Heinlein, Robert A – Friday

“That’s what we are here to find out, Marj. If you areÄor if you become soÄwe have other drugs that will make you comfortable.”

Ah so! The dear thing was just trying to take care of me. “Boss man, suppose I tell you, Cub Scout honor, that I ain’t done nothin’ a-tall for my last two periods? Although several have tried. You among them.”

“Why, I would say, `Take this cup and get me a urine sample’ and then I’ll take a blood sample, and a saliva sample. I’ve dealt before with women who hadn’t done nothin’.”

“You’re a cynic, Jerry.”

“I’m trying to take care of you, dear.”

“I know you are, you sweet thing. All right, I’ll go along with the nonsense. If the mouse squealsÄ”

“It’s a gerbil.”

“If the gerbil says yes, you can notify the Pope-in-Exile that it’s happened at last, and I’ll buy you a bottle of champagne. This has been the longest dry spell of my life.”

Jerry took his samples and did nineteen other things, and gave me a blue pill to take before dinner and a yellow pill to make me sleep and another blue pill to take before breakfast. “These don’t have quite the authority of the stuff you asked for but they will do and they don’t cause a baby to be born with his feet on backwards or some such. I’ll call you tomorrow morning as soon as I’m through with office hours.”

“I thought that pregnancy tests today were service-while-youwait?”

“Get along with you. Your great-grandmother used to find out through her waistband becoming too tight. You’re spoiled. Just hope I don’t have to run the test over.”

So I thanked him and kissed him, which he pretended to try to avoid but not very hard. Jerry is a lamb. –

The blue pills did let me eat dinner and breakfast.

I stayed in my cabin after breakfast. Jerry called about on time. “Brace yourself, Marj. You owe me a bottle of champagne.”

“What?” Then I quieted down for Tilly’s benefit. “Jerry, you are certifiably insane. Out of your skull.”

“Certainly,” he agreed. “But that’s no handicap in this business. Stop in and we’ll discuss a regime for you. Say at fourteen?”

“Say at right now. I want to talk to that gerbil.”

Jerry convinced me. He went over the details, showing just how each test was conducted. Miracles do happen and I was demonstrably pregnant . . . so that’s why my breasts had been feeling sort of tender lately. He had a little pamphlet for me, telling me what to do, what to eat, how to bathe, what to avoid, what to expect, and dreary so forth. I thanked him and took it and left. Neither of us mentioned the possibility of abortion and he made no wisecracks about women “who hadn’t done nothin’.”

Only I hadn’t. Burt was the last time and that was two periods back and anyhow I had been rendered surgically sterile at menarche and had never used contraception of any sort in all my very busy social life. All those hundreds and hundreds of times and now he tells me I’m pregnant!

I am not totally stupid. Having accepted the fact, the old Sherlock Holmes rule told me when and where and how it had happened. Once back in cabin BB I went into the bathroom, latched the door, took off my clothes, and lay down on the floorÄspread both hands around my navel, tensed my muscles, and pushed.

A little nylon sphere popped out and I grabbed it.

I examined it carefully. No doubt about it; this was the same little marble I had worn in there since the trick surgery was done to me, always worn except when I was carrying a message there. Not a container for an ovum in stasis, not a container for anythingÄjust a small, featureless, translucent sphere. I looked at it again and popped it back in.

So they had lied to me. I had wondered at the time about “stasis” at body temperature because the only stasis for living tissues I had

ever heard of involved cryogenic temperatures, liquid nitrogen or lower.

But that was Mr. Sikmaa’s problem and I don’t claim to be a biophysicistÄif he had confidence in his scientists, it was not my place to argue. I was a courier; my sole responsibility was to deliver the package.