The family banded together and began cleaning up the hulls of the craft in preparation for the transplant with B-9's help. Locksmith watched from a distance alongside Debbie the Bloop staring down them down watching them peel the metal off the craft then put it on to a makeshift sled on to the unnaturally long porcupine.
It was easy leading the porcupine to and from; dangling a basket of berries in front of it and feeding it every so often leading it to the craft.
It stirred a lot of laughter initially from Penny and Don.
Even Doctor Locksmith's avoidance using his back as a excuse not to be part of the effort.
"Say, Doctor Locksmith do you know what galaxy we are in?" John asked, that following afternoon.
Locksmith was in the middle of eating a chicken leg for lunch when he dropped it to the table then dabbed around his mouth and looked up toward the younger man raising his brows at once
"Excuse me?" Locksmith asked.
"We are not in the milky way galaxy." John said.
"How can you tell?" He lifted a brow.
"It is warped and twisted." John said.
"John. . ." Locksmith paused. "I don't know how to tell you this without you correcting me. . ."
"But?" John asked.
"The milky way is twisted and warped." Locksmith said.
"But it is spiral and very flat." Maureen said.
Locksmith looked at him, incredulously, at the same time as B-9 turned his attention upon him.
"A twisted and warped spiral." B-9 said.
"How do you know that?" Maureen asked, looking at him, turning away from the slowly being expanded space van. "How can you be sure that is correct?"
"For one thing, we befriended some scientists aboard the detention center and got a better look of where we were," Locksmith said.
"I tested the equipment," B-9 said. "It was working adequately."
"Including how far that we are away from our wormhole leading to the area of space that we belong in. It is very far away." Locksmith elaborated. "So far away that it requires a entire destruction of a massive ship just about the size of Fantasia Stazion to send us fast enough to the wormhole right into the time that we belong."
"Without outliving the rest of our unit." B-9 finished.
"And that." Locksmith said. "Is a very a ideal situation."
The Robinsons stopped and stared at his direction.
"You need to blow up a entire mothership just to get home?" John asked. "You could just use a worm hole tunnel to get there."
"But I don't have it," Locksmith said.
"The Jupiter 2 has one." John said.
"It will be a one time use," Locksmith said. "And I doubt the professor would like to entertain using one without a very thorough star chart."
"We would be more lost than before," B-9 said. "For sure."
"Indeed, we would." Locksmith said.
"You could reuse the engine for something else," John said. "Like luring what you want there at a reasonable distance to your wormhole and set off the explosion that you want."
"I would hate to use it since it is very important to your quest," Locksmith said. "It is the Alpha Centauri system that you are headed to."
"It is." Maureen said. "We can give it to you once we get there and the Jupiter 2 can make a controlled descent down with what fuel that will be left behind."
"If we are not three hundred years from Alpha Centauri," John said. "How far are we, really, then?"
"Sixty-five years, probably." Penny said. "Knowing space."
"Possibly." John said then smiled as he watched Maureen beginning to radiate as she looked up toward the sky with her hands on her hips.
Hope.