“I’ll handle Mother, and Dad, too. Howard should have stayed away. Get going. Split ‘em up, then get lost.”
“All right,” I said uneasily. “Uh… look, Pat, I appreciate He looked at me and his lip curled. “Think I’m doing this for you?”
“Why, I thought-”
“You never think … and I’ve been doing nothing else for days. If I’m going to be a cripple, do you fancy I’m going to spend my life in a public ward? Or here, with Mother drooling over me and Dad pinching pennies and the girls getting sick of the sight of me? Not Patrick! If I have to be like this, I’m going to have the best of everything … nurses to jump when I lift a finger and dancing girls to entertain me-and you are going to see that the LRF pays for it. We can keep our contract and we’re going to. Oh, I know you don’t want to go, but now you’ve got to.”
“Me? You’re all mixed up. You crowded me out. You-”
“Okay, forget it. You’re rarin’ to go.” He reached, up and punched me in the ribs, then grinned. “So we’ll both go-for you’ll take me along every step of the way. Now get out there and break that up.”
I left two days later. When Pat handed Mum his reverse-twist whammie, she did not even fight. If getting the money to let her sick baby have proper care and everything else he wanted meant that I had to space, well, it was too bad but that was how it was. She told me how much it hurt to have me go but I knew she was not too upset. But I was, rather … I wondered what the score would have been if it had been I who was in Pat’s fix? Would she have let Pat go just as easily simply to get me anything I wanted? But I decided to stop thinking about it; parents probably don’t know that they are playing favorites even when they are doing it.
Dad got me alone for a man-to-man talk just before I left. He hemmed and hawed and stuck in apologies about how he should have talked things over with me before this and seemed even more embarrassed than I was, which was plenty. When he was floundering I let him know that one of our high school courses had covered most of what he was trying to say. (I didn’t let him know that the course had been an anti-climax.) He brightened up and said, “Well, son, your mother and I have tried to teach you right from wrong. Just remember that you are a Bartlett and you won’t make too many mistakes. On that other matter, well, if you will always ask yourself whether a girl is the sort you would be proud to bring home to meet your mother, I’ll be satisfied.”
I promised-it occurred to me that I wasn’t going to have much chance to fall into bad company, not with psychologists practically dissecting everybody in Project Lebensraum. The bad apples were never going into the barrel
When I see how naive parents are I wonder how the human race keeps on being born. Just the same it was touching and I appreciate the ordeal he put himself through to get me squared away-Dad was always a decent guy and meant well.
I had a last date with Maudie but it wasn’t much; we spent it sitting around Pat’s bed, She did kiss me good-by-Pat told her to. Oh, well!
VI TORCHSHIP “LEWIS AND CLARK”
I was in Switzerland only two days. I got a quick look at the lake at Zurich and that was all; the time was jammed with trying to hurry me through all the things Pat had been studying for weeks. It couldn’t be done, so they gave me spools of minitape which I was to study after the trip started.
I had one advantage: Planetary League Auxiliary Speech was a required freshman course at our high school-P-L lingo was the working language of Project Lebensraum. I can’t say I could speak it when I got there, but it isn’t hard. Oh, it seems a little silly to say “goed” when you’ve always said “gone” but you get used to it, and of course all technical words are Geneva-International and always have been.