Kath looked down at her hands, her cheeks turning a faint pink. “Don’t pay any attention to them,” she said, but she didn’t suggest picking up their bowling game again.
The girls from the G.A.A. down at the far end hadn’t noticed they had an audience. They were still getting their lesson from Miss Weiland, who was instructing them on the proper way to walk toward the lane. “The footwork is unhurried—you don’t need to run at the lane,” Lily heard her say. Her voice carried clearly in a break between the echoing, musical sounds of bowling balls crashing into pins. She watched Miss Weiland take her stance and begin her approach to the lane, her arm swinging back and releasing the ball, her right leg extending backward in that bowling lane curtsy. Miss Weiland was wearing trim-fitting khaki pants rather than a skirt, and Lily wondered if Miss Weiland had done that on purpose.
“Now, you see, you swing the ball back like a pendulum and simply let it go,” Miss Weiland was saying.
Miss Weiland’s bowling ball spun down the right side of the lane and then hooked toward the center, rolling right into the space between the center pin and the one to its right. The crack of collision echoed as the pins tumbled over. Lily could imagine it illustrated in a cartoon with the jagged-edged star of an explosion, and she immediately thought of rockets. “It’s all physics,” she said suddenly.
“What?” Kath said, puzzled.
“The bowling ball hitting the pins—it’s Newton’s third law. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It’s how rockets work.”
“I think you’ve lost me.”
“Sorry. Do you want me to explain?”
“Sure.”
Lily reached for her book bag and pulled out a notebook, and began to draw a diagram with a rocket and a stick figure of a human being. Kath, sitting beside her, leaned over to watch as she drew. “How do you know all this?” Kath asked.
“I’ve read about it,” Lily said, trying to ignore the brush of Kath’s knee against her leg. “And my aunt Judy has explained some of it to me.”
“I’d love to go on a rocket.”
“People can’t go on rockets. It’s too dangerous.”
“Isn’t that why it would be fun?”
Kath was close enough that Lily could feel the warmth from her body. “Not—not for me. I get sick when the cable car goes downhill too fast.”
“I’d definitely go.” Kath leaned back, her shoulder grazing Lily’s. “Can you imagine how exciting it would be to go to the moon or to Mars?”
“Arthur C. Clarke says it would take about two hundred and fifty days to reach Mars. As long as a rocket can reach escape velocity, it doesn’t take much more energy to keep flying all the way to Mars.”
“How long would it take to get to the moon?”
“Five days or less. If we left tomorrow, we could be there by Tuesday! But we don’t have the ability yet to launch a rocket that can escape Earth’s gravity. And it’s very dangerous.” Lily tapped her pencil against her notebook, her equations forgotten. “We’d have to shield the crew—if there was a crew—from radiation. It would be much safer to send automatic instruments.” She gestured excitedly with her pencil and said, “Robots!”
The pencil nearly stabbed Kath in the leg. “Careful,” Kath said, laughing, and reached for Lily’s hand.
“Sorry,” Lily said, blushing.
Kath eased the pencil from Lily’s fingers and set it down on the bench. “Let’s say you invent a rocket that can do it—”
“It’s a fuel problem,” Lily said.
“Right, fuel. Let’s say we get that right, and we can get people onto this rocket. What do you think it would be like to go to the moon?”
“Hmm.” Lily still felt the ghost of Kath’s hand on hers. She tried to focus. “Well, we’d need to develop space suits too. Arthur C. Clarke said they might look like suits of armor—wouldn’t that be funny?”
“Why suits of armor?”
“Because of the pressure. There’s no pressure on the moon, so the suit would probably have to be rigid.”
“So we’d be wearing suits of armor on the moon? Like King Arthur and his knights? I guess if you meet some aliens, then you’d be prepared.” Kath reached for the pencil and brandished it as if it were a sword. “En garde, aliens!”
Lily burst into laughter, and her notebook slid off her lap onto the floor. Kath picked it up to use as a shield, standing to strike a heroic pose. Lily covered her mouth, still laughing, and out of the corner of her eye she saw the group of men again. She had almost forgotten about them. Now they seemed somewhat pathetic; they were middle-aged and balding, dressed in ugly plaid shirts. There was a desperation to the way they were eyeing the girls. Whatever danger she had sensed from their attention had turned to pity, and with a burst of inspiration she stood up and went to the ball rack.
“You see, I’ll show you—it’s physics,” she joked to Kath. There was a certain pleasure in knowing that Kath was watching her, that Kath would keep her eyes trained on Lily’s body as she released the bowling ball to spin down the lane—inexpertly, to be sure—and when the ball struck only one of the pins on the left side, she shrugged. “I’m not good, but it’s still conservation of momentum. The moment the ball strikes the pins is exactly like the moment a rocket launches from the ground—it’s an explosion.”
Kath came to pick up her bowling ball. “I think you’ve lost me with your analogy, but I don’t think I need to know how it works. You’re the one who’s going to build the rockets, right?”
Lily smiled. “Right.”
She stepped back to give Kath room to bowl, and also to block the men’s view.
18