The baby had been asleep earlier, when they’d ail come in to look at her. Now Fay stepped into the nursery, half-lit by a small table lamp, and leaned over the crib to smile down at Carrie’s child.
Vickie was fair, like her mother, with wide-set eyes and pug nose. Her eyes were closed, but her pudgy hands and feet were moving, in that aimless way of infants learning their bodies. Light gleamed on her soft stretching throat.
Perhaps sensing Fay’s presence, the baby abruptly opened her eyes and gazed upward with intense concentration. Beautiful green eyes, darker than jade. Then the wide mouth opened and the baby gave a gassy smile, complete with bubbles.
It’s a trick of the light. Fay thought, but it wasn’t. Holding tight to the side of the crib, she watched Vickie laugh. We think we’re safe, she thought. We move the danger far away where it can only hurt people we don’t care about, and we stay here safe. But it’s coming, anyway.
In the doorway, Carrie said, “Fay? Dinner.”
I can’t let her guess I know. Fay thought, but when she turned the truth must have been plain in her eyes because Carrie, smiling with some irritation, said, “Oh, you noticed.”
“Carrie.”
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing.” Taking Fay’s arm, walking her out to the master bedroom, Carrie said, “There’s a company doctor knows all about it, there’s a little operation when Vickie’s just a bit older, there won’t be a trace.”
“A company doctor? This has happened before?”
“And they’re all just as healthy and happy as can be,” Carrie said, smiling her contented smile. “Come along to dinner.” She leaned close, the smile turning confidential. “But don’t mention it to anyone, all right? I mean, it’s going to be fixed.”
“Oh, no. I wouldn’t.”
And she wouldn’t. Following Carrie to the dining room, Fay knew she would never mention it to a soul. But she would remember. Clear in her mind’s eye it would remain, the vision of Vickie, the wide-set deep green eyes, the little pug nose, the forked tongue.
The World’s a Stage
“We’d better be getting our act together and taking it on the road,” said ensign Benson, “or we’ll be stuck on this planet forever.”
From the beginning of Time, Man has been on the move, ever outward. First he spread over his own planet, then across the Solar System, then outward to the Galaxies, all of them dotted, speckled, measled with the colonies of Man.
Then, one day in the year eleven thousand four hundred and six (11,406), an incredible discovery was made in the Master Imperial Computer back on Earth. Nearly 500 years before, a clerical error had erased from the computer’s memory more than WOO colonies, all in sector F.U.B.A.R.3. For half a millennium, those colonies, young and struggling when last heard from, had had no contact with the rest of Humanity.
The Galactic Patrol Interstellar Ship Hopeful, Captain Gregory Standforth commanding, was at once dispatched to re-establish contact with the Thousand Lost Colonies and return them to the bosom of Mankind.
The two tramps, picturesquely filthy, sat by the side of the road in the dusty sunshine. They were dressed in more rags than seemed absolutely necessary given the mildness of the weather, and while one of them mused upon life more or less audibly, the other removed a battered, scruffy boot and frowned mistrustfully into it, as though expecting to find something alive in there. He sighed. He blew into the boot. He sighed. He put the boot on. He took it off again. He turned to his musing, muttering companion and said, “Didi?”
“Yes?”
“What do we do now?”
“We wait.”
A kind of inner earthquake of frustration vibrated through the tramp holding the boot. With a repressed scream, he cried, “For what?”
“For him,” Didi said. “He promised he’d meet us here, and we’re supposed to wait until—” He broke off, gazing upward past his friend’s filthy forehead.
“Well?” asked the other. “Go on, go on.”
“Oh, my gosh,” said Didi His voice, his manner, even his facial appearance, all had changed.
“What is it?” asked his friend, turning to look.
The two tramps stared upward at the slowly descending spaceship, a great silver corncob lowering through the empty air. “It’s Godot,” Didi whispered in awe. “He finally got here.”
Inside the spaceship, 27 birds watched Pam Stokes, astrogator, beautiful and brainy but blind to passion, play with her ancestral slide rule. The birds were all stuffed and wired to their perches around the Hopeful’s command deck, and from the expression in their glass eyes, they didn’t like it a bit. Or perhaps what they didn’t like was the sight of Captain Gregory Standforth disemboweling yet another bird on the control panel. Indigo ichor oozed through the dials and switches into the panel’s innards, where it would make a mysterious bad smell for the next several weeks.
A tall, skinny, vague-eyed, loose-wired sort of fellow, Captain Standforth was the seventh consecutive generation of Standforths to spend his life in the service of the Galactic Patrol and the first to be terrible at it. Much was expected of a Standforth, but in this case it was expected in vain. The captain had had no choice other than to follow the family footsteps into the patrol, and the patrol had had to take him, but neither had profited. All the captain wanted was to pursue his one passion, taxidermy — the stuffing of birds from everywhere in the universe — while all the patrol wanted was to never see or hear from him again
Thump. “Ouch!” said the captain. As vermilion blood mixed with the indigo ichor, he put his cut varicolored finger into his mouth, said, “Oog,” took it out again and made a bad-taste grimace. “Nn.” Turning to Pam, he said, “What was that thump? Made me cut myself.”
“Subsidence,” she said, rapidly whizzing the slide rule’s parts back and forth. “By my calculations, ground level must have eroded seven millimeters in the last half-chiliad. Therefore, the ship’s computer switched off engines before we actually—”
“Half-chiliad?” asked the captain. “What’s a half-chiliad?”
“Five hundred years. So that’s why we thumped when we landed.”
“Landed? You mean we’ve arrived somewhere?”
“Yes, sir.”
Captain Standforth looked around at his birds. They looked back. “I wonder where we are,” he said. “I wonder what kind of birds they have here.”
“Wardrobe! Wardrobe!”
“Now what?”
“My wings keep falling off.”
“All right, I’ll get my needle and thread.”
He’s an airhead, Ensign Kybee Benson thought, raging murderously within while he struggled to appear calm and composed without. A clot head, a bonehead, a meal-head. Chowderhead, fathead. Muttonhead. No, he’s worse than all of those — he’s a Luthguster.
The Luthguster in question, Councilman Morton Luthguster of the Supreme Galactic Council, sealed on the other side of Ensign Benson’s desk, went obliviously on with his question. “Why name an entire planet after an actor? A planet called J. Railsford Farnsworth is ridiculous.”
“In the first place,” Ensign Benson said, swallowing brimstone, “the planet is named Hestia IV, since it is the fourth planet from its sun, Hestia. The colony’s full name is the J. Railsford Farnsworth Repertory Company.”