He bristled. “How should I know? But if there is a micron’s s difference, or a shade or tone off that you could pick up with a spectrophotometer, from the pic your brother mailed to my brother, I’ll eat it! But how do I know how the proud parents had the thing prettied up?”
“Sorry, sorry! It’s a swell picture. I wish there were some way I could pay you.”
“Don’t stay awake nights; I’ll think of something. My services come high.”
I took down my pic of Lucille LaVonne and put Molly in her place. I didn’t throw away the one of Lucille, though.
It was a couple of months later that I found out that Dr. Devereaux had seen entirely different possibilities in my being able to use the “wave length” of Uncle Alf and Sugar Pie from the obvious ones I had seen. I had continued to talk with both of them, though not as often as I had at first. Sugar Pie was a young lady now, almost eighteen, in normal school at Witwatersrand and already started practice teaching. Nobody but Unc and I called her “Sugar Pie” and the idea that I might someday substitute for Unc was forgotten-at the rate we were shifting around pretty soon she could bring me up.
But Doe Devereaux had not forgotten the matter. However the negotiations had been conducted by him with LRF without consulting me. Apparently Pat had been told to keep it to himself until they were ready to try it, for the first I knew of it was when I told him to stand by to record some routine traffic (we were back on regular watches by then). “Skip it, old son,” he said. “Pass the traffic to the next victim. You and I are going to try something fresh.”
(“What?”)
“LRF orders, all the way down from the top. Molly has an interim research contract all of her own, just like you and I had.”
(“Huh? She’s not a twin.”)
“Let me count her. No, there’s just one of her-though she sometimes seems like an entire herd of wild elephants. But she’s here, and she wants to say hello to Uncle Tom.”
(“Oh, fine. Hello, Molly.”)
“Hello, Uncle Tom.”
I almost jumped out of my skin. I had caught it right off, with no fumbling. (“Hey, who was that? Say that again!”)
“Hello, Uncle Tom.” She giggled. “I’ve got a new hair bow.”
I gulped. (“I’ll bet you look mighty cute in it, honey. I wish I could see you. Pat! When did this happen?”)
“On and off, for the past ten weeks. It took some tough sessions with Dr. Mabel to make it click. By the way, it took some tougher sessions with, uh, the former Miss Kouric before she would agree to let us try it.”
“He means Mommy,” Molly told me in a conspirator’s whisper. “She didn’t like it. But I do, Uncle Tom. I think it’s nice.”
“I’ve got no privacy from either one of them,” Pat complained. “Look, Tom, this is just a test run and I’m signing off. I’ve got to get the terror back to her mother.”
“She’s going to make me take a nap,” Molly agreed in a resigned voice, “and I’m too old for naps. Good-by, Uncle Tom. I love you.”
(“I love you, Molly.”)
I turned around and Dr. Devereaux and the Captain were standing behind me, ears flapping. “How did it go?” Dr. Devereaux demanded, eagerly-for him.
I tried to keep my face straight. “Satisfactorily. Perfect reception.” ….
“The kid, too?”
“Why, yes, sir. Did you expect something else?”
He let out a long breath. “Son, if you weren’t needed, I’d beat your brains out with an old phone list.”
I think Baby Molly and I were the first secondary communication team in the fleet. We were not the last. The LRF, proceeding on a hypothesis suggested by the case of Uncle Alfred and Sugar Pie, assumed that it was possible to form a new team where the potential new member was very young and intimately associated with an adult member of an old team. It worked in some eases. In other cases it could not even be tried because no child was available.