up the shelf with horrible speed and came to rest at the top of it, balancing its fat, hairy body on several long, thick legs—each one of which was tipped with a chitinous claw.
Penny shrieked and stumbled backwards, landing on her behind in her haste to escape. She scrambled to her feet and started to run but the old woman was suddenly blocking her path.
“No, no, dearie,” she said calmly. “Don’t you worry—a Keeper won’t leave its store, no it won’t. Not unless you take from it. Of course,” she went on, going to stand not three feet from the menacing spider-thing which was still balancing on the top of the shelf and staring at Penny with eight bulbous eyes. “Of course, if you’d stolen one of the Keeper’s lures, then it would have chased you down and had you for its dinner, so it would.”
“It…it would?” Penny couldn’t believe the old woman was standing so close to the huge, hairy Keeper without being attacked. But the spider-thing just sat there on the top of the shelf, swaying from side to side, and hissing faintly through its jagged mandibles.
“Why, a‘course it would!” the old woman said.
“A’course! A’course!” squeaked her second head, opening and shutting its eyes.
“Hush, you.” The old woman swatted the little head gently, which only made it open and close its eyes more rapidly. “My twin,” she said to Penny, who was watching the display uncertainly. “She’s a pain in m’rump, so she is, but I’m stuck with her, ‘ent I?”
“Um…” Penny wasn’t sure if this was a rhetorical question or not.
“Yes, I am.” The old woman sighed. “Stuck with her is old Granny Two-two.”
“Granny Two-two?” Penny asked.
“Why sure, dearie—that’s what they call me. Granny Two-two. And what might your name be?”
“Oh, I’m Penelope Wainright,” Penny said. “Uh, but people call me Penny.”
“Penny it is then.” Granny Two-two nodded. “Well, Penny, it seems you don’t know much of what you’re doing around here. Either that or you thought you could outrun a Keeper.”
Penny glanced again at the hairy green spider as big as a large dog and shuddered.
“No.” She shook her head. “No, I never thought that. I’ve never seen a, uh, Keeper before.”
“Never seen a Keeper before? Why then, you must not have been aboard Hell’s Gate very long,” Granny Two-two remarked.
“No, I haven’t,” Penny confessed. “In fact, we just docked here a few hours ago to make repairs to our ship.”
“We? Our?” Granny Two-two squinted at her with both heads. “I don’t see but one of you, child. Unless you’ve got a twin hidden on you somewhere?” she asked.
“Twin! Twin!” the second head shouted at the top of its squeaky voice, staring at Penny with renewed interest.
“No, I don’t, honestly. I don’t have a, uh, twin,” Penny said hastily. “I was talking about my shipmates. But unfortunately they got caught in a temporal anomaly. I mean, I think they did, anyway. They seem frozen in time and they’re just stuck there.”
“I see.” Granny Two-two nodded, apparently unsurprised to hear this. “And where did you dock, child?”
“Back that way—at the end of the station.” Penny pointed down the long metal corridor, back the way she’d come.
Granny Two-two shook her head and clucked her tongue.
“Well, no wonder you got stuck in a time-suck if you docked down there! Why, nobody’s used that end of Hell’s Gate for the past thirty cycles at least, ‘cause the sucks are so bad.”
“Time-suck! Time-suck!” her second head crowed.
“Hush, you.” Granny Two-two swatted at it again. “The wonder of it is,” she went on, talking to Penny. “That you got out at all. Most folks get stuck in a suck the minute they try to dock and then that’s the end of them, don’t you know.”
“No, I didn’t know or we never would have docked there,” Penny said. “Please, can you help me? My, uh, friends got stuck in kind of an awkward position and the part of the ship they’re in is where the communications devices and viewscreen are. Is there any way to get them free from the, uh, time-suck?”
“’Fraid not, dearie.” Granny Two-two shook her head and the second head shouted,
“Not! Not!”
“Not unless you can move as fast as a quick-loris, anyway,” Granny Two-two went on, after swatting at the second head again.
“A quick-loris? What’s that?” Penny asked.
“Come with me, dearie, and I’ll show you.” Turning, the old woman stamped off down the corridor in the direction Penny had been heading in the first place.
There didn’t seem to be anything