigidly.
"You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not
me."
Junior frowned at his wife. "I believe you're actually glad it
happened."
"I could think of worse things," Reba said.
"I like your spunk, Reb," Grampa muttered.
"Speaking of children," Junior said, "where's Four?"
"Here." Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room,
carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a
small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round,
raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep.
"Fweep?" it queried hopefully.
"Not now," said Four.
"Where've you been?" Reba asked anxiously. "What've you been doing?"
"I've been all over Fweepland," Four said wearily, "trying to locate
its center of gravity."
"Well?" Fred prompted.
"It shifts."
"That's impossible," said Junior.
"Not for Fweep," Four replied.
"What do you mean by that?" Joyce suspiciously asked.
"It shifted," Four explained patiently, "because Fweep kept following
me."
"Fweep?" Junior repeated stupidly.
"Fweep?" Fweep said eagerly.
"He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear
polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet
so heavy. He's why we can't leave."
* * * * *
The land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered
the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. "I got it figured out,
Four," he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. "A missionary takes
over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing
cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and--"
"Not now, Grampa," Four said inattentively as he watched Fweep making
the grand tour of the cabin.
The raspberry sphere swept over a scattering of crumbs, engulfed them,
absorbed them. Four looked at Joyce. Joyce was watching Fweep, too.
"Rat poison?" Four asked.