Probability Space Read Free

they’d know that Amanda had come home early, had been in the house. Then they might come to get her, too.
    Maybe they were already on the way!
    She had to leave, now, right away. But she couldn’t go to Carol’s sister, where Carol and Sudie were visiting, because the bad people would surely know where Carol and Sudie were. Then they’d get Amanda. And she couldn’t let that happen because she was the only one who had actually seen her father get taken away. She was an eyewitness. She had to get help for her father, and it had to be somebody she could absolutely trust, and it had to be somebody the bad people wouldn’t suspect she’d go to, and it had to be somebody rich and powerful enough to help. Amanda knew that, too, from holo shows.
    Marbet Grant. On Luna.
    All the breath went out of Amanda and she almost cried with relief. Marbet was perfect. No one would think of looking for Amanda on Luna. And Marbet was the nicest, smartest, best person Amanda knew. Secretly Amanda had hoped her father would marry Marbet. Although Carol was nice, too, and maybe Carol was better for her father because Marbet was a Sensitive and her father was too ornery to want somebody guessing with such high probability what he was thinking all the time.
    Now that the decision was made, Amanda turned efficient. She ran to her room, put on shoes, and crammed her dance bag with a few clean clothes and toiletries. All the time, she was thinking furiously. Her father had given her the code to the safe. She made House open it and pulled out her passport—but if she used it, couldn’t she be traced? She took it anyway, plus all the money chips. Then she added the small blue plastic pouch with the stones from the vug.
    The vug. A sparkling cave on the planet World, like Aladdin’s cave in the story. Her father and Dieter Gruber had taken her and Sudie there, just once, when her father was making his important physics discoveries on World. Dieter had let Amanda and Sudie take double handfuls of the diamonds and gold nuggets on the cave floor and walls. Sudie had only wanted to play with them, but Amanda had been interested in how the gems got there. “Once this was the caldera of a volcano, right here,” Dieter had said. “The gold precipitates out from circulating water heated by magma.” It seemed so long ago. She’d been such a child.
    Amanda put the bag of gems into her pocket, which was the first time she realized she was still wearing her mother’s dress. Well, good. It would make her look older. Wait … yes! Quickly she ran back to her father’s room, grabbed a handful of Carol’s makeup from her drawer, and shoved it in the dance bag.
    She turned off House’s surveillance and left by the kitchen door. Quickly she disappeared into the dark woods behind the house. She and her friends played in these woods all the time; Amanda knew them well. “Manicured woods,” her father always called them, “suburban Trianons with low probability of actual wildlife.” Well, so what.
    The woods smelled of spring earth, rich and fresh. It was cold under the trees, and Amanda shivered as she hurried, surefooted, along the moonlit paths. She’d forgotten her jacket.
    Fifteen minutes later, she emerged on the other side of the woods, several blocks from home. She walked to the corner and caught a maglev to Cambridge. No one questioned her; the bus was full of kids just a little older than she was. (And her father said she was too young to ride the train alone at night!) Amanda sat in the last seat, propped Carol’s hand mirror on her knees, and applied Carol’s makeup, pursing her lips critically.
    Now she looked much older. Maybe even sixteen.
    What if the kidnappers killed her father?
    They wouldn’t kill him. Low probability! He was a famous physicist, and that was the only reason to kidnap him, so they probably wanted him alive to do physics for them. Yes. She had to stop thinking about what might happen to him and concentrate all her