Mike looked down at his coffee cup, watching the slight wavering of the surface as it broke up the reflected light from the glow panels. He had invited this girl down to his stateroom (he told himself) to get information about Snookums. But now he realized that information about the girl herself was far more important.
“How long have you been working with Snookums?” he asked, without looking up from his coffee.
“Over eight years,” she said.
Then Mike looked up. “You know, you hardly look old enough. You don’t look much older than twenty-five.”
She smiled—a little shyly, Mike thought. “As Snookums says, ‘You’re nice.’ I’m twenty-six.”
“And you’ve been working with Snookums since you were eighteen?”
“Uh-huh.” She looked, very suddenly, much younger than even the twenty-five Mike had guessed at. She seemed to be more like a somewhat bashful teen-ager who had been educated in a convent. “I was what they call an ‘exceptional child.’ My mother died when I was seven, and Dad ... well, he just didn’t know what to do with a baby girl, I guess. He was a kind man, and I think he really loved me, but he just didn’t know what to do with me. So when the tests showed that I was ... brighter ... than the average, he put me in a special school in Italy. Said he didn’t want my mind cramped by being forced to conform to the mental norm. Maybe he even believed that himself.
“And, too, he didn’t approve of public education. He had a lot of odd ideas.
“Anyway, I saw him during summer vacations and went to school the rest of the year. He took me all over the world when I was with him, and the instructors were pretty wonderful people; I’m not sorry that I was brought up that way. It was a little different from the education that most children have, but it gave me a chance to use my mind.”
“I know the school,” said Mike the Angel. “That’s the one under the Cesare Alfieri Institute in Florence?”