Have space suit-- will travel by Robert A. Heinlein Read Free Book Online

“rocket ship.” It made no noise but a whoosh and there weren’t any flaming jets-it seemed to move by clean living and righteous thoughts.
    I was too busy keeping from being squashed to worry about details. A space suit in one gravity is no track suit; it’s a good thing I had practiced. The ship sat down where I had just been, occupying more than its share of pasture, a big black shape.
    The other one whooshed down, too, just as a door opened in the first. Light poured through the door; two figures spilled out and started to run. One moved like a cat; the other moved clumsily and slowly-handicapped by a space suit. S’help me, a person in a space suit does look silly. This one was less than five feet tall and looked like the Gingerbread Man.
    A big trouble with a suit is your limited angle of vision. I was trying to watch both of them and did not see the second ship open. The first figure stopped, waiting for the one in the space suit to catch up, then suddenly collapsed-just a gasping sound, “Eeeah!”-and clunk.
    You can tell the sound of pain. I ran to the spot at a lumbering dogtrot, leaned over and tried to see what was wrong, tilting my helmet to bring the beam of my headlight onto the ground.
    A bug-eyed monster-
    That’s not fair but it was my first thought. I couldn’t believe it and would have pinched myself except that it isn’t practical when suited up.
    An unprejudiced mind (which mine wasn’t) would have said that this monster was rather pretty. It was small, not more than half my size, and its curves were graceful, not as a girl is but more like a leopard, although it wasn’t shaped like either one. I couldn’t grasp its shape-I didn’t have any pattern to fit it to; it wouldn’t add up.
    But I could see that it was hurt. Its body was quivering like a frightened rabbit. It had enormous eyes, open but milky and featureless, as if nictitating membranes were across them. What appeared to be its mouth-
    That’s as far as I got. Something hit me in the spine, right between the gas bottles.
    I woke up on a bare floor, staring at a ceiling. It took several moments to recall what had happened and then I shied away because it was so darn silly. I had been out for a walk in Oscar . . . and then a space ship had landed . . . and a bug-eyed-
    I sat up suddenly as I realized that Oscar was gone. A light cheerful voice said, “Hi, there!”
    I snapped my head around. A kid about ten years old was seated on the floor, leaning against a wall. He-I corrected myself. Boys don’t usually clutch rag dolls. This kid was the age when the difference doesn’t show much and was dressed in shirt, shorts and dirty tennis shoes, and had short hair, so I didn’t have much to go on but the rag dolly.
    “Hi, yourself,” I answered. “What are we doing here?”
    “I’m surviving. I don’t know about you.”
    “Huh?”
    “Surviving. Pushing my breath in and out. Conserving my strength. There’s nothing else to do at the moment; they’ve got us locked in.”
    I looked around. The room was about ten feet across, four-sided but wedge-shaped, and nothing in it but us. I couldn’t see a door; if we weren’t locked, we might as well be. “Who locked us in?”
    “Them. Space pirates. And him.”
    “Space pirates? Don’t be silly!”
    The kid shrugged. “Just my name for them. But better not think they’re silly if you want to keep on surviving. Are you ‘Junebug’?”
    “Huh? You sound like a junebug yourself. Space pirates, my aunt!” I was worried and very confused and this nonsense didn’t help. Where was Oscar? And where was I?
    “No, no, not a junebug but ‘Junebug’-a radio call. You see, I’m Peewee.”
    I said to myself, Kip old pal, walk slowly to the nearest hospital and give yourself up. When a radio rig you wired yourself starts looking like a skinny little girl with a rag doll, you’ve flipped. It’s going to be wet packs and tranquilizers and no excitement for you-you’ve blown every