And all of a sudden it hit him like a bolt of lightning from the heavens themselves. Where was he sitting, anyway? Those rascals! Those damned scoundrels! People after his own heart, most likely.
"Information," he called again. "Phineas Barnum, please."
"No listing for a Phineas Barnum."
"Not a listing. Who was he?"
"Barnum, Phineas Taylor, lived eighteen ten to eighteen ninety-one, Old Earth calendar system. Established museum of curiosities, later created a traveling circus called the Greatest Show on Earth. Descendants of the circus, merged many times and split among many units, perform to this day on established appearance circuits, with some periods of interruption. Credited with the saying, 'There is a sucker born every minute.' Barnum was also a politician and mayor of a major city at one time in his career. He-"
"That's enough!" As the signal bell sounded indicating that dinner had arrived, he sat back and laughed heartily to himself. Phineas Taylor Barnum. A sucker born every minute!
It made perfect sense. Nobody paid anything to see robots battle or holographic shows that did the same things time after time, and even if you could walk right into a virtual reality game and battle gladiators in ancient Rome, there was some prurient interest and even some artistic appreciation for those folks of the old school who could still perform the old acts, live, in the ways you couldn't.
There's one born every minute… He almost choked on the steak, good as it was, because of his inability to suppress chuckling spasms.
This was a scientific reserve, but it was more than that. Lots of genetics work was done to order here, and lots of preservation and even resuscitation of extinct plants and animals from preserved DNA and stored encoding sequences were done here as well. It was also one of the few places where, for some substantial fees, you could do some special-order genetics on humans as well. Not well publicized, and in the old days before the Great Silence it was never advertised, but it was done here. What better place for breeding controlled mutations if that's what you wanted to do? Lots of museum and performer types here as well, because of the laid-back attitudes. And even universally condemned activities might be done here, no questions asked.
And that was what he'd been doing for them all this time. They had their performers who might even get around now and then to out-of-the-way worlds like Tara Hibernius. Who would look twice at them? Such a backward nontechnological society would be a natural for live performances.
So you dropped by and you already carried the seeds of the project, whatever it might be, and thanks to the strict claustrophobic society there would be a lot of teen rebellion, perhaps against both church and society, so you had a seemingly unthreatening underground organization that attracted some of the young. The best prospects might be impregnated with the project seed, and then good old Murphy comes along delivering atmospheric purifiers and super fertilizers and he picks up the impregnated ones who also have been chosen as ones who really wanted out or else and deposits them here. Who would notice? Even if something in the chain blew, it wouldn't look like any kind of illegal genetics work, it would just look like what it seemed, with the Satanic stuff thrown in for an even smellier bundle of red herrings.
Still, somebody had gone to a lot of trouble and expense for what seemed easy to do right here in a compound out in the bush. Why go to all that trouble, and for so little result? Three engineered babies you could grow in test tubes?
No, he had some of it, but not all of it, not yet. He was certain of that.
It was well into the night before the girls returned, much to his relief. Not that he was so terrified for their welfare, of course, but he had to get paid, after all.
His relief was short-lived, though, when he saw that they were under no apparent spells but dressed quite differently, and followed by a robot cart carrying a ton of packages. They themselves had on loose but rather colorful one-piece dresses, wide, floppy brim hats, fancy designer sunglasses, and nice-looking sandals. They also appeared to have discovered the application of makeup, were wearing earrings and finger rings, wearing painted lips and painted nails.
"Good god! How'd you get all that?" he asked nervously. "You didn't spend every single bit of credit I got, did you?"
"Oh, of course not!" Irish laughed, sounding tired but happy. "We didn't spend nothin' at all for these!"
Murphy frowned. "Then how…? I mean, they got print and retinal checks and you need the money or else here! Or did you just walk out with it while makin' nobody see you or somethin' like that?"
"Oh, nothing like that," Mary Margaret laughed. "We just did like everybody else. We picked what we wanted, we gave 'em our finger and looked through their eyepiece or whatever it is, and it said we was okay. Worked every place we went."
He sat back down, a bit dumbfounded. "Heh! Best damn security system for payment and credit I know, and you girls just breeze right past it 'cause the machines all think they know you and want to make you happy! Sweet Jesus! As hard as I had to work to steal things over me many years!"
"We didn't steal," Irish O'Brian insisted. "We just did what everybody else did for payment and it was good. So who loses? The shops got paid, right? So if there's no money there, it's the government's own fault for giving it to us!"
"I wanta try on that stuff but I'm beat," Mary Margaret McBride put in.
"Me, too," chipped in Brigit Moran.
Irish came over to the old captain and kissed him on the forehead. "So can you be a dear man and put them things someplace here for us? I think it's bedtime."
You didn't argue with these gals, that was clear. He let them go in, get their showers, and stake out their bed places and get settled, then he quietly made certain that the connecting door was completely shut and went back to the comm console.
"Manual mode. Keyboard, please," he said quietly.
In front of him a holographic keyboard appeared. Few could read and write these days, or needed to do either, but there were times when that was a real advantage for someone who could.
With his index finger he tapped out, "Order of Saint Phineas, Dir." The same listing came up as before. This time, however, he input, "Call. Low volume."
A weak electronic signal buzzed on and off several times. Then a woman's voice answered, "This is the main number of the Order of Saint Phineas. Leave your message and contact information and someone will get back to you."
He waited for the tone, then said softly, "Captain Patrick Murphy, Hotel Aden, suite five five four. I am in early with cargo for you. Please contact me and arrange delivery or pickup. Message ends."
He suspected that they already knew he was here, and probably just about all that had happened, via those stones or whatever they were, but it never hurt to go through the motions. Now there was nothing left to do but to wait for contact.
Truth be told, he almost would miss the girls. If he could get them to trust him with that power of theirs, there was no limit to what they could do, and the fantasy of a man his age with three very pretty companions wasn't at all unpleasant to him. Still, they'd probably get him in more trouble than he'd ever been in in his whole life just by being their own sweet ditzy selves and, besides, it was beginning to look more and more like the very last folk you'd want to cross would be these Phineas people.
Still, all the previous deliveries had been a bit older, a bit smarter, and generally just one or two at a time. He really wondered what the future held for these girls, or if they had one once he delivered them. Clearly it wasn't the trio that this Order was interested in, it was what they carried in their bellies. This was a huge, mostly wild, and very unpopulated world where folks could disappear forever and never be missed, in spite of all those state-of-the-art police controls. Once relieved of their babies and their fancy gem gadgets, they were just three pretty, helpless, far-too-young girls, fit for cleaning up the place or making bushmen a bit less lonely or, if all else failed, providing a nice dinner for some of them creepy crawly types out in the wild.