I naturally wondered whether Pop might not know more about
navigating this plane than he let on, a whole lot more in fact, and the
seemingly idiotic petulance of his pushing all the buttons have been a
shrewd cover for pushing the Atla-Hi button. But if Pop had been acting
he'd been acting beautifully, with a serene disregard for the chances of
breaking his own neck. I decided this was a possibility I could think
about later and maybe act on then, after Alice and me had worked through
the more obvious stuff.

The reason we hadn't tried the one button yet was that it showed a green
nimbus, just like the Atla-Hi button had had a violet nimbus. Now there
was no green on either of the screens except for the tiny green star
that I had figured stood for the plane and it didn't make sense to go
where we already were. And if it meant some other place, some place not
shown on the screens, you bet we weren't going to be too quick about
deciding to go there. It might not be on Earth.

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 sc