The night before we took off I had trouble getting to sleep; it seemed like I kept hearing the doors to the house opening and slamming shut. When I got up Alice was already dressed, as though she had never even been to bed. We both hurried to the flyer. We were carrying almost nothing with us, if ignore my black leather briefcase, and Alice’s shoulder bag, where the swim fins and harpoon for underwater hunting had been tied. The morning was cold, chilly, and bright. The meteorologists had promised to give us rain after supper, but, as always, they had been off in their timing and the rain had come just before dawn. The streets were empty; we had already said good-byes to our relatives and friends and had promised to write from every planet.

The flyer cruised slowly over the streets and drifted west to the space port; I gave piloting over to Alice and pulled out my reader, scrolling down the enormous list, re-examining and cross- checking for the thousandth time because Captain Poloskov had sworn to me that if we could not kick of three tons of payload, at the very least, we would never make it off the planet.

I was paying no attention to our approach to the space port; Alice was clearly concentrating on something, but what it was not was flying, which she had completely forgotten about. She was so distracted she landed the flyer at the base of another ship, a freighter loading piglets for Venus.

At the sight of a car dropping out of the sky the piglets scattered in every direction, the robots herding them rushed to catch the fugitives, and the human in charge of the loading cursed me out for trusting a landing to a small child.

“She’s not so small.” I answered the freight handler. “She just finished second grade.”

“Even worse.” The freight handler said, clutching a just caught squealing piglet to his chest. “There’s no way we’ll catch them all before sundown!”

I glared at Alice, took the control rod from her, and moved the car to the white disk of the Pegasus.