And every two hours, plus or minus a few minutes, he had to feed the brute. If he was lucky it lay quiet, but more often he had to chase it around with the sprayer. Normally FROBs of this age were too weak to move about-but that was under Hudlar’s crushing gravity-pull and pressure. Here in conditions which were to it less than one quarter-G, the infant Hudlarian could move. And it was having fun.
O’Mara wasn’t: his body felt like a thick, clumsy sponge saturated with fatigue. After each feed he dropped onto the couch and let his bone-weary body dive blindly into unconsciousness. He was so utterly and completely spent, he told himself after every spraying, that he could not possibly hear the brute the next time it complained-he would be too deeply out. But always that blaring, discordant foghorn jerked him at least half awake and sent him staggering like a drunken puppet through the motions which would end that horrible, mind-wrecking din.
After nearly thirty hours of it O’Mara knew he couldn’t take much more. Whether the infant was collected in two days or two months the result as far as he was concerned would be the same; he would be a raving lunatic. Unless in a weak moment he took a walk outside without his suit. Pelling would never have allowed him to be subjected to this sort of punishment, he knew, but the doctor was an ignoramus where the FROB life-form was concerned. And Caxton, only a little less ignorant, was the simple, direct type who delighted in this sort of violent practical joke, especially when he considered that the victim deserved everything he got.
But just suppose the section chief was a more devious character than O’Mara had suspected? Suppose he knew exactly what he was sentencing him to by leaving the infant Hudlarian in his charge? O’Mara cursed tiredly, but he had been at it so constantly for the last ten or twelve hours that bad language had ceased to be an emotional safety valve. He shook his head angrily in a vain attempt to dispel the weariness which clogged his brain.
Caxton wasn’t going to get away with it.
He was the strongest man on the whole project, O’Mara knew, and his reserves of strength must be considerable. All this fatigue and nervous twitching was simply in his mind, he told himself insistently, and a couple of days with practically no sleep meant nothing to his tremendous physique-even after the shaking up he’d received in the accident. And anyway, the present situation with the infant couldn’t get any worse, so it must soon begin to improve. He would beat them yet, he swore. Caxton would not drive him mad, or even to the point of calling for help.
This was a challenge, he insisted with weary determination. Up to now he had bemoaned the fact that no job had fully exploited his capabilities. Well, this was a problem which would tax both his physical stamina and deductive processes to the limit. An infant had been placed in his charge and he intended taking care of it whether it was here for two weeks or two months. What was more, he was going to see that the kid was a credit to him when its foster parents arrived…
After the forty-eighth hour of the infant FROB’s company and the fiftyseventh since he had had a good sleep, such illogical and somewhat maudlin thinking did not seem strange to O’Mara at all.
Then abruptly there came a change in what O’Mara had accepted as the order of things. The FROB after complaining, was fed and refused to shut up!
O’Mara’s first reaction was a feeling of hurt surprise; this was against the rules. They cried, you fed them, they stopped crying-at least for a while. This was so unfair that it left him too shocked and helpless to react.
The noise was bedlam, with variations. Long, discordant blasts of sound beat over him. Sometimes the pitch and volume varied in an insanely arbitrary manner and at others it had a grinding, staccato quality as if broken glass had got into its vocal gears. There were intervals of quiet, varying between two seconds and half a minute, during which O’Mara cringed waiting for the next blast. He struck it out for as long as he could-a matter of ten minutes or so-then he dragged his leaden body off the couch again.