"I don't know where they got the car," he began; his face was set and his eyes were blank.
I kept the tape running, and picked up the parts I'd missed before. Then I sent Teddy off to the playroom, and played back the tape, and thought for a while.
There was a little more, besides what you've read. Parts of it were confused, with some strange words mixed in, and with sentences half-completed, and a feeling of ambivalence or censorship or inhibition of some kind preventing much clarity. Other parts were quite clear. Of these, the only section I have omitted so far that seems to me to belong in the story is this one:—
The baby will have to be born on Earth! They have decided that themselves. And for the first time, I am glad that they cannot communicate with me as perfectly as they do among themselves. I can think some things they do not know about.
We are not coming back. I do not think that I will like it on Earth for very long, and I do not know—neither does Larry—what will happen to us when the Security people find us, and we cannot answer their questions. But—
I am a woman now, and I love like a woman. Larry will not be their pet; so I cannot be. I am not sure that I am fit to be what Larry thinks of as a "human being." He says I must learn to be "my own master." I am not at all sure I could do this, if it were necessary, but fortunately, this is one of Larry's areas of semantic confusion. The feminine of master is mistress, which has various meanings.
Also, there is the distinct possibility, from what Larry says, that we will not, either of us, be allowed even as much liberty as we have here.
There is also the matter of gratitude. They brought me up, took care of me, taught me, loved me, gave me a way of life, and a knowledge of myself, infinitely richer than I could ever have had on Earth. Perhaps they even saved my life, healing me when I was quite possibly beyond the power of Earthly medical science to save. But against all this—
They caused the damage to start with. It was their force-field that wrecked the car and killed my parents. They have paid for it; they are paying for it yet. They will continue to pay, for more years than make sense in terms of a human lifetime. They will continue to wander from planet to planet and system to system, because they have broken their own law, and now may never go home.