I stopped thinking about Maudie as a girl, certainly not as one I had been sweet on. I decided that she was probably getting fat and sloppy and very, very domestic—she never could resist that second chocolate éclair. As a matter of fact; Pat and I had grown very far apart, for we had little in common now. The minor gossip of the ship, so important to me, bored him; on the other hand, I couldn't get excited about his flexible construction units and penalty dates. We still telecommunicated satisfactorily but it was like two strangers using a telephone. I was sorry, for I had grown to like him before he slipped away from me.
But I did want to see my niece. Knowing Sugar Pie had taught me that baby girls are more fun than puppies and even cuter than kittens. I remembered the idea I had had about Sugar Pie and braced Dusty on the subject.
He agreed to do it; Dusty can't turn down a chance to show how well he can draw. Besides, he had mellowed, for him; he no longer snarled when you tried to pet him even though it might be years before he would learn to sit up and beg.
Dusty turned out a beautiful picture. All Baby Molly lacked was little wings to make her a cherub. I could see a resemblance to myself—to her father, that is. "Dusty, this is a beautiful picture. Is it a good likeness?"
He bristled. "How should I know? But if there is a micron's s difference, or a shade or tone off that you could pick up with a spectrophotometer, from the pic your brother mailed to my brother, I'll eat it! But how do I know bow the proud parents had the thing prettied up?"
"Sorry, sorry! It's a swell picture. I wish there were some way I could pay you."
"Don't stay awake nights; I'll think of something. My services come high."
I took down my pic of Lucille LaVonne and put Molly in her place. I didn't throw away the one of Lucille, though.
It was a couple of months later that I found out that Dr. Devereaux had seen entirely different possibilities in my being able to use the "wave length" of Uncle Alf and Sugar Pie from the obvious ones I had seen. I had continued to talk with both of them, though not as often as I had at first. Sugar Pie was a young lady now, almost eighteen, in normal school at Witwatersrand and already started practice teaching. Nobody but Unc and I called her "Sugar Pie" and the idea that I might someday substitute for Unc was forgotten—at the rate we were shifting around pretty soon she could bring me up.
But Doe Devereaux had not forgotten the matter. However the negotiations had been conducted by him with LRF without consulting me. Apparently Pat had been told to keep it to himself until they were ready to try it, for the first I knew of it was when I told him to stand by to record some routine traffic (we were back on regular watches by then). "Skip it, old son," he said. "Pass the traffic to the next victim. You and I are going to try something fresh."
("What?")
"LRF orders, all the way down from the top. Molly has an interim research contract all of her own, just like you and I had."
("Huh? She's not a twin.")
"Let me count her. No, there's just one of her—though she sometimes seems like an entire herd of wild elephants. But she's here, and she wants to say hello to Uncle Tom."
("Oh, fine. Hello, Molly.")
"Hello, Uncle Tom."
I almost jumped out of my skin. I had caught it right off, with no fumbling. ("Hey, who was that? Say thatagain!")
"Hello, Uncle Tom." She giggled. ``I've got a new hair bow."
I gulped. ("I'll bet you look mighty cute in it, honey. I wish I could see you. Pat! When did this happen?")
"On and off, for the past ten weeks. It took some tough sessions with Dr. Mabel to make it click. By the way, it took some tougher sessions with, uh, the former Miss Kouric before she would agree to let us try it."
"He means Mommy," Molly told me in a conspirator's whisper. "She didn't like it. But I do, Uncle Tom. I think it's nice."
"I've got no privacy from either one of them," Pat complained. "Look, Tom, this is just a test run and I'm signing off. I've got to get the terror back to her mother."
"She's going to make me take a nap," Molly agreed in a resigned voice, ``and I'm too old for naps. Good-by, Uncle Tom. I love you."
("I love you, Molly.")
I turned around and Dr. Devereaux and the Captain were standing behind me, ears flapping. "How did it go?" Dr. Devereaux demanded, eagerly—for him.
I tried to keep my face straight. "Satisfactorily. Perfect reception." ....
"The kid, too?"
"Why, yes, sir. Did you expect something else?"
He let out a long breath. "Son, if you weren't needed, I'd beat your brains out with an old phone list."
I think Baby Molly and I were the first secondary communication team in the fleet. We were not the last. The LRF, proceeding on a hypothesis suggested by the case of Uncle Alfred and Sugar Pie, assumed that it was possible to form a new team where the potential new member was very young and intimately associated with an adult member of an old team. It worked in some eases. In other cases it could not even be tried because no child was available.
Pat and Maude had a second baby girl just before we reached the Tau Ceti system. Maudie put her foot down with respect to Lynette; she said two freaks in her family were enough.
XII TAU CETI
By the time we were a few light-hours from Tan Ceil we knew that we had not drawn a blank; by stereo and doppler-stereo Harry Gates had photographed half a dozen planets. Harry was not only senior planetologist; he was boss of the research department. I suppose he had enough degrees to string like beads, but I called him "Harry" because everybody did. He was not the sort you call "Doctor"; he was eager and seemed younger than he was.
To Harry the universe was a complicated toy somebody had given him; he wanted to take it apart and see what made it go. He was delighted with it and willing to discuss it with anybody at any time. I got acquainted with him in the bottle-washing business because Harry didn't treat lab assistants like robots; he treated them like people and did not mind that he knew so much more than they did—he even seemed to think that he could learn something from them.
How lie found time to marry Barbara Kuiper I don't know, but Barbara was a torch watchstander, so it probably started as a discussion of physics and drifted over into biology and sociology; Harry was interested in everything. But he didn't find time to he around the night their first baby was born, as that was the night he photographed the planet he named Constance, after the baby. There was objection to this, because everybody wanted to name it, but the Captain decided that the ancient rule applied: finders of astronomical objects were entitled to name them.
Finding Constance was not an accident. (I mean the planet, not the baby; the baby wasn't lost.) Harry wanted a planet about fifty to fifty-one million miles from Tau, or perhaps I should say that the LRF wanted one of that distance. You see, while Tan Ceti is a close relative of the Sun, by spectral types, Tau is smaller and gives off only about three-tenths as much sunshine—so, by the same old tired inverse square law you use to plan the lights for a living room or to arrange a photoflash picture, a planet fifty million miles from Tau would catch the same amount of sunlight as a planet ninety-three million miles from Sol, which is where Earth sits. We weren't looking for just any planet, or we would have stayed home in the Solar System; we wanted a reasonable facsimile of Earth or it would not he worth colonizing.