Podkayne of Mars (2 page)

It was the job Mother did on Deimos that accounts for Clark and myself. Mother was determined to meet her construction dates; and Daddy, on leave from Ares U. with a Guggenheim grant, was even more frantically determined to save every scrap of the ancient Martian artifacts no matter how much it delayed construction; this threw them into such intimate and bitter conflict that they got married and for a while Mother had babies.

Daddy and Mother are Jack Spratt and his wife; he is interested in everything that has already happened, she is interested only in what is going to happen, especially if she herself is making it happen. Daddy’s title is Van Loon Professor of Terrestrial History but his real love is Martian history, especially if it happened fifty million years ago. But do not think that Daddy is a cloistered don given only to contemplation and study. When he was even younger than I am now, he lost an arm one chilly night in the attack on the Company Offices during the Revolution—and he can still shoot straight and fast with the hand he has left.

The rest of our family is Great-Uncle Tom, Daddy’s father’s brother. Uncle Tom is a parasite. So he says. It is true that you don’t see him work much, but he was an old man before I was born. He is a Revolutionary veteran, same as Daddy, and is a Past Grand Commander of the Martian Legion and a Senator-at-Large of the Republic, but he doesn’t seem to spend much time on either sort of politics, Legion or public; instead he hangs out at the Elks Club and plays pinochle with other relics of the past. Uncle Tom is really my closest relative, for he isn’t as intense as my parents, nor as busy, and will always take time to talk with me. Furthermore he has a streak of Original Sin which makes him sympathetic to my problems. He says that I have such a streak, too, much wider than his. Concerning this, I reserve my opinion.

That’s our family and we are all going to Earth. Wups! I left out three—the infants. But they hardly count now and it is easy to forget them. When Daddy and Mother got married, the PEG Board—Population, Ecology, & Genetics—pegged them at five and would have allowed them seven had they requested it, for, as you may have gathered, my parents are rather high-grade citizens even among planetary colonials all of whom are descended from, or are themselves, highly selected and drastically screened stock.

But Mother told the Board that five was all that she had time for and then had us as fast as possible, while fidgeting at a desk job in the Bureau of Planetary Engineering. Then she popped her babies into deep-freeze as fast as she had them, all but me, since I was the first. Clark spent two years at constant entropy, else he would be almost as old as I am—deep-freeze time doesn’t count, of course, and his official birthday is the day he was decanted. I remember how jealous I was—Mother was just back from conditioning Juno and it didn’t seem fair to me that she would immediately start raising a baby.

Uncle Tom talked me out of that, with a lot of lap sitting, and I am no longer jealous of Clark—merely wary.

So we’ve got Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon in the sub-basement of the crèche at Marsopolis, and we’ll uncork and name at least one of them as soon as we get back from Earth. Mother is thinking of revivifying Gamma and Epsilon together and raising them as twins (they’re girls) and then launching Delta, who is a boy, as soon as the girls are house-broken. Daddy says that is not fair, because Delta is entitled to be older than Epsilon by natural priority of birth date. Mother says that is mere worship of precedent and that she does wish Daddy would learn to leave his reverence for the past on the campus when he comes home in the evening.

Daddy says that Mother has no sentimental feelings—and Mother says she certainly hopes not, at least with any problem requiring rational analysis—and Daddy says let’s be rational, then . . . twin older sisters would either break a boy’s spirit or else spoil him rotten.

Mother says that is unscientific and unfounded. Daddy says that Mother merely wants to get two chores out of the way at once—whereupon Mother heartily agrees and demands to know why proved production engineering principles should not be applied to domestic economy?

Daddy doesn’t answer this. Instead he remarks thoughtfully that he must admit that two little girls dressed just alike would be kind of cute . . . name them “Margret” and “Marguerite” and call them “Peg” and “Meg”—

Clark muttered to me, “Why uncork them at all? Why not just sneak down some night and open the valves and call it an accident?”

I told him to go wash out his mouth with prussic acid and not let Daddy hear him talk that way. Daddy would have walloped him properly. Daddy, although a historian, is devoted to the latest, most progressive theories of child psychology and applies them by canalizing the cortex through pain association whenever he really wants to ensure that a lesson will not be forgotten. As he puts it so neatly: “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”

I canalize most readily and learned very early indeed how to predict and avoid incidents which would result in Daddy’s applying his theories and his hand. But in Clark’s case it is almost necessary to use a club simply to gain his divided attention.

So it is now clearly evident that we are going to have twin baby sisters. But it is no headache of mine, I am happy to say, for Clark is quite enough maturing trauma for one girl’s adolescence. By the time the twins are a current problem I expect to be long gone and far away.

INTERLUDE

So you think I can’t read your worm tracks.

A lot you know about me! Poddy—oh, excuse me, “Captain” Podkayne Fries, I mean, the famous Space Explorer and Master of Men—Captain Poddy dear, you probably will never read this because it wouldn’t occur to you that I not only would break your “code” but also write comments in the big, wide margins you leave.

Just for the record, Sister dear, I read Old Anglish just as readily as I do System Ortho. Anglish isn’t all that hard and I learned it as soon as I found out that a lot of books I wanted to read had never been translated. But it doesn’t pay to tell everything you know, or somebody comes along and tells you to stop doing whatever it is you are doing. Probably your older sister.

But imagine calling a straight substitution a “code”! Poddy, if you had actually been able to write Old Martian, it would have taken me quite a lot longer. But you can’t. Shucks, even Dad can’t write it without stewing over it and he probably knows more about Old Martian than anyone else in the System.

But you won’t crack my code—because I haven’t any.

Try looking at this page under ultraviolet light—a sun lamp, for example.

TWO

Dirty ears! Hangnails! Snel-frockey!
Spit!
WE AREN’T
GOING!

At first I thought that my brother Clark had managed one of his more charlatanous machinations of malevolent legerdemain. But fortunately (the only fortunate thing about the whole miserable mess) I soon perceived that it was impossible for him to be in fact guilty no matter what devious subversions roil his id. Unless he has managed to invent and build in secret a time machine, which I misdoubt he
would
do if he could . . . nor am I prepared to offer odds that he can’t. Not since the time he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks and charge them to my code number without (so far as anyone could ever prove) disturbing the company’s seal on the control box.

We’ll never know how he did that one, because, despite the fact that the company offered to Forgive All and pay a cash bonus to boot if only he would
please
tell them how he managed to beat their unbeatable seal—despite this, Clark looked blank and would not talk. That left only circumstantial evidence, i.e., it was clearly evident to anyone who knew us both (Daddy and Mother, namely) that
I
would never order candy-stripe ice cream smothered in hollandaise sauce, or—no, I can’t go on; I feel ill. Whereas Clark is widely known to eat anything which does not eat him first.

Even this clinching psychological evidence would never have convinced the company’s adjuster had not their own records proved that two of these obscene feasts had taken place while I was a house guest of friends in Syrtis Major, a thousand kilometers away. Never mind, I simply want to warn all girls not to have a Mad Genius for a baby brother. Pick instead a stupid, stolid, slightly subnormal one who will sit quietly in front of the solly box, mouth agape at cowboy classics, and never wonder what makes the pretty images.

But I have wandered far from my tragic tale.

We aren’t going to have twins.

We already have triplets.

Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon, throughout all my former life mere topics of conversation, are now Grace, Duncan, and Elspeth in all too solid flesh—unless Daddy again changes his mind before final registration; they’ve had three sets of names already. But what’s in a name?—they are here, already in our home with a nursery room sealed on to shelter them . . . three helpless unfinished humans about canal-worm pink in color and no features worthy of the name. Their limbs squirm aimlessly, their eyes don’t track, and a faint, queasy odor of sour milk permeates every room even when they are freshly bathed. Appalling sounds come from one end of each—in which they heterodyne each other—and even more appalling conditions prevail at the other ends. (I’ve yet to find all three of them dry at the same time.)

And yet there is something decidedly engaging about the little things; were it not that they are the proximate cause of my tragedy I could easily grow quite fond of them. I’m sure Duncan is beginning to recognize me already.

But, if I am beginning to be reconciled to their presence, Mother’s state can only be described as atavistically maternal. Her professional journals pile up unread, she has that soft Madonna look in her eyes, and she seems somehow both shorter and wider than she did a week ago.

First consequence: she won’t even discuss going to Earth, with or without the triplets.

Second consequence: Daddy won’t go if she won’t go—he spoke quite sharply to Clark for even suggesting it.

Third consequence: since they won’t go, we
can’t
go. Clark and me, I mean. It is conceivably possible that I might have been permitted to travel alone (since Daddy agrees that I am now a “young adult” in maturity and judgment even though my ninth birthday lies still some months in the future), but the question is formal and without content since I am not considered quite old enough to accept full responsible control of my brother with both my parents some millions of kilometers away (nor am I sure that I would wish to, unless armed with something at least as convincing as a morning star) and Daddy is so dismayingly fair with that he would not even discuss permitting one of us to go and not the other when both of us had been promised the trip.

Fairness is a priceless virtue in a parent—but just at the moment I could stand being spoiled and favored instead.

But the above is why I am sure that Clark does not have a time machine concealed in his wardrobe. This incredible contretemps, this idiot’s dream of interlocking mishaps, is as much to his disadvantage as it is to mine.

How did it happen? Gather ye round—Little did we dream that, when the question of a family trip to Earth was being planned in our household more than a month ago, this disaster was already complete and simply waiting the most hideous moment to unveil itself. The facts are these: the crèche at Marsopolis has thousands of newborn babies marbleized at just short of absolute zero, waiting in perfect safety until their respective parents are ready for them. It is said, and I believe it, that a direct hit with a nuclear bomb would not hurt the consigned infants; a thousand years later a rescue squad could burrow down and find that automatic, self-maintaining machinery had not permitted the tank temperatures to vary a hundredth of a degree.

In consequence, we Marsmen (not “Martians,” please!—Martians are a non-human race, now almost extinct)—Marsmen tend to marry early, have a full quota of babies quickly, then rear them later, as money and time permit. It reconciles that descrepancy, so increasingly and glaringly evident ever since the Terran Industrial Revolution, between the best biological age for having children and the best social age for supporting and rearing them.

A couple named Breeze did just that, some ten years ago—married on her ninth birthday and just past his tenth, while he was still a pilot cadet and she was attending Ares U. They applied for three babies, were pegged accordingly, and got them all out of the way while they were both finishing school. Very sensible.

The years roll past, he as a pilot and later as master, she as a finance clerk in his ship and later as purser—a happy life. The spacelines like such an arrangement; married couples spacing together mean a taut, happy ship.

Captain and Mrs. Breeze serve their ten-and-a-half (twenty Terran) years and put in for half-pay retirement, have it confirmed—and immediately radio the crèche to uncork their babies, all three of them.

The radio order is received, relayed back for confirmation; the crèche accepts it. Five weeks later the happy couple pick up three babies, sign for them, and start the second half of a perfect life.

So they thought—

But what they had deposited was two boys and a girl; what they got was two girls and a boy. Ours.

Believe this you must—it took them the better part of a week to notice it. I will readily concede that the difference between a brand-new boy baby and a brand-new girl baby is, at the time, almost irrelevant. Nevertheless there is a slight difference. Apparently it was a case of too much help—between a mother, a mother-in-law, a temporary nurse, and a helpful neighbor, and much running in and out, it seems unlikely that any one person bathed all three babies as one continuous operation that first week. Certainly Mrs. Breeze had not done so— until the day she did . . . and noticed . . . and fainted—and dropped one of our babies in the bath water, where it would have drowned had not her scream fetched both her husband and the neighbor lady.