I haven't had time to write in this journal for days.  Just getting ready to leave was almost impossible - and would have been truly impossible had it not been that most preparations - all the special Terran inoculations and photographs and passports and such - were mostly done before Everything Came Unstuck.  But Mother came out of her atavistic daze and was very helpful.  She would even let one of the triplets cry for a few moments rather than leave me half pinned up.

I don't know how Clark got ready or whether he had any preparations to make.  He continued to creep around silently, answering in grunts if he answered at all.  Nor did Uncle Tom seem to find it difficult.  I saw him only twice during those frantic ten days (once to borrow baggage mass from his allowance, which he let me have, the dear!) and both times I had to dig him out of the card room at the Elks Club.  I asked him how he managed to get ready for so important a trip and still have time to play cards?

"Nothing to it," he answered.  "I bought a new toothbrush.  Is there something else I should have done?"

So I hugged him and told him he was an utterly utter beast and he chuckled and mussed my hair.  Query: Will I ever become that blasé about space travel?  I suppose I must if I am to be an astronaut.  But Daddy says that getting ready for a trip is half the fun... so perhaps I don't want to become that sophisticated.

Somehow Mother delivered me, complete with baggage and all the myriad pieces of paper - tickets and medical records and passport and universal identification complex and guardians' assignment-and-guarantee and three kinds of money and travelers' cheques and birth record and police certification and security clearance and I don't remember - all checked off, to the city shuttle port.  I was juggling one package of things that simply wouldn't  go into my luggage, and I had one hat on my head and one in my hand; otherwise everything came out even.

(I don't know where that second hat went.  Somehow it never got aboard with me.  But I haven't missed it.)

Good-bye at the shuttle port was most teary and exciting.  Not just with Mother and Daddy, which was to be expected (when Daddy put his arm around me tight, I threw both mine around him and for a dreadful second I didn't want to leave at all), but also because about thirty of my classmates showed up (which I hadn't in the least expected), complete with a banner that two of them were carrying reading:

BON VOYAGE - PODKAYNE

I got kissed enough times to start a fair-sized epidemic if any one of them had had anything, which apparently they didn't.  I got kissed by boys who had never even tried to, in the past - and I assure you that it is not utterly impossible to kiss me, if the project is approached with confidence and finesse, as I believe that one's instincts should be allowed to develop as well as one's overt cortical behavior.

The corsage Daddy had given me for going away got crushed and I didn't even notice it until we were aboard the shuttle.  I suppose it was somewhere about then that I lost that hat, but I'll never know - I would have lost the last-minute package, too, if Uncle Tom had not rescued it.  There were photographers, too, but not for me - for Uncle Tom.  Then suddenly we had to scoot aboard the shuttle right now because a shuttle can't wait; it has to boost on the split second even though Deimos moves so much more slowly than Phobos.  A reporter from the War Whoop was still trying to get a statement out of Uncle Tom about the forthcoming Three-Planets conference but he just pointed at his throat and whispered, "Laryngitis" - then we were aboard just before they sealed the airlock.

It must have been the shortest case of laryngitis on record; Uncle Tom's voice had been all right until we got to the shuttle port and it was okay again once we were in the shuttle.