“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.