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…
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.
“There you are, sir,” he said. “Black. And now to business.”
“Please.”
“Sir, we have some difficult news.”
“And?”
“Sir, we want you to know that this action was taken very reluctantly — VERY reluctantly.”
“For the love of the gospels, man,” said Thomas wearily, “will you spit it out or let me go back to my work?”
It came out in a rush, because the government man was worried. They’d promised him there’d be no trouble about this, but he found that hard to believe. If it had been him there would have been trouble. A lot of trouble. And he wasn’t even somebody important.
“Sir, a baby of the Lines has been kidnapped from the maternity ward at Santa Cruz Memorial Hospital.”
Chornyak did not so much as blink. He might as well have said that the sun had come up that morning in the east.
“Federal kidnapping, I assume,” he said. And they nodded.
“Female or male?”
“Female, sir.”
“Mmhmm.”
The junior man looked at his companion out of the corner of his eye, signaling confusion and now-what and a bunch of other stuff; the senior official, who’d been at this a long time, paid no attention to him. They’d wait; and when the Lingoe godfather chose to speak, he’d choose to speak. And if he was going to raise hell, well, he’d raise hell. And there was not one thing anybody could do about it, except if he used the needle he had in his pocket, and he wasn’t sure he could do that.
“Explain,” said Thomas at last. “Please.”
He was being excruciatingly polite. If he were pulling out your toenails one at a time, he would be excruciatingly polite.
“My name is John Smith, Mr. Chornyak,” said the senior official.
“Yes. I’ve worked with you before.”
“I was instructed to explain to you that in the interests of our efforts to acquire the Beta-2 language of the primary Jovian lifeforms it became necessary for us to take temporary custody of one of the infants of St. Syrus Household… somewhat abruptly.”