Podkayne of Mars (4 page)

“I tried to withdraw it. I do withdraw it.”

“Senator?”

Uncle Tom bowed stiffly to Mr. Poon, who returned it. “Accepted, sir. No offense meant and none taken.” Then Uncle Tom grinned merrily, let his potbelly slide back down out of his chest, and said in his normal voice, “Okay, Hymie, let’s get on with the crime. Your move.”

Dr. Schoenstein said carefully, “Young lady, I have just learned that the recent disruption of family planning in your home—which we all deeply regret—caused an additional sharp disappointment to you and your brother.”

“It certainly did!” I answered, rather shrilly I’m afraid.

“Yes. As your uncle put it, the ripples spread out. Another of those ripples could wreck this establishment, make it insolvent as a private business. This is an odd sort of business we are in here, Miss Fries. Superficially we perform a routine engineering function, plus some not unusual boarding nursery services. But in fact what we do touches the most primitive of human emotions. If confidence in our integrity, or in the perfection with which we carry out the service entrusted to us, were to be shaken—” He spread his hands helplessly. “We couldn’t last out the year. Now I can show you exactly how the mishap occurred which affected your family, show you how wildly unlikely it was to have it happen even under the methods we did use . . . prove to you how utterly impossible it now is and always will be in the future for such a mistake to take place again, under our new procedures. Nevertheless”—he looked helpless again—“if you were to talk, merely tell the simple truth about what did indeed happen once . . . you could ruin us.”

I felt so sorry for him that I was about to blurt out that I wouldn’t even
dream
of talking!—even though they had ruined my life—when Clark cut in. “Watch it, Pod! It’s loaded.”

So I just gave the Director my Sphinx expression and said nothing. Clark’s instinctive self-interest is absolutely reliable.

Dr. Schoenstein motioned Mr. Poon to keep quiet. “But, my dear lady, I am not asking you not to talk. As your uncle the Senator says, you are not here to blackmail and I have nothing with which to bargain. The Marsopolis Crèche Foundation, Limited, always carries out its obligations even when they do not result from formal contract. I asked you to come in here in order to suggest a measure of relief for the damage we have unquestionably—though unwittingly—done you and your brother. Your uncle tells me that he had intended to travel with you and your family . . . but that now he intends to go via the next Triangle Line departure. The
Tricorn,
I believe it is, about ten days from now. Would you feel less mistreated if we were to pay first-class fares for your brother and you—round trip, of course—in the Triangle Line?”

Would I! The
Wanderlust
has, as her sole virtue, the fact that she is indeed a spaceship and she was shaping for Earth. But she is an old, slow freighter. Whereas the Triangle Liners, as everyone knows, are utter palaces! I could but nod.

“Good. It is our privilege and we hope you have a wonderful trip. But, uh, young lady . . . do you think it possible that you could give us some assurance, for no consideration and simply out of kindness, that you wouldn’t talk about a certain regrettable mishap?”

“Oh? I thought that was part of the deal?”

“There is no deal. As your uncle pointed out to me, we owe you this trip, no matter what.”

“Why—why, Doctor, I’m going to be so busy, so utterly rushed, just to get ready in time, that I won’t have
time
to talk to anyone about any mishaps that probably weren’t your fault anyhow!”

“Thank you.” He turned to Clark. “And you, son?”

Clark doesn’t like to be called “son” at best. But don’t think it affected his answer. He ignored the vocative and said coldly, “What about our expenses?”

Dr. Schoenstein flinched. Uncle Tom guffawed and said, “That’s my boy! Doc, I told you he had the simple rapacity of a sand gator. He’ll go far—if somebody doesn’t poison him.”

“Any suggestions?”

“No trouble. Clark. Look me in the eye. Either you stay behind and we weld you into a barrel and feed you through the bunghole so that you
can’t
talk—while your sister goes anyhow—or you accept these terms. Say a thousand each—no, fifteen hundred—for travel expenses, and you keep your snap-per shut forever about the baby mix-up . . . or I personally, with the aid of four stout, blackhearted accomplices, will cut your tongue out and feed it to the cat. A deal?”

“I ought to get ten percent commission on Sis’s fifteen hundred. She didn’t have sense enough to ask for it.”

“No cumshaw. I ought to be charging
you
commission on the whole transaction. A deal?”

“A deal,” Clark agreed.

Uncle Tom stood up. “That does it, Doc. In his own unappetizing way he is as utterly reliable as she is. So relax. You, too, Kwai Yau, you can breathe again. Doc, you can send a check around to me in the morning. Come on, kids.”

“Thanks, Tom. If that is the word. I’ll have the check over before you get there. Uh . . . just one thing . . .”

“What, Doc?”

“Senator, you were here long before I was born, so I don’t know too much about your early life. Just the traditional stories and what it says about you in
Who’s Who on Mars.
Just what were you transported for? You
were
transported? Weren’t you?”

Mr. Poon looked horror-stricken, and I was. But Uncle Tom didn’t seem offended. He laughed heartily and answered, “I was accused of freezing babies for profit. But it: was a frameup—I never did no such thing nohow. Come on, kids. Let’s get out of this ghouls’ nest before they smuggle us down into the sub-basement.”

Later that night in bed I was dreamily thinking over the trip. There hadn’t even been the least argument with Mother and Daddy; Uncle Tom had settled it all by phone before we got home. I heard a sound from the nursery, got up and paddled in. It was Duncan, the little darling, not even wet but lonely. So I picked him up and cuddled him and he cooed and then he was wet, so I changed him.

I decided that he was just as pretty or prettier than all those other babies, even though he was five months younger and his eyes didn’t track. When I put him down again, he was sound asleep; I started back to bed.

And stopped—The Triangle Line gets its name from serving the three leading planets, of course, but which direction a ship makes the Mars-Venus-Earth route depends on just where we all are in our orbits.

But just where were we?

I hurried into the living room and searched for the
Daily War Whoop
—found it, thank goodness and fed it into the viewer, flipped to the shipping news found the predicted arrivals and departures.

Yes, yes,
yes!
I am going not only to Earth—but to Venus as well!

Venus!
Do you suppose Mother would let me—No, best just say nothing now. Uncle Tom will be more tractable, after we get there.

I’m going to miss Duncan—he’s such a little doll.

FOUR

I haven’thad time to write in this journalfor
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:

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.

One shuttle trip is exactly like another, whether to Phobos or Deimos. Still, that first tremendous
whoosh!
of acceleration is exciting as it pins you down into your couch with so much weight that you can’t breathe, much less move—and free fall is always strange and eerie and rather stomach fluttering even if one doesn’t tend to be nauseated by it, which, thank you, I don’t.

Being on Deimos is just like being in free fall, since neither Deimos nor Phobos has enough surface gravitation for one to feel it. They put suction sandals on us before they unstrapped us so that we could walk, just as they do on Phobos. Nevertheless Deimos is different from Phobos for reasons having nothing to do with natural phenomena. Phobos is, of course, legally a part of Mars; there are no formalities of any sort about visiting it. All that is required is the fare, a free day, and a yen for a picnic in space.

But Deimos is a free port, leased in perpetuity to Three-Planets Treaty Authority. A known criminal, with a price on his head in Marsopolis, could change ships there right under the eyes of our own police—and we couldn’t touch him. Instead, we would have to start most complicated legal doings at the Interplanetary High Court on Luna, practically win the case ahead of time and, besides that, prove that the crime was a crime under Three-Planet rules and not just under our own laws . . . and then all that we could do would be to ask the Authority’s proctors to arrest the man if he was still around—which doesn’t seem likely.

I knew about this, theoretically, because there had been about a half page on it in our school course
Essentials of Martian Government
in the section on “Extraterritoriality.” But now I had plenty of time to think about it because, as soon as we left the shuttle, we found ourselves locked up in a room misleadingly called the “Hospitality Room” while we waited until they were ready to “process” us. One wall of the room was glass, and I could see lots and lots of people hurrying around in the concourse beyond, doing all manner of interesting and mysterious things. But all we had to do was to wait beside our baggage and grow bored.

I found that I was growing furious by the minute, not at all like my normally sweet and lovable nature. Why, this place had been built by my own mother!—and here I was, caged up in it like white mice in a bio lab.

(Well, I admit that Mother didn’t exactly build Deimos; the Martians did that, starting with a spare asteroid that they happened to have handy. But some millions of years back they grew tired of space travel and devoted all their time to the whichness of what and how to unscrew the inscrutable—so when Mother took over the job, Deimos was pretty run down; she had to start in from the ground up and rebuild it completely.)

In any case, it was certain that everything that I could see through that transparent wall was a product of Mother’s creative, imaginative and hardheaded engineering ability. I began to fume. Clark was off in a corner, talking privately to some stranger—“stranger” to me, at least; Clark, for all his antisocial disposition, always seems to know somebody, or to know somebody who knows somebody, anywhere we go. I sometimes wonder if he is a member of some vast underground secret society; he has such unsavory acquaintances and never brings any of them home.