Podkayne of Mars (3 page)

So we suddenly had month-old triplets.

The lawyer man from the crèche was very vague about how it happened; he obviously did not want to discuss how their “foolproof” identification system could result in such a mixup. So I don’t know myself—but it seems logically certain that, for all their serial numbers, babies’ footprints, record machines, et cetera, there is some point in the system where one clerk read aloud “Breeze” from the radioed order and another clerk checked a file, then punched “Fries” into a machine that did the rest.

But the fixer man did not say. He was simply achingly anxious to get Mother and Daddy to settle out of court—accept a check and sign a release under which they agreed not to publicize the error.

They settled for three years of Mother’s established professional earning power while the little fixer man gulped and looked relieved.

But nobody offered to pay
me
for the mayhem that had been committed on my life, my hopes, and my ambitions.

Clark did offer a suggestion that was almost a sensible one, for him. He proposed that we swap even with the Breezes, let them keep the warm ones, we could keep the cold ones. Everybody happy—and we all go to Earth.

My brother is far too self-centered to realize it, but the Angel of Death brushed him with its wings at that point. Daddy is a truly noble soul . . . but he had had almost more than he could stand.

And so have I. I had expected today to be actually on my way to Earth, my first space trip farther than Phobos—which was merely a school field trip, our “Class Honeymoon.” A nothing thing.

Instead, guess what I’m doing.

Do you have any idea how many times a day
three
babies have to be changed?

THREE

Hold it! Stop the machines! Wipe the tapes! Cancel
all bulletins—

WE ARE GOING TO EARTH
AFTER ALL!!!!

Well, not
all
of us. Daddy and Mother aren’t going, and of course, the triplets are not. But—Never mind; I had better tell it in order.

Yesterday things just got to be Too Much. I had changed them in rotation, only to find as I got the third one dry and fresh that number one again needed service. I had been thinking sadly that just about that moment I should have been entering the dining saloon of S.S.
Wanderlust
to the strains of soft music. Perhaps on the arm of one of the officers . . . perhaps even on the arm of the Captain himself had I the chance to arrange an accidental Happy Encounter, then make judicious use of my “puzzled kitten” expression.

And, as I reached that point in my melancholy daydream, it was then that I discovered that my chores had started all over again. I thought of the Augean Stables and suddenly it was just Too Much and my eyes got blurry with tears.

Mother came in at that point and I asked if I could
please
have a couple of hours of recess?

She answered, “Why, certainly dear,” and didn’t even glance at me. I’m sure that she didn’t notice that I was crying; she was already doing over, quite unnecessarily, the one that I had just done. She had been tied up on the phone, telling someone firmly that, while it was true as reported that she was not leaving Mars, nevertheless she would not now accept another commission even as a consultant—and no doubt being away from the infants for all of ten minutes had made her uneasy, so she just had to get her hands on one of them.

Mother’s behavior had been utterly unbelievable. Her cortex has tripped out of circuit and her primitive instincts are in full charge. She reminds me of a cat we had when I was a little girl—Miss Polka Dot Ma’am and her first litter of kittens. Miss Pokie loved and trusted all of us—except about kittens. If we touched one of them, she was uneasy about it. If a kitten was taken out of her box and placed on the floor to be admired, she herself would hop out, grab the kitten in her teeth and immediately return it to the box, with an indignant waggle to her seat that showed all too plainly what she thought of irresponsible people who didn’t know how to handle babies.

Mother is just like that now. She accepts my help simply because there is too much for her to do alone. But she doesn’t really believe that I can even pick up a baby without close supervision.

So I left and followed my own blind instincts, which told me to go look up Uncle Tom.

I found him at the Elks Club, which was reasonably certain at that time of day, but I had to wait in the ladies’ lounge until he came out of the card room. Which he did in about ten minutes, counting a wad of money as he came. “Sorry to make you wait,” he said, “but I was teaching a fellow citizen about the uncertainties in the laws of chance and I had to stay long enough to collect the tuition. How marches it, Podkayne mavourneen?”

I tried to tell him and got all choked up, so he walked me to the park under the city hall and sat me on a bench and bought us both packages of Choklatpops, and I ate mine and most of his and watched the stars on the ceiling and told him all about it and felt better.

He patted my hand. “Cheer up, Flicka. Always remember that, when things seem darkest, they usually get considerably worse.” He took his phone out of a pocket and made a call. Presently he said, “Never mind the protocol routine, miss. This is Senator Fries. I want the Director.” Then he added in a moment, “Hymie? Tom Fries here. How’s Judith? Good, good . . . Hymie, I just called to tell you that I’m coming over to stuff you into one of your own liquid helium tanks. Oh, say about fourteen or a few minutes after. That’ll give you time to get out of town. Clearing.” He pocketed his phone. “Let’s get some lunch. Never commit suicide on an empty stomach, my dear; it’s bad for the digestion.”

Uncle Tom took me to the Pioneers Club where I have been only once before and which is even more impressive than I had recalled—It has
real waiters
. . . men so old that they might have been pioneers themselves, unless they met the first ship. Everybody fussed over Uncle Tom and he called them all by their first names and they all called him “Tom” but made it sound like “Your Majesty” and the master of the hostel came over and prepared my sweet himself with about six other people standing around to hand him things, like a famous surgeon operating against the swift onrush of death.

Presently Uncle Tom belched behind his napkin and I thanked everybody as we left while wishing that I had had the forethought to wear my unsuitable gown that Mother won’t let me wear until I’m nine and almost made me take back—one doesn’t get to the Pioneers Club every day.

We took the James Joyce Fogarty Express Tunnel and Uncle Tom sat down the whole way, so I had to sit, too, although it makes me restless; I prefer to walk in the direction a tunnel is moving and get there a bit sooner. But Uncle Tom says that he gets plenty of exercise watching other people work themselves to death.

I didn’t really realize that we were going to the Marsopolis Crèche until we were there, so bemused had I been earlier with my own tumultuous emotions. But when we were there and facing a sign reading: OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR—PLEASE USE OTHER DOOR, Uncle Tom said, “Hang around somewhere; I’ll need you later,” and went on in.

The waiting room was crowded and the only magazines not in use were
Kiddie Kapers
and
Modern Homemaker,
so I wandered around a bit and presently found a corridor that led to the Nursery.

The sign on the door said that visiting hours were from 16 to 18.30. Furthermore, it was locked, so I moved on and found another door which seemed much more promising. It was marked: POSITIVELY NO ADMITTANCE—but it didn’t say “This Means You” and it wasn’t locked, so I went in.

You never saw so many babies in your whole life!

Row upon row upon row, each in its own little transparent cubicle. I could really see only the row nearest me, all of which seemed to be about the same age—and much more finished than the three we had at home. Little brown dumplings they were, cute as puppies. Most of them were asleep, some were awake and kicking and cooing and grabbing at dangle toys that were just in reach. If there had not been a sheet of glass between me and them I would have grabbed me a double armful of babies.

There were a lot of girls in the room, too—well, young women, really. Each of them seemed to be busy with a baby and they didn’t notice me. But shortly one of the babies nearest me started to cry whereupon a light came on over its cubicle, and one of the nurse girls hurried over, slid back the cover, picked it up and started patting its bottom. It stopped crying.

“Wet?” I inquired.

She looked up, saw me. “Oh, no, the machines take care of that. Just lonely, so I’m loving it.” Her voice came through clearly in spite of the glass—a hear and speak circuit, no doubt, although the pickups were not in evidence. She made soft noises to the baby, then added, “Are you a new employee? You seem to be lost.”

“Oh, no,” I said hastily, “I’m not an employee. I just—”

“Then you don’t belong here, not at this hour. Unless”—she looked at me rather skeptically—“just possibly you are looking for the instruction class for young mothers?”

“Oh, no, no!” I said hastily. “Not yet.” Then I added still more hastily, “I’m a guest of the Director.”

Well, it wasn’t a fib. Not quite. I was a guest of a guest of the Director, one who was with him by appointment. The relationship was certainly concatenative, if not equivalent.

It seemed to reassure her. She asked, “Just what did you want? Can I help you?”

“Uh, just information. I’m making a sort of a survey. What goes on in this room?”

“These are age six-month withdrawal contracts,” she told me. “All these babies will be going home in a few days.” She put the baby, quiet now, back into its private room, adjusted a nursing nipple for it, made some other sort of adjustments on the outside of the cubicle so that the padding inside sort of humped up and held the baby steady against the milk supply, then closed the top, moved on a few meters and picked up another baby. “Personally,” she added, “I think the age six-month contract is the best one. A child twelve months old is old enough to notice the transition. But these aren’t. They don’t care who comes along and pets them when they cry . . . but nevertheless six months is long enough to get a baby well started and take the worst of the load off the mother. We know how, we’re used to it, we stand our watches in rotation so that we are never exhausted from being ‘up with the baby all night’ . . . and in consequence we aren’t short-tempered and we never yell at them—and don’t think for a minute that a baby doesn’t understand a cross tone of voice simply because he can’t talk yet. He knows! And it can start him off so twisted that he may take it out on somebody else, years and years later. There, there, honey,” she went on but not to me, “feel better now? Feeling sleepy, huh? Now you just hold still and Martha will keep her hand on you until you are fast asleep.”

She watched the baby for a moment longer, then withdrew her hand, closed the box and hurried on to where another light was burning. “A baby has no sense of time,” she added as she removed a squalling lump of fury from its crib. “When it needs love, it needs it right now. It can’t know that—” An older woman had come up behind her. “Yes, Nurse?”

“Who is this you’re chatting with? You know the rules.”

“But . . . she’s a guest of the Director.”

The older woman looked at me with a stern no-nonsense look. “The Director sent you in here?”

I was making a split-second choice among three non-responsive answers when I was saved by Fate. A soft voice coming from everywhere at once announced: “Miss Podkayne Fries is requested to come to the office of the Director. Miss Podkayne Fries, please come to the office of the Director.”

I tilted my nose in the air and said with dignity, “That is I. Nurse, will you be so kind as to phone the Director and tell him that Miss Fries is on her way?” I exited with deliberate haste.

 

 

The Director’s office was four times as big and sixteen times as impressive as the principal’s office at school. The Director was short and had a dark brown skin and a gray goatee and a harried expression. In addition to him and to Uncle Tom, of course, there was present the little lawyer man who had had a bad time with Daddy a week earlier—and my brother Clark. I couldn’t figure out how he got there . . . except that Clark has an infallible homing instinct for trouble.

Clark looked at me with no expression; I nodded. The Director and his legal beagle stood up. Uncle Tom didn’t but he said, “Dr. Hyman Schoenstein, Mr. Poon Kwai Yau—my niece. Podkayne Fries. Sit down, honey; nobody is going to bite you. The Director has a proposition to offer you.”

The lawyer man interrupted. “I don’t think—”

“Correct,” agreed Uncle Tom. “You don’t think. Or it would have occurred to you that ripples spread out from a splash.”

“But—Dr. Schoenstein, the release I obtained from Professor Fries explicitly binds him to silence, for separate good and sufficient consideration, over and above damages conceded by us and made good. This is tantamount to blackmail. I—”

Then Uncle Tom did stand up. He seemed twice as tall as usual and was grinning like a fright mask. “What was that last word you used?”

“I?” The lawyer looked startled. “Perhaps I spoke hastily. I simply meant—”

“I heard you,” Uncle Tom growled. “And so did three witnesses. Happens to be one of the words a man can be challenged for on this still free planet. But, since I’m getting old and fat, I may just sue you for your shirt instead. Come along, kids.”

The Director spoke quickly. “Tom . . . sit down, please. Mr. Poon . . . please keep quiet unless I ask for your advice. Now, Tom, you know quite well that you can’t challenge nor sue over a privileged communication, counsel to client.”

“I can do both or either. Question is: will a court sustain me? But I can always find out.”

“And thereby drag out into the open the very point you know quite well I can’t afford to have dragged out. Simply because my lawyer spoke in an excess of zeal. Mr. Poon?”