Heinlein, Robert A – Friday

What package? Friday, you know durn well what package. Not one in your navel. One about ten centimeters farther inside. One that was planted in you one night in Florida when you were induced to sleep sounder than you knew. One that takes nine months to unload. That postpones your plans to complete the Grand Tour, does it not? If this fetus is what it has to be, they won’t let you leave The Realm until after you unload.

If they wanted a host mother, why the blinkin’ hell didn’t they say so? I would have been reasonable about it.

Wait a moment! The Dauphiness has to give birth to this baby. That is what the whole hanky-panky is about: an heir to the throne, free of any congenital defects, from the DauphinessÄunarguably from the Dauphiness, born in the presence of about four court physicians and three nurses and a dozen members of the court. Not you, you mongrel AP with the phony birth certificate!

Which took me back to the original scenario with just the slightest variation: Miss Marjorie Friday, wealthy tourist, goes groundside on The Realm to enjoy the glories of the imperial capital . . . and catches a bad cold and has to go to hospital. And the Dauphiness is brought to the same hospital andÄno, hold it! Would the Dauphiness do anything so plebeian as to be a patient in a hospital open to tourists?

Okay, try this: You enter hospital with a bad cold, as instructed. About three in the morning you go out the back door on a meat wagon with a sheet draped over you. You wind up in the Palace. How soon? How long will it take the Palace physicians to fiddle her royal body chemistry into receptiveness for the fetus? Oh, forget it, Friday; you don’t know and don’t have to know. When she is ready, they place both of you on operating tables and spread your legs and take it out of you and plant it in her, while it’s small and no problem.

Then you get paid a fancy price and you leave. Does The First Citizen thank you? Probably not in person. But possibly incognito ifÄ Stop it, Friday! Don’t daydream; you know better. At a lecture clear back in basicÄone of Boss’s orientation lectures, it wasÄ “The trouble with this sort of mission is that, after an agent has

successfully completed it, something permanent happens to that agent, something that keeps him from talking, then or later. So, no matter how lavish the fee, it is well to avoid this class of mission.”

XXXI

During the leg to Botany Bay I mulled that thought over and over, trying to find some flaw in it. I recalled the classic case of J. F. Kennedy. His putative assassin had been killed (assassinated) too quickly for even a preliminary hearing. Then there was that dentist who had gunned down Huey LongÄgunned down himself a few seconds later. And any number of agents during the long Cold War who had lived just long enough to carry out their missions and “just happened” to walk in front of speeding vehicles.

But the picture that kept coming back to my mind was so old that it is almost mythology: A lonely beach and a pirate chief supervising the burying of treasure. The hole is dug, the chests of loot placed thereinÄand the men who dug the hole are shot; their bodies help to fill the hole.

Yes, I’m being melodramatic. But it is my womb we are talking about, not yours. Everybody in the Known Universe knows that the father of the present First Citizen climbed to the throne over uncounted dead bodies and his son stays on that throne by being even more ruthless than his father.

Is he going to thank me for having improved his line? Or is he going to bury my bones in his deepest dungeon?

Don’t kid yourself, Friday; knowing too much is a capital offense. In politics it always has been. If they ever had any intention of treating you fairly, you would not be pregnant. Therefore you are forced

to assume that they will not treat you fairly after they take this royal fetus out of you.