“Gentlemen?” the general prodded. “I’m a very busy man.”
“Oh, hellfire,” said Brooks Showard. He knew. Either he did the talking, or they’d all sit there until the end of time. Which, to hear the general tell it, wouldn’t be all that long. “You know what we’ve got to do next. You know perfectly well. Since you government/military shits are too chicken to slap every last goddam linguist into prison for treason or murder or inciting to riot or pandering or sodomy or whatever the hell it takes to make the fucking Lingoes cooperate—”
“You know we can’t do that, Colonel!” The general’s lips were as stiff as two slabs of frozen bacon. “If the linguists had any excuse, any excuse, they’d withdraw from every sensitive negotiation we have underway with Aliens, and that would be the end of us! And there wouldn’t be one damn thing we could do about it, Colonel—not one damn thing!”
“—since, like I said, you’re too chicken to do that and do it right and make it stick, there’s only one thing left. You fellows want to keep your pretty hands clean, I’m sure. But we fellows have got to steal us a linguist infant, a baby Lingoe. On your behalf, or course. For the good of all mankind. How’s that for Plan B?”
They all squirmed, then. Volunteered babies, that was nasty. But stolen babies? It wasn’t that the effing linguists didn’t deserve it, and it wasn’t that they didn’t have babies in hordes and swarms enough to console themselves with if they came up one short. But the baby didn’t exactly deserve it, somehow. They were willing to go along with the religious party line, after a fashion, but none of them was really able to swallow that stuff about the sins of the fathers being visited, etc. Stealing a baby. That was not very nice.
“Their women whelp on the public wards,” Showard observed. “It won’t be difficult.”
“Oh dear.”
The general could hardly believe he’d said that. He tried again.
“Well, by heaven!”
“Yeah?”
“Is that the only alternative remaining to us, Colonel Showard? Are you absolutely certain?”
“You have some other suggestion?” Showard snarled.
“General,” Dolbe put in, “we’ve done everything else. We know that our Interface is an exact duplicate of those the linguists use. We know our procedure is exactly the same as theirs—not that it’s much of a procedure. You put the Alien—or better still, two Aliens, if you can get a pair—in one side. You put the baby in the other. And you get out of their way. That’s all there is to it. That’s what we do, just like that’s what they do—we’ve tried it again and again. And you know what happened when we tried the test-tube babies . . . it was the same, only it was worse somehow. Don’t ask me to explain that. And we’ve brought in every computer expert, every scientist, every technician, every—”
“But see here, man—”
“No, General! There’s nothing to see. We have checked and rechecked and re-rechecked. We have gone over every last variable not just once but many many times. And it has to be, General, it has to be that for some reason known only to the linguists—and I do feel, by the way, that it constitutes treason for them to keep that knowledge to themselves—for some reason known only to them, only linguist infants are capable of learning Alien languages.”
“Some genetic reason, you mean.”
“Well? Look how inbred they are, it’s on the fine line of incest, if you ask me! What are we talking about? Thirteen families! That’s not much of a gene pool. They bring in the odd bit of outside stock now and then, sure, but basically it’s those thirteen sets of genes over and over. Sure, I’d say it’s a genetic reason.”
“General,” Beau added, “all we’re doing here is sacrificing the innocent children of nonlinguists, in something that is never going to work. It’s got to be an infant born of one of the Lines, and that is all there is to it.”
“They deny it,” said the general.
“Well, wouldn’t you deny it, in their place? It suits the traitorous bastards, controlling the whole goddam government, doling out their nuggets of wisdom to us on whatever schedule happens to strike their fancy, living off the backs and the blood of decent people. And if we have to murder innocent babies trying to do what they ought to be doing for us, well, shit, they don’t care. That just puts every American citizen, and every citizen of every country on this globe and in its colonies, all the more at their mercy. Sure they deny it!”
“They’re lying,” Showard summed up, feeling that Beau St. Clair had said about all he was going to say. “Plain flat out lying.”
“You’re sure?”
“Damn right.”
The general made the noise a restless horse makes, and then he sat there and chewed his upper lip. He didn’t like it. If the Lingoes suspected . . . if there was a leak . . . and there always were leaks . . .
“Shit,” said Lanky Pugh, “they’ve got so many babies, they’ll never miss one, long as we can get by with a female. Can we get by with a female?”
“Why not, Mr. Pugh?”
“Well. I mean. Can a female do it?”
The general frowned at Pugh, and then looked at the others for explanation. This was beyond him.
“We keep telling Lanky,” Showard said. “We keep explaining it to him. There is no correlation between intelligence and the acquisition of languages by infants, except at the level of gross retardation where you’ve got a permanent infant. We keep telling him that, but it offends him or something. He can’t seem to handle it.”
“I should think,” said the general, “that Mr. Pugh would want to stay abreast of at least the basic literature on language acquisition. Considering.”
The general was wrong. Lanky Pugh, who had tried to learn three different foreign human languages, because he felt that a computer specialist ought to know at least one other language that wasn’t a computer language—and had had no success—was not about to keep up with the literature on native language acquisition. If Lingoe females could learn foreign languages . . . Alien languages, for chrissakes! . . . when they were only babies, then how come he couldn’t even master passable French? Every linguist kid had to have native fluency in one Alien language, three Terran languages from different language families, American Sign Language, and PanSig—plus reasonable control of as many other Terran languages as they could pick up on the side. And he’d heard that a lot of them were native in two Alien tongues. While he, Lanky Pugh, could speak English. Just English. No, he didn’t like it, and he didn’t want to take any close look at the question. It was something he carefully did not think about any longer.
“. . . throw his ass right out of here,” Showard was saying. “But it just so happens that he is the top computer tech in the whole world, the top hands-on man, and it just so happens that we can’t do without him, and if he chooses to know absolutely nothing but computers, that’s his privilege. That’s all he’s required to know, General, and he knows that better than anybody, anywhere, anytime. And nevertheless, we are not going to crack Beta-2 with a computer. Sorry.”
“I see,” said the general. He said it with utter finality. And he stood up and picked up his funny hat with all the spangled stuff on it. “None of my business, of course. I’m sure Dolbe here runs a tight ship.”
“General?”
“Yes, Dolbe?”
“Don’t you want to discuss—”
“No, he doesn’t want to discuss how we do this cute little kidnapping caper, Dolbe!” shouted Brooks Showard. “For gods sakes, Dolbe!”
The general nodded smartly.
“Right on target,” he agreed. “Right on target. I wish I didn’t know what I already do know.”
“You asked us, General,” Showard pointed out.
“Yes. I know I did.”
He left, with a smile all around, and he was gone before they could say anything else. The general got in, he did his business, he got out. That was why he was a general, and they were in the baby-stealing business. And the baby-killing business.
The only question now was, which one of them was going to do it? Because it would have to be one of them. There wasn’t anybody you could trust to go snatch a linguist baby out of a hospital nursery. And it had better not be Lanky Pugh, because he was the only Lanky Pugh they could get, and he couldn’t be spared. They didn’t dare risk Lanky Pugh.
Arnold Dolbe and Brooks Showard and Beau St. Clair stared at each other, hating each other. And Lanky Pugh, he went after the straws.
Showard had thought he might feel nervous, but he didn’t. His white lab coat was the same one he wore at work. It wasn’t as if he had on a disguise. The corridors of the hospital were like the corridors of hospitals and laboratories everywhere; if it hadn’t been for the constant bustle and racket that went with changing shifts and visitors coming and going he could easily have been at G.W. The only concession he’d made to the fact that he was actually in this place to kidnap a living human child was the stethoscope that hung round his neck, and he had stopped being aware of it almost at once. People passing him mumbled, “Good evening, Doctor” automatically, without needing anything more than the antique symbol of his calling to identify him, even after he reached the maternity ward. Any other profession, they’d have switched a hundred years ago to something less grotesque then an entirely nonfunctional and obsolete instrument like the stethoscope—but not the doctors. No little insignia on a corner of the collar for them. No tasteful little button. They knew the power of tradition, did the doctors, and they never missed a beat.
“Good evening, Doctor.”
“Mmph,” said Showard.
Nobody was paying any attention to him. Women had babies at every hour of the day or night, and a doctor on the maternity floor at ten minutes to midnight was nothing to pay any attention to.
The call had come in twenty minutes ago—“A bitch Lingoe just whelped over at Memorial, about half an hour ago! Get your tail over there.” And here he was. It was no consolation at all to him that the baby was a female, but he assumed Lanky would be pleased.
This was an old hospital, one of the oldest in the country. He supposed it must have fancy wards somewhere, with medpods that took care of every whim a patient had, with no need for the bumbling hands of human beings; but those wards were high in the towers that looked down over the river. With private elevators to make sure that the wealthy patients going up to them, and their wealthy visitors, didn’t have to be offended by the crudity of the rest of the buildings. Here in the public wards there was very little change from what a hospital had looked like when he’d had his appendix out at the age of six. For all he could tell, except for the nurses’ uniforms and the computers at every bedside, it looked just like hospitals had looked for the last century or so. And the maternity ward, since it served only women, would be the last place anybody would spend money on renovation.
A light over a booth at the end of the hall showed him where to go. The night nurse there was bent over her own computer, making sure the entries from the bedside units matched the entries on the charts. Very inefficient, but he supposed she had to have something to do to make the night go by.
He pulled the forged charge slip from his coat pocket and handed it to her.
“Here,” he said. “Where’s the Lingoe kid?”
She looked at him, ducked her head deferentially, and then looked at the charge slip.
BABY ST. SYRUS, it read. EVOKED POTENTIALS, STAT.
And the indecipherable scrawl that was the graphic badge of the real doctor of real medicine.
“I’ll call a nurse to bring you the baby, Doctor,” she said at once, but he shook his head.
“I haven’t got time to wait around for your nurses,” he told her. As rudely as possible, keeping up the doctor act. “Just tell me where the kid is, and I’ll get it.”
“But, Doctor—”
“I have sense enough, and training enough, to pick up one infant and carry it down to Neuro,” he snapped at her, doing his best to sound as if she were far less than the dirt beneath his valuable feet. “Now are you going to cooperate, or do I have to call a man to get some service around here?”
She backed down, of course. Well trained, in spite of being out in the big wide world of the ancient hospital. Her anxious face went white, and she stared at him with her mouth half open, frozen. Showard snapped his fingers under her nose.
“Come on, nurse!” he said fiercely. “I’ve got patients waiting!”
Three minutes later he had the St. Syrus baby tucked securely into the crook of his arm and was safely in the elevator to the back exit that led out into a quiet garden of orange trees and miscellaneous ugly plants and a few battered extruded benches. One light glowed over the garden, and at midnight you couldn’t see your own hand in front of your face out there—they’d checked that.
It was so easy to do that it was ridiculous. Out the door of the elevator, baby firmly tucked against him. “Pardon me, Doctor.” “Not at all, pardon me.” “Pardon me, Doctor.” “Good morning, Doctor.” They were very scientific in this place. Sixteen minutes past midnight and they were saying good morning.
Down the corridor, turn right. Another corridor. A small lobby, where another night nurse looked at him briefly and went back to her mindless fiddling with records. Another corridor. “Good morning, ‘Doctor.” An elderly man, carrying flowers. “God bless you, Doctor.” Almost bowing. Must be nice, being a medicoe and getting all that adoration. “Thank you,” Showard said curtly, and the man looked absurdly thrilled.
And then he was at the door. He felt a faint tingle at the back of his neck, walking toward it . . . if he were going to be stopped, if some alarm had already gone off and they were after him, this was where it would happen.
But nothing happened.
He opened the door, pulled the blanket up over the infant’s head, making sure it could still get enough air to breathe, and he was outside and headed for the flyer parked at the edge of the lot for him. With the Pink Cross/Pink Shield stickers on its doors.
It was, as they used to say, a piece of cake.
Chapter Five
Oh, chiddies and chuddies, do you DO you want to come in out of the dark and cog ALL that’s happening? You do you DO! I know you do, you want to dip and cog the WHOLE waxball in its nicewrap, don’t you, my sweet chiddy-chuddy fans? OH YES! Well, here I have a little bit of something for your neurons to chomp, yes, I do . . . how about a Lingoe Story to start our mutual day, this mutual day? It’s not easy, getting into a Lingoeden, you know—but for you I’d go through fire and toxins, and I DID I DID and oh these eyes were data-saturated door to DOOR!
Did you know that every Lingoeden has as many servomechanisms as it has rooms, my luvvies? At 300 M-credits the unit? Well, that’s rational, that’s reasonable, that’s so no Lingoe ever has to bend over to pick up any least thingthang, you cog . . . might sprain the giant brain, and we can’t have THAT, oh woe no!
And did you know about the baths in the dens—oh, chiddies and chuddies, I SAW this, with my own taxpaying eyes, I saw it—every least knob and toggle and button and switch has the family crest outlined on it in seed pearls and solid gold . . . isn’t that QUARKY, luvaduvs? Have you checked your facility lately, luvaduvs? Just to see if maybe you’ve got a little gold horsey standing on its hind legs inside a circle of seed pearls? Maybe there’s one of those on YOUR waterswitch, hoy boy . . . why don’t you go look? And if you can’t find yours, why, you could just run next door to your friendly nabehood Lingoes’, could you NOT, and borrow yourself a cup of pearls and just a smigwídgen of gold? And why NOT? Isn’t it your taxes, chiddies and chuddies, that fill up the Lingoe treasure vaults, way down WAY DOWN in their underground castles? You go right over there and ask . . . but WATCH IT! You have to get past the laser guns on the doors, like I did! Oh hoy hoy hoy, our aching backs, luvaduvs . . . our aching backs. . . .
(by Frazzle Gleam, comset popnews caster,
COMING AT YOU program,
August 28, 2179)
The message on the private line, all certified debugged and then scrambled and rescrambled because there was no such thing as a truly debugged line, and the codes changed daily because even if you did all that you couldn’t be sure—the message said, “Emergency meeting in DAT40, 1900 hours.” Room 40, Department of Analysis & Translation . . . that would be one of the soundproof rooms in the lowest of the sub-basements. He remembered it from other times. No air, either too much heat or too much cold, and no bathroom facilities closer than a good brisk five minute walk. Damn.
Thomas was tired, and he had work to do, and he’d had other plans for this evening if he’d managed to get that work done. It had by god better be an emergency, but there was no way to find out except by going over there. That was the whole point of the private line and the debugging and the scrambling and the code changes.
By the time he got there he was thoroughly irritated. He’d wasted thirty precious minutes circling over the flyerpad on the building’s roof, waiting for permission to land, and ten minutes more waiting for some fool visiting potentate complete with cameras to clear off so that it was safe for him to leave the flyer. He was tired, and he was cold, and he was hungry, and he had nine thousand things on his mind, and he charged into Room 40 in a way that made the two men in there already exchange swift looks and sit up straighter in their chairs.
“All right!” he said as he sat down. “What is it?”
“It’s an emergency,” said one of them.
“So you said,” said Thomas. And “I don’t suppose there’s coffee?”
“Scotch if you like,” said the other, before the first—who knew better—could stop him.
Thomas Blair Chornyak stared at the fellow as he stared at everything he couldn’t see any good excuse for.
“No man who needs the use of his mind drinks anything stronger than a very good wine,” said Thomas. “Now do you have coffee or not?”
“We have coffee,” said the first fellow, and he went and got it and set it down in front of Thomas. He knew better than to put it in anything but a real cup, and he knew better than to bring it any way but black. He also knew enough to hurry. Dealing with a man who was the absolute top dog linguist in the world and all its outposts, you hurried.
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