THE SQUARE PEGS

By RAY BRADBURY

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Thrilling Wonder Stories October 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Lisabeth stopped screaming because she was tired. Also, there was this room to consider. There was a vast vibration, like being plunged about in the loud interior of a bell. The room was filled with sighs and murmurs of travel. She was in a rocket. Suddenly she recalled the explosion, the plummeting, the Moon riding by in cool space, the Earth gone. Lisabeth turned to a round window deep and blue as a mountain well. It was filled to its brim with evil swift life, movement, vast space monsters lurking with fiery arms, hurrying to some unscheduled destruction. A meteor school flashed by, blinking insane dot-dash codes. She put her hand out after them.

Then she heard the voices. Sighing, whispering voices.

Quietly, she moved to an iron barred door and peered without a sound through the little window of the locked frame.

"Lisabeth's stopped screaming," a tired woman's voice said. It was Helen.

"Thank heaven," a man's voice sighed. "I'll be raving myself before we reach Asteroid Thirty-six."

A second woman's voice said, irritably, "Are you sure this will work? Is it the best thing for Lisabeth?"

"She'll be better off than she was on Earth," cried the man.

"We might have asked her if she wanted to take this trip, at least, John."

John swore. "You can't ask an insane sister what she wants!"

"Insane? Don't use that word!"

"Insane she is," John said, bluntly. "For honesty's sake, call a spade a spade. There was no question of asking her to come on this trip. We simply had to make her do it, that's all."

Listening to them talk, Lisabeth's white fingers trembled on the caged room wall. They were like voices from some warm dream, far away, on a telephone, talking in another language.

"The sooner we get her there and settled on 

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