4) Theodore himself had been missing in action, chopped half in two by machine-gun fine... yet he had been rescued and restored without even a scar.
S) My father was ‘missing in action', too. The AFS didn't even get round to reporting him as missing until long after the fact and there were no details.
6) In the thought experiment called ‘Schrõdinger's Cat' the scientists(?), or philosophers, or metaphysicians, who devised it, maintain that the cat is neither dead nor alive but simply a fog of probabilities, until somebody opens the box.
I don't believe it. I don't think Pixel would believe it.
But - Is my father alive? or dead? away back there in the twentieth century?
So I spoke to Jubal about it.
He said, ‘I can't tell you, Mama Maureen. How badly do you want your father to be alive?'
‘More than anything in the world!'
‘Enough to risk everything on it? Your life? Still worse, the chance of disappointment? Of knowing that all hope is gone?'
I sighed deeply. ‘Yes. All of that'
‘Then join the Time Corps and learn how such things are done. In a few years - ten to twenty years, I would guess you will be able to form an intelligent opinion.'
‘Ten to twenty years!'
It could take longer. But the great beauty about time manipulations is that there is always plenty of time, never any hurry.'
When I told Ishtar that I wanted to take an indefinite leave of absence, she did not ask me why. She simply said, ‘Mama, I have known for some time that you were not happy in this work; I have been waiting for you to discover it.'
She kissed me. ‘Perhaps next century you will find a true vocation for this work. There is no hurry. Meanwhile, be happy.'
So for about twenty years of my personal time tine and almost seven years of Boondock time I went where I was told to go and reported on what I was told to investigate. Never as a fighter. Not like Gretchen whose first baby is descended both from me (Colonel Ames is my grandson through Lazarus) and from my co-wife Hazel/Gwen (Gretchen is Hazel's great-granddaughter) - Major Gretchen is a big, strong, strapping Valkyrie, reputed to be sudden death with or without weapons.
Fighting is not for Maureen. But de Time Corps needs all sorts. My talent for languages and my love of history makes me suitable to be sent to ‘scout the Land of Canaan' - or Nippon in the 1930s - or whatever country or planet needs scouting. My only other talent is sometimes useful, too.
So with twenty years of practice and some preliminary research in history of time line two, second phase of the Permanent War, I signed off for a weekend and bought a ticket on a Burroughs-Carter time-space bus, one with a scheduled stop in New Liverpool, 1950, intending to scout the history of the 1939-1945 War a little closer up. Hilda had developed a thriving black-market trade through the universes; one of her companies supplied scheduled services to the explored time lines and planets for a bracket of dates - exact date of choice available if you pay for it.
The bus driver had just announced ‘New Liverpool Earth Prime 1950 time line two next stop! Don't leave any personal possessions aboard' - when there was a loud noise, the bus lurched, a trip attendant said, ‘Emergency exit - this way, please' - and somebody handed me a baby, there was much smoke, and I saw a man with a bloody stump where his hand should have been.
I guess I passed out, as I don't remember what happened next.
I woke up in bed with Pixel and a corpse.
Chapter 26 - Pixel to the Rescue
After that Mad Tea Party in which I woke up in bed with a cat and a corpse in Grand Hotel Augustus, Pixel and I wound up in the office of Dr Eric Ridpath, house physician, where we met his office nurse, Dagmar Dobbs - a gal who was at once awarded Pixel's stamp of approval. Dagmar was giving me a GYN examination, when she told me that tonight was La Fiesta de Santa Carolita.
It is a good thing that just before she put me on the table she had required me to pee in a cup, or I might have peed in her face.
As I have explained in excessive detail, ‘Santa Carolita' is my daughter Carol, born in Gregorian 1902 at Kansas City on Tellus Prime, time line two, code Leslie LeCroix.
Lazarus Long had initiated ‘Carol's Day' on 26 June 1918 Gregorian, as a rite of passage for Carol, marking her transition from childhood to womanhood. Lazarus toasted Carol in champagne, telling her what a wonderful thing it was to be a woman, naming for her both the privileges and the responsibilities of her new and exalted status, and declaring that 26 June shall now and forever be known as ‘Carol's Day'.
the notion of calling it ‘Carol's Day' had suggested itself to Lazarus from something he remembered from a thousand years in the future - or in the past, depending on your time frame. On the frontier planet New Beginnings he and his wife Dora had declared ‘Helen's Day' to celebrate puberty in their oldest child, Helen. That was their stated purpose. Their unstated purpose was to attempt to place some control over the sexual behaviour of their growing sons and daughters, in order to head off the sort of tragedy I ran into with Priscilla and Donald.
Neither Lazarus nor I (nor Dora) had moralistic notions about incest, but all of us had feared the damage incest can do, both genetically and socially. ‘Helen's Day' and ‘Carol's Day' gave each set of parents some leverage in handling the touchy problems of sex in young people, problems that can so easily end in tragedy... but need not.
(I most despise in Marian her self-indulgent failure to carry out the parental duty of maintaining discipline. ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child' is not sadistic; it is hard common sense. You fail your children worst if you do not punish them when they need it. The lessons you fail to teach them will be taught later and much more harshly by a cruel world, the real world where no excuses are accepted, the world of TANSTAAFL and of Mrs Be-Done-By-As-You-Did.)
Lazarus told me (centuries later or years later - a matter of viewpoint) that he was half-way through his toast to Carol when he suddenly realised that he was inaugurating the most widespread holiday of the human race: Carolita's Day - and that he has been trying ever since to decide which came first: the chicken or the egg.
Chicken or egg, Carol's Day did develop over the centuries and on many planets into a public holiday - this I learned when I was taken to Tertius. Usually it was celebrated just for the fun of it, the way the Japanese celebrate Christmas, as a secular holiday having nothing to do with religion.
But in some cultures it developed as a religious holiday peculiar to theocracies: the safety-valve holiday, the day of excesses, of sin without punishment, the saturnalia.
While I got out of those silly stirrups and down off that cold table and put on my ‘clothes' (a caftan rigged. from a beach towel), Dr Ridpath and Dagmar looked over my test results. They pronounced me healthy-merely out of my skull, which neither of them seemed to regard as important.
Dr Ridpath said, ‘Explain things to her, Dag. I'm going to take a shower and get ready.'
‘What do you want to do, Maureen?' Dagmar asked me. ‘Doc tens me that your total assets are that terry-cloth tent you're wearing and this orange cat. Pixel! Stop that! This is not a night you can go to a police station and ask your way to the county poor farm; tonight the cops skin down and join in the riot.' She looked me up and down. ‘If you go out on the streets tonight - well, you'd have a quieter time in a lions' den. Maybe you like such things - many do. Me, f'rinstance. But tonight a gal is either locked up or knocked up. You can stay here, sleep on the couch. I can find you a blanket. Pixel! Get down from there!'