Heinlein, Robert A – Friday

The last item and the burns and the broken toes were all that I recalled; the others must have happened while I was distracted by other matters.

Boss said, “Friday, you know that it will take at least six weeks to regenerate that missing nipple.”

“But plastic surgery for a simple cosmetic job would heal in a week. Dr. Krasny told me so.”

“Young woman, when anyone in this organization is maimed in line of duty, she will be restored as perfectly as therapeutic art can achieve. In addition to that our permanent policy, in your case

there is another reason, compelling and sufficient. We each have a moral obligation to conserve and preserve beauty in this world; there is none to waste. You have an unusually comely body~ damage to it is deplorable. It must be repaired.”

“Cosmetic surgery is all right, I said so. But I don’t expect to have milk in these jugs. And anybody in bed with me won’t care.”

“Friday, you may have convinced yourself that you will never have need to lactate. But esthetically a functional breast is very different from a surgery-shaped imitation. That hypothetical bedmate might not know . . . but you would know and I would know. No, my dear. You will be restored to your former perfection.”

“Hmm! When are you going to get that eye regenerated?”

“Don’t be rude, child. In my case, no esthetic issue obtains.”

So I got my tit back as good as ever or maybe better. The next argument was over the retraining I felt I needed to correct my hairtrigger kill reflex. When I brought up the matter again, Boss looked as if he had just bitten into something nasty. “Friday, I do not recall that you have ever made a kill that turned out to be a mistake. Have you made any kills of which I am unaware?”

“No, no,” I said hastily. “I never killed anybody until I went to work for you and I haven’t made any that I didn’t report to you.”

“In that case all of your killings have been in self-defense.”

“All but that ‘Belsen’ character. That wasn’t self-defense; he never laid a finger on me.”

“Beaumont. At least that was the name he usually used. Self-defense sometimes must take the form of ‘Do unto others what they would do unto you but do it first.’ De Camp, I believe. Or some other of the twentieth-century school of pessimistic philosophers. I’ll call up Beaumont’s dossier so that you may see for yourself that he belonged on everyone’s better-dead list.”

“Don’t bother. Once I looked into his pouch, I knew that he wasn’t following me to kiss me. But that was afterward.”

Boss took several seconds to answer, far beyond his wont. “Friday, do you want to change tracks and become a hatchet man?”

My chin dropped and my eyes widened. That was all the answer I made.

“I didn’t intend to frighten you off the nest,” Boss said dryly. “You will have deduced that this organization includes assassins. I don’t want to lose you as a courier; you are my best. But we always need skilled assassins, as their attrition rate is high. However, there is this major difference between a courier and an assassin: A courier kills only in self-defense and often by reflex . . . and, I concede, always with some possibility of error . . . as not all couriers have your supreme talent for instantly integrating all factors and reaching a necessary conclusion.”

“Huh!”

“You heard me correctly. Friday, one of your weaknesses is that you lack appropriate conceit. An honorable hatchet man does not kill by reflex; he kills by planned intent. If the plan goes so far wrong that he needs to use self-defense, he is almost certain to become a statistic. In his planned killings, he always knows why and agrees with the necessity . . . or I won’t send him out.”

(Planned killing? Murder, by definition. Get up in the morning, eat a hearty breakfast, then keep rendezvous with your victim, cut him down in cold blood? Eat dinner and sleep soundly?) “Boss, I don’t think it is my sort of work.”