"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 snapper 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 hjs own unappetizing way he is as utterly reliable as she is. So relax. You, too, Kwai Yau, you can breathe again. Doe, you can send a cheek around to me in the morning. Come on, kids."
"Thanks, Tom. If that is the word. I'll have the cheek over before you get there. Uh ... just one thing . .
"What, Doe?"
"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 subbasement."
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.
IV
I haven't had time to write in this journal for 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 Terra 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:
BON VOYAGE-PODKAYNE
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.