We had a great time in one of the escape pods. I sat Pete at the little control panel and he played astronaut for more than an hour. It only took a teeny bit of persuasion to get him to agree to what I wanted him to do. He even liked the idea. “It’ll be like being a real astronaut, won’t it?” he enthused.
“Sure it will,” I told him.
While he was playing astronaut in the escape pod I ducked out to my office and made two phone calls. I invited Jill to an early dinner at the Eclipse. She accepted right away, asking only why I wanted to eat at five o’clock.
“I’ll be babysitting later,” I said.
Her face on my display screen looked positively shocked. “Babysitting? You?”
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” That was all I could think of to say. And at that, it was probably too much.
Then I tracked down Melinda by phone and invited her and Larry to have dinner, on me, in the Eclipse at eight o’clock.
She was back in the damned exercise room, walking on one of the treadmills. “Dinner?” she puffed. “I’d love to, Sam, but by eight T.J.’s usually in bed for the night.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” I said as casually as I could manage. “I’ll take care of him.”
“You?” Her eyes went round.
“Sure. We’re old pals now. I’ll babysit while you and Larry have a decent meal for a change. Why should D’Argent and the old farts on his board of directors be the only ones to enjoy good food?”
“I don’t know….” She wavered.
“The best cooking in the solar system,” I tempted her. “My chef is cordon bleu.” Which was almost true. He had worked in Paris one summer. As a busboy.
“I’ll have to check with Larry,” she said.
“Sure. Do that.”
I noticed that she turned up the speed on her treadmill. Like I said, taking apples off a blind man’s fruit stand.
So I had a nice, relaxed dinner with Jill early that evening. Then I escorted her back to her mini-suite in the zero-gee section. Some of the kids were still in the gym area, whizzing around and screaming at each other.
“You’re not going to get much sleep until they get put away,” I said to Jill.
She gave me a crooked grin as she opened the door to her suite. “I wasn’t planning to sleep—not yet.”
I didn’t like the sly look in her eye. “Uh, I promised Larry and Melinda I’d watch their baby….”
“When do you have to be there?” Jill asked, gliding through the doorway and into her zero-gee love nest.
I glided in after her, naturally, and she maneuvered around and shut the door, cutting off the noise of the kids playing outside.
I can recognize a trap when I see one, even when the bait is tempting. “Jill—uh, I’ve got to go. Now.”
“Oh, Sam.” She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me passionately. I’ve got to admit that while I was kissing her back a part of my brain was calculating how much time I had left before I had to show up at Larry and Melinda’s door. Which was just on the opposite side of the wailing banshees in the gym.
Reluctantly I disengaged from Jill and said, “I don’t have the time. Honest.” My voice sounded odd, like some embarrassed acne-faced teenager’s squeak.
Jill smiled glumly and said, “A promise is a promise, I suppose.”
“Yeah,” I answered weakly. And I didn’t want to make any promises to a United States Senator that I didn’t intend to keep.
So I left Jill there in her suite, looking sad and disappointed, and zipped through the gym area, heading straight for the Karshes’ suite.
Larry and Melinda were waiting for me. He was wearing an actual suit, dark blue, and a tie that kept floating loose from his shirt front. Melinda had a dress full of flounces that billowed in zero-gee like a waterfall of lace. Jack Spratt and the Missus. They’d look better in the restaurant’s lunar gravity.
Melinda floated me into the bedroom of their suite, where T.J. was zippered into a sleep cocoon. They had stuffed it with pillows because it was way too big for him. The kid was sound asleep with a thumb in his mouth. I’ve got to admit, he looked like a little angel.
“He won’t wake up for at least four hours,” she assured me. “We’ll be back by then.” Still, she gave me the whole orientation demonstration: bottle, milk, diapers, ass wipes, the whole ugly business.
I kept a smile on my face and shooed them out to their dinner. Then I went back into T.J.’s room.
“Okay, kid,” I whispered. “It’s you and me now.”
I fidgeted around their suite for more than an hour, waiting for Larry and Melinda to get through most of their meal, thinking that I might swing back to Jill’s suite and—no, no; there lay madness. Finally I went into the baby’s room and gendy, gentiy picked up T.J., blankets and all, and headed for the escape pod where I had stashed Pete.
The baby stirred and half woke up when I lifted him, but I shushed and rocked him. He kind of opened one eye, looked at me, and made a little smile. Then he curled himself into my arms and went back to sleep. Like I said, we were old pals by now.
I’ve got to admit that I felt a slight pang of conscience when I thought about how Larry and especially Melinda would feel when they came back from dinner and found their darling baby missing. I’d be missing, too, of course, and probably at first they’d be more miffed than scared. They’d phone around, trying to find me, figuring I had their kid with me, wherever I was. But after fifteen minutes, half an hour at most, they would panic and call for the security guards.
I grinned to myself at that. While the goons were searching the station I’d be in a space suit, breaking into the Rockledge lab from the outside. The one place nobody would bother looking for me because it was already so heavily guarded. Hah!
Okay, so Larry and Melinda would have a rough hour or two. They’d forget it when I returned their kid to them and they saw he was none the worse for wear. And if Larry wanted to call the bumpers Karsh Shields he owed me some kind of payment, didn’t he?
Pete was in the escape pod waiting for me. I had told him only that he could play astronaut in the pod for a couple of hours, as long as he watched the baby. I had some work to do but I’d be back when I was finished. The kid was as happy as an accordion player in a Wisconsin polka bar. Little T.J. was snoozing away, the picture of infant innocence.
“I’ll take good care of him, Mr. Gunn,” Pete assured me. He had come a long way from the surliness he had shown earlier. He was even grinning at the thought of playing inside the pod for hours.
I’m not a complete idiot, though. I carefully disconnected the pod’s controls. Pete could bang on the keyboard and yank at the T-yokes on the control panel till his arms went numb; nothing would happen—except in his imagination. I disconnected the communications link, too, so he wouldn’t be able to hear the commotion that was due to come up. Wouldn’t be able to call to anybody, either.
“Okay, captain,” I said to Pete. “You’re in charge until I return.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” And he snapped me a lopsided salute. The grin on his face told me that he knew what we were doing was not strictly kosher, and he loved it.
I carefully sealed the pod’s hatch, then closed the connecting airlock hatch and sealed it. I hustled down the corridor to the emergency airlock and my personal space suit, which I had stashed there. It was going to be a race to get into a suit and out the airlock before any of the security types poked their noses in this section of the corridor. I had disabled the surveillance cameras earlier in the afternoon and duly reported the system malfunction in the station’s log. By the time they got them fixed I’d be long gone.