Up and Running
Nita and Kit and Dairine made their way among the shops of the lower level of Penn Station and caught the C train for the Upper West Side, coming up at Eighty-first and Central Park West. For a little bit they stood there just getting their bearings. It was warm, but not uncomfortable yet. The park glowed green and golden.
Dairine was fidgeting. “Now where?”
“Right here,” Nita said, turning around. The four-block stretch behind them, between 77th and 81st streets, was commanded by the huge, graceful bulk of the American Museum of Natural History, with its marble steps and beast-carved pediment, and the great bronze equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt looking eastward across at the park. Tucked into a corner of the building on 81st Street stood the art deco-looking brick cube of the Hayden Planetarium, topped with a greened-copper dome.
“It looks like a tomb,” Dairine said. “Shove that. I’m going to Natural History and look at the stuffed elephants.”
“Climb on the stuffed elephants, you mean,” Nita said. “Forget it. You’re staying with us.”
“Oh? What makes you think you can keep track of me if I decide to-“
“This,” Kit said grimly, hefting his wizard’s manual. “If we have to, we can put a tracer on you. Or a leash ...”
“Oh, yeah? Well, listen, smart guy-“
“Kit,” Nita said under her breath, “easy. Dari, are you out of your mind? This place is full of space stuff. The new Shuttle mock-up. A meteorite ten feet long.” She smiled slightly. “A store with Star Wars books ...”
Dairine stared at Nita. “Well, why didn’t you say so? Come on.” She headed down the cobblestone driveway toward the planetarium doors.
“You never catch that fly with vinegar,” Nita said quietly to Kit as the two of them followed at a safe distance.
“She’s not like my sisters,” Kit said.
“Yeah. Well, your sisters are human beings...”
They snickered together and went in after Dairine. To Nita’s mild relief- because paying for her little sister’s ticket would have killed her hot-dog money-Dairine already had admission money with her. “Dad give you that?” Nita said as she paid.
“No, this is mine,” said Dairine, wrapping the change up with the rest of a wad, and sticking it back in her shorts.
“Where’d you get all that?”
“I taught a couple guys in my class to play poker last month,” said Dairine. And off she went, heading for the souvenir store.
“Neets?” Kit said, tossing his manual in one hand.
Nita thought about it. “Naah,” she said. “Let her go. Dairine!”
“What?”
“Just don’t leave the building!”
“Okay.”
“Is that safe?” Kit said.
“What, leaving her alone? She’ll get into the Shuttle mock-up and not come out till closing time. Good thing there’s hardly anyone here. Besides, she did say she wouldn’t leave. If she were going to weasel out of it, she would’ve just grunted or something.”
The two of them paused to glance into the souvenir store, full of books and posters and T-shirts and hanging Enterprises-both shuttle and starship. Dairine was browsing through a Return of the Jedi picture book. “Whatcha gonna get, hotshot?” Kit said, teasing.
“Dunno.” She put the book down. “What I really need,” she said, looking down at a set of Apollo decals, “is a lightsaber.”
“And what would you do with it once you had it?”
“Use it on Darth Vader,” Dairine said. “Don’t you two have somewhere to be?”
Nita considered the image of Dairine facing down Darth Vader, lightsaber in hand, and felt sorry for Vader. “C’mon,” she said to Kit. They ambled down the hall a little way, to the Ahnighito meteorite on its low pedestal- thirty-four tons of nickel-iron slag, pitted with great holes like an irregularly melted lump of Swiss cheese. Nita laid her hands and cheek against it; on a hot day in New York, this was the best thing in the city to touch, for its pleasant coolness never altered, no matter how long you were in contact with it. Kit reached out and touched it too.
“This came a long way,” he said.
“The asteroid belt,” Nita said. “Two hundred fifty million miles or so ...”
“No,” Kit said. “Farther than that.” His voice was quiet, and Nita realized that Kit was deep in the kind of wizardly “understanding” with the meteorite that she had with trees and animals and other things that lived. “Long, long dark times,” Kit said, “nothing but space, and the cold. And then slowly, light growing. Faster and faster-diving in toward the light, till it burns, and gas and water and metal boil off one after another. And before everything’s gone, out into the dark again, for a long, long time. ...”
“It was part of a comet,” Nita said.
“Until the comet’s orbit decayed. It came in too close to the Sun on one pass, and shattered, and came down-“ Kit took his hand away abruptly. “It doesn’t care for that memory,” he said.
“And now here it is ...”
“Tamed,” Kit said. “Resting. But it remembers when it was wild, and roamed in the dark, and the Sun was its only tether...”
Nita was still for a few seconds. That sense of the Earth being a small safe “house” with a huge backyard, through which powers both benign and terrible moved, was what had first made her fall in love with astronomy. To have someone share the feeling with her so completely was amazing. She met Kit’s eyes, and couldn’t think of anything to say; just nodded.
“When’s the sky show?” he said.
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Let’s go.”
They spent the afternoon drifting from exhibit to exhibit, playing with the ones that wanted playing with, enjoying themselves and taking their time. To Nita’s gratification, Dairine stayed mostly out of their way. She did attach herself to them for the sky show, which may have been lucky; for Dairine got fascinated by the big Zeiss star projector, standing under the dome like a giant lens-studded dumbbell, and only threats of violence kept her out of the open booth that contained the computer-driven controls.
When the sky show was done, Dairine went off to the planetarium store to add a few more books to the several she’d already bought. Nita didn’t see her again until late in the afternoon, when she and Kit were trying out the scales that told you your weight on various planets. Nita had just gotten on the scale for Jupiter, which weighed her in at twenty-one hundred pounds.
“Putting on a little weight, there, Neets,” Dairine said behind her. “Especially up front.”
Nita almost turned around and decked her sister. Their mom had just taken Nita to buy her first bra, and her feelings about this were decidedly mixed-a kind of pride combined with embarrassment, because none of the girls she hung out with had one yet, and she had become the focus of some slight envy. It all made her uncomfortable, and Dairine, sensing this, had been running the subject into the ground for days.
She can stuff it right up! Nita thought fiercely, I am not going to let her get to me! “All muscle, Dair,” she said. “Besides, it’s where you are that counts. Check this out.” She sidestepped to the Mars scale, the needle of which stopped at seven pounds. “Less than the Moon, even.”
“But it’s bigger than the Moon,” Dairine said.
“But not as dense. That’s why its atmosphere’s so thin even though Mars is that big; its mass is too small to hold it-“ Nita heard footsteps, turned around, and saw that she had lost her audience. “Dairine? Where you headed?”
“Bathroom.” Dairine’s voice came from halfway down the stairs to the lower level.
“Well, hurry up, it’s almost closing time.”
Kit, on the Saturn scale, moved over to the Jupiter. “What was that all about?” he said. “I don’t often hear you think these days, but if your dad had heard your mind right after she said that, he would’ve washed your head out with soap.”
“Oh, crap.” She tried the scale for Mercury: three and a half pounds. “I’m growing.”
“You don’t look any taller.”
“Kit!”
“Oh.” He looked at her chest. “Oh. I guess.” He shrugged. “I didn’t notice.”
Oh, thank heaven, Nita thought, and immediately after that, He didn’t notice? She swallowed and said, “Anyway, she’s been riding me. I’m gonna kill her if she keeps it up.”
“Maybe she’s jealous.”
Nita laughed. “Her? Of me?”
“Sure.” Kit got off the scales and began to pace off the space between the scales and the doors to the planetarium proper. “Neets, wake up. You’re a wizard. Here Dairine’s been hot for magic since she was a little kid-any kind, Star Wars, you name it-and all of a sudden, not only does it turn out that there really is such a thing, but you turn up with it. From what you had to tell her to keep her quiet after she found out, Dari knows that you and I do big stuff. She wishes she could get her hands on the power. And there’s no guarantee she ever will.”
“She was into my manual over the last couple of days, I think...”
“So there you are. If she can’t have the magic, she’s gonna twist you around whatever other way she can. I hate to say this, Neets, but she’s a real brat.”
That agreed too well with thoughts Nita had been having, but had rejected. “Well...”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said a woman’s voice from the ceiling speakers down the hall, “the planetarium is now closing. Thank you.”
Nita sighed. Kit punched her lightly in the arm. “Come on,” he said “don’t let her get you down. Let’s go over to the park and get hot dogs. She starts getting on our nerves, we’ll tell her we’ll turn her into a fire hydrant and call in every dog in Manhattan to try her out.”
“Too late,” Nita said. “She already knows we don’t do that kind of thing.”
“She knows you don’t do that kind of thing,” Kit said. “She doesn’t know that I don’t...”
Nita looked at his grim expression and wondered briefly whether the grimness was all faked. “I am starved.”
“So c’mon.”
They headed down the stairs together and came out on the ground floor, by the front doors. In the stairwell, under an arrow pointing toward the basement level, was a sign they had seen earlier that day, and laughed at:
TO MARS, VENUS, AND LADIES’ ROOM
“Wait for me,” Nita said. “She’s probably trying to break into that Venus exhibit to see where the ‘lava’ comes from.”
Kit rolled his eyes. “Being a fire hydrant may be too good for her.”
Nita went down the stairs. “Dari?” she called, annoyed. “Come on before they lock us in.”
It was considerably cooler down here. Nita turned right at the bottom of the stairs and walked quickly through the Venus exhibit, rubbing her upper arms at the chill, which went right through her thin T-shirt. Someone had turned off the sluggishly erupting Venerian volcano behind its murky glass wall; no one was to be seen anywhere else, all the way down to the temporary plasterboard wall with the sign that said MARS CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS.
“Don’t tell me she’s still in the toilet,” Nita muttered, annoyed. Reading, probably. One of these days she’s gonna fall in. She went back the way she had come, past the stairs, to the ladies’ room. It was not only cold down here, there was a draft. She grabbed the handle of the door and pulled; it resisted her slightly, and there was a faint hoo noise, air sliding through the door crack as she tugged. “Dari? Come on, we’re leaving!” Nita pulled harder, the door came open-
Air blew hard past her and ruffled her hair into her eyes. Bitter cold smote the front of her, and in it the humidity in the air condensed out instantly, whipping past Nita through the sucking air as stinging, dust-fine snow.
Nita was looking through the doorway into a low rust-red wasteland: nothing but stones in all sizes, cracked, tumbled, piled, with dun dust blowing between them. Close, much too close to be normal, lay a horizon hazed in blood-brown, shading up through translucent brick color, rose, violet, a hard dark blue, and above everything, black with stars showing. Low in the crystalline rose burned a small pinkish sun, fierce, distant-looking, and cold. Nita flinched from the unsoftened sight of it, from the long, harsh shadows it laid out behind every smallest stone. She slammed the ladies’ room door shut. Air kept moaning past her, through the cracks, out into the dry red wasteland. “Mars,” she breathed, and terror grabbed her heart and squeezed. “She went to Mars... ”