Alice expressed it by saying, "My namesake was always a little too quick at responding to those DRINK ME cues."
I suppose she thought she was being cryptic, but I fooled her. "Alice in Wonderland?" I asked. She nodded, and gave me a little smile, not at all like one of the EAT ME smiles she'd given me last evening.
It is funny how crazily happy a little touch of the intellectual past like that can make you feel—and how horribly uncomfortable a moment later.
We both started to study the North America screen again and almost at once we realized that it had changed in one small particular. The green star had twinned. Where there had been one point of green light there were now two, very close together like the double star in the handle of the Dipper. We watched it for a while. The distance between the two stars grew perceptibly greater. We watched it for a while longer, considerably longer. It became clear that the position of the more westerly star on the screen was fixed, while the more easterly star was moving east toward Atla-Hi with about the speed of the tip of the minute hand on a wrist watch (two inches an hour, say). The pattern began to make sense.
I figured it this way: the moving star must stand for the plane, the other green dot must stand for where the plane had just been. For some reason the spot on the freeway by the old cracking plant was recognized as a marked locality by the screen. Why I don't know. It reminded me of the old "X Marks the Spot" of newspaper murders, but that would be getting very fancy. Anyway the spot we'd just taken off from was so marked and in that case the button with the green nimbus ...
"Hold tight, everybody," I said to Alice, grudgingly including Pop in my warning. "I got to try it."
I gripped my seat with my knees and one arm and pushed the green button. It pushed.
The plane swung around in a level loop, not too tight to disturb the stomach much, and steadied out again.
I couldn't judge how far we'd swung but Alice and me watched the green stars and after about a minute she said, "They're getting closer," and a little while later I said, "Yeah, for sure."