Steel Beach

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Feeling not unlike the hood ornament on a luxury rover-and showing a lot more chrome-plated belly than either Mr. Rolls or Mr. Royce would have approved of-I stepped boldly forth into the sunlight, almost as naked as the day I was born. Boldly, if you don't dwell on the thirty minutes I spent getting up my nerve to do it in the first place. Naked, if you don't count the mysterious force field that kept me wrapped in a warming blanket of air at least five millimeters thick.

Even the warming part was illusory. It certainly felt as if the air was keeping me warm, and without that psychological reassurance I doubt if I'd have made it. Actually, the air was cooling me, which is always the problem in a space suit, whether bought off the shelf at Hamilton's or hocus-pocused into existence by the Genius of the Robert A. Heinlein. See, the human body generates heat, and a spacesuit has to be a good insulator, that's its main purpose; the heat will build up and choke you without an outlet. See?

Oh, brother. If you had a chuckle at my explanations of nanoengineering and cybernetics, wait till you hear Hildy's Field Suits Made Simple.

"You're doing fine, Hildy," Gretel (not her real name) coaxed. "I know it takes some getting used to."

"How would you know that?" I countered. "You grew up in a field suit."

"Yeah, but I've taken tenderfeet out before."

Tenderfeet, indeed. I bent over to see those pedal extremities, thinking I'd have to get re-acquainted with them post-partum. I wiggled my toes and light wiggled off the reflections. Like wearing thick mylar socks, only all I could feel was what appeared to be the rough surface of Luna. There was some feedback principle at work there, I'd been told; the field kept me floating five millimeters high no matter how hard I pressed down. And a good thing, too. Those rock were hot.

"How's the breathing?" Gretel asked, in a funny voice I'd get used to eventually. Part of the field suit package was a modification of my implanted telephone so that sub-vocalization could be heard over the channel the Heinleiners used suit-to-suit.

"I still want to gasp," I said.

"Say again?"

I repeated it, saying each word carefully.

"That's just psychotic."

I think she meant psychosomatic, or maybe psychological. Or possibly psychotic was the perfect word. How would you describe someone who trusted her delicate hide to a spatial effect that, as near as I could understand it, had no existence in the real world?

The desire to breathe was real enough, even though a suppressor of some kind was at work in my brain cutting off that part of the autonomic nervous system. My body was getting all the oxygen it needed, but when your lungs have been inhaling and exhaling for over a hundred years, some part of you gets a little alarmed when asked to shut it off for an hour or so. I'd been holding my breath for almost ten minutes so far. I felt about ready to go back inside and gulp.

"You want to go back inside?"

I wondered if I'd been muttering to myself. Gotta watch that. I shook my head, remembered how hard that was to see, and mouthed "No."

"Then take my hand," she said. I did, and our two suit fields melted together and I felt her bare hand in mine. I could see that, if these things ever got on the market, there was going to be a big fad in lovemaking under the stars.

Don't go shopping for a field suit just yet, though.

They'll surely be available in a few years, what with current conditions. A lot of people are angry at the Heinleiners for not just bestowing the patents gratis to the general public. I've heard mutterings. A lot of good it will do the mutterers; they simply don't understand Heinleiners. There goddam sure ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and they're out to prove it.

As I write this, the Heinleiners are still pretty pissed off, and who could blame them? All charges have naturally been dropped, the statutes of limitations have expired, as it were. Nobody's out hunting them. Yet I swore a solemn oath not to reveal the names of any of them until given permission, and that permission has not been granted, and who's to say they're wrong? Say what you will about me as a reporter, but I never revealed a source, and I never will. Hence, the girl I will call "Gretel." Hence all the aliases I will bestow on the people I met after I followed Gretel's trail into the perfect mirror.

And I promised not to lie to you, but from here on in I will not always tell you the whole truth. Events have of necessity been edited, to protect people with no reason to trust authority but who trusted me and then found… but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The trail of breadcrumbs led into the rubble that washed at the base of the Heinlein. At first it seemed as if they vanished into a blank wall, but I found that if I ducked a little there was a way through.

Luckily, I had Winston on a leash, because he was straining to head right into the pile, and god knows if I'd ever have found him again. I shined my flashlight under the overhang-which seemed to be the back end of a vintage rover-and saw it would be possible to squirm my way in. Without the crumbs I never would have tried it, as I could already see four ways to go. But I did go in, wondering all the time just how stable this whole pile was, if I dared brush up against anything.

Not too far in it became clear I was on a pathway. At first it was just bare rock. Soon there was a flooring laid down, made of discarded plastic wall panels. I tested each step cautiously, but it seemed firm. I found each panel had been spot welded to some of the more massive pieces of debris that made up the jackstraw jumble. I further saw, looking around the edge of the roadway, that the ground was no longer down there. My flashlight picked up an endless array of junk. If there'd been any air I might have tried dropping a coin or something; I had a feeling I'd hear it clatter for a long time.

For a while I kept testing each new panel cautiously, but each was as firmly in place as the last. I decided I was being silly. People obviously used this path with some frequency, and despite its impromptu nature it seemed sturdy enough. Flashing my light around above me I could soon see the tunnel itself had been made by some kind of boring machine. It was cylindrical, and a lot of rubbish had been blasted or cut away; I found sliced edges of metal beams on each side of the tunnel, as if the center sections had been cut out. I hadn't seen it as a cylinder at first because its walls were so relentlessly baroque, not covered with anything as they would be in King City.

Before long I came to a string of lights hung rather haphazardly along the left-hand side of the tunnel. And not long after that I saw somebody approaching me from a good distance. I shined the light at the person, and she shined her light at me, and I saw she was also pregnant and also had a bulldog on a leash, which seemed too much for coincidence.

Winston didn't put it together. Instead, he plowed forward in his usual way, either to greet a new friend or to rend an enemy into bloody gobbets, who could tell? I could hear the clang over my suit radio when he hit. He sat down hard, having had no visible effect upon the perfect mirror.

Neither did I, though I scrupulously did all the futile things people do in stories about humans encountering alien objects: chunking rocks, swinging a makeshift club, kicking it. I left no scratches on it. ("Mister President, it is my scientific opinion the saucer is made of an alloy never seen on Earth!") I'd have tried fire, electricity, lasers, and atomic weapons, but I didn't have any handy. Maybe lasers wouldn't have been the best idea.

So I waited, wondering if she'd been watching me, hoping she'd had a good laugh at my expense, feeling sure she hadn't led me this far just to strand me, and in a moment the surface of the mirror bulged and became a human face. The face smiled, and then the rest of the body appeared. At first I thought she was moving forward, but it turned out the mirror was moving back and the field was forming around her body as she simply stood there.

It moved back about three meters, and she beckoned to me. I went to her, and she made some gestures which I didn't understand. Finally I got the idea that I was to hold on to a bar fastened to the wall. I did, and the girl crouched and held on to Winston, who seemed happy to see her.

There was a loud bang and something slammed into me. Bits of trash and dust swirled, maybe a little mist, too. The perfect mirror was no longer where it had been and the corridor had changed. I looked around and saw the walls were now coated with the same mirror, and the flat surface had re-formed behind me, where it had been originally. A rather dramatic airlock.

For a few more seconds Gretel was still wrapped in distortion, then her suit field vanished and she became the nude ten-year-old who had run through my dreams for such a long time. She was saying something. I shook my head and glanced at the readouts for exterior temperature and pressure-pure habit, I could see and hear the air was okay-then I took off my helmet.

"First thing," Gretel said, "you've got to promise not to tell my father."

"Not to tell him what?"

"That you saw me on the surface without my suit. He doesn't like it when I do that."

"I wouldn't, either. Why do you do it?"

"You gotta promise, or you can just go home."

I did. I would have promised one hell of a lot of things to get farther down that tunnel I could see stretching ahead of me. I even would have kept most of them. Personally, I don't view a promise made to a ten-year-old to be binding, if it involves a matter of safety, but I'd keep that one if I could.

I had a thousand questions, but wasn't sure how to ask them. I'm a good interviewer, but getting answers out of a child takes a different technique. It would be no problem-the problem with Gretel was getting her to shut up-but I didn't know it at the time. Right then she was squatting, getting Winston out of his helmet, so I watched and waited. Liz had promised me Winston never bit people unless ordered to do so, and I sure hoped that was true.

Once again Winston came through for me. He greeted her like a long-lost friend, bowling her over in his attempts to lick her face, reducing her to giggles. I helped her get him out of the rest of his suit.

"You could get out of yours, too, if you want to," Gretel said.

"It's safe?"

"You might have asked that before I took off the dog's helmet."

She had a point. I started peeling out of it.

"You've led me a merry chase," I said.

"It took me a while to convince my father we ought to let you in at all. But I'm never in a hurry about such things, anyway. Do you good to wait."

"What changed his mind?"

"Me," she said, simply. "I always do. But it wasn't easy, you being a reporter and all."

A year ago that would have surprised me. Working for a newspad you don't get your face as well-known as straight television reporters do. But recent events had changed that. No more undercover work for me.

"Your father doesn't like reporters?"

"He doesn't like publicity. When you talk to him, you'll have to promise not to use any of it in a story."

"I don't know if I can promise that."

"Sure, you can. Anyway, that's between you and him."

We were walking down the round, mirrored corridor by then. When we came to another mirrored wall like the one I'd first encountered, she didn't slow down but headed right for it. When she was a meter away it vanished to reveal another long section of walkway. I looked behind us and there it was. Simple and effective. The bored-out tubes were lined with the field, and these safety barriers were spaced out along the way. This new technology would revolutionize Lunar building techniques, whatever it was.

I was bursting with questions about it, but my feeling for her was that it wasn't the right time to ask them. I was there as the result of a child's whim, and it would be a good idea to see where I stood with her, get on her good side as much as possible.

"So…" I said. "Did you like the toys?"

"Oh, please," she said. Not a promising beginning. "I'm a little grown up for that."

"How old are you?" There was always the chance I'd read her wrong from the beginning; she could be older than me.

"I'm eleven, but I'm precocious. Everyone says so."

"Especially Daddy?"

She grinned at me. "Never Daddy. He says I'm a walking argument for retroactive birth control. Okay, sure I liked the toys, only I'd prefer to think of them as charming antiques. Mostly, I liked the dog. What's his name?"

"Winston. So that's why you talked your father into letting me in?"

"No. I could get a dog easily enough."

"Then I don't get it. I worked so hard to interest you."

"You did? That's neat. Hell, Hildy, I'd have asked you in if you'd just sat out there on your butt."

"Why?"

She stopped and turned to me, and the look on her face told me what was coming. I'd seen that look before.

"Because you work for the Nipple. It's my favorite pad. Tell me, what was Silvio really like?"

Most of my conversations with Gretel got around to Silvio sooner or later, usually after long and adoring detours through the celebrity underbrush of the current pre-pubescent idols of television and music. I'd interviewed Silvio a total of three times, been at social occasions where he was present maybe twenty times, exchanged perhaps a dozen sentences with him at those functions. It didn't matter. It was all gold to Gretel, who was easily twice as star-struck as most girls her age. She hung on my every word.

Naturally, I made up a lot. If I could do it in print, why not to her? And it was good practice for telling her all the intimate details of the teeny stars, few of whom I'd even heard of, much less met.

Is that awful? I suppose it is, lying to a little girl, but I'd done worse in my life, and how badly did it hurt her? The whole gossip industry, flagshipped by the Nipple and the Shit, is of questionable moral worth to begin with, but it's a very old industry, and as such, must fill a basic human need. I've apologized for it enough here. The biggest difference in my stories to her was that, when I was writing it, it was usually nasty gossip. My stories to her were usually nice ones. I viewed it as paying my keep. If Scheherazade could do it, why not Hildy Johnson?

I was grateful that she held my hand on that first stroll on the surface. Breathing is perhaps the most underrated pleasure in life. You notice it when something smells good, curse it when something stinks, but the rest of the time you don't even think of it. It's as natural as… well, see? To really appreciate it, try holding your mouth and nose closed for three minutes, or however long it takes to reach the edge of blackout. That first breath that brings you back from the edge of death will be the sweetest thing you ever tasted, I guarantee it.

Now try it for thirty minutes.

The oxygen in my new lung was supposed to be good for that long, with a five to seven minute margin. "Think of it as thirty," Aladdin had said, when he installed it. "That'll keep you safe."

"I'll think of it as fifteen," I retorted. "Maybe five." I'd been sitting in his clinic at the time, the left side of my chest laid open, the ugly gray mass of what had recently been my left lung lying in a pan on a table like so much butcher-shop special of the day.

"Don't talk," he warned. "Not when I'm doing respiratory-system work." He wiped a drop of blood from the corner of my mouth.

"Maybe one," I said. He picked up the new lung, a thing of shiny metal with some trailing tubes, shaped very much like a lung, and started shoving it into the chest cavity. It made wet sucking sounds going in. I hate surgery.

I'd have thought it was something brand-new but for my recent researches into vacuum technology. One part of it was revolutionary, but the rest had been cobbled together from things developed and set aside a long time ago.

The Heinleiners weren't the first to work on the problem of adapting the human body to the Lunar surface. They were just the first ones to find a more or less practical answer. Most of the lung Aladdin put inside me was just an air bottle, filled with compressed oxygen. The rest was an interface device that allowed the oxygen to be released directly into my bloodstream while at the same time cleansing the carbon dioxide. A few other implants allowed some of the gas to be released through new openings in my skin, carrying off heat. None of it was new; most of it had been experimented with as early as the year 50.

But the year 50 wasn't railroad time. The system wasn't practical. You still had to wear a garment to protect you from the heat and the cold, and it had to protect you from both-extremes never seen on Earth-while at the same time keeping the vacuum from your skin, bleeding off waste heat, and a host of other requirements. Such garments were available; I'd bought two of them within the last year. They were naturally much improved from the mummy bags the first space explorers wore, but they worked on the same principles. And they worked better than the implanted lungs. If you're going to have to wear a suit, after all, what's the point of a thirty-minute supply of air in place of a lung? If you plan much of a stay on the surface you're going to have to back-pack most of your air, just like Neil Armstrong did.

And the Heinleiners did, too, for longer stays. But they'd solved the problem of what to do with the suit: just turn it off when not in use.

I supposed they'd also solved the psychological problem of the suits, which was the panic reflex when one has not breathed normally for some time, but I suspected the answer was the same one a child learns in her first swimming lesson. Do it enough, and you'll stop being afraid.

I'd done it for fifteen minutes now, and I was still frightened. My heart was racing and my palm was sweating. Or was that Gretel's?

"You'll sweat quite a bit," she said, when I asked. "It's normal. That layer of air will stay pretty hot, but not too hot to handle. Also, the sweat helps to bleed off the heat, just like it does inside."

I'd been told the suit's distance from one's body fluctuated by about a millimeter in a regular rhythm. That varied the volume considerably, sucking waste air from inside you and expelling it into vacuum in a bellows action. Water vapor went along with it, but a lot just dripped down your skin.

"I think I'd like to go back in now," I mouthed, and must have done it well enough, because I heard her say "Okay," quite clearly. That was the same circuitry the CC used to talk to me in private, back when I was still speaking to him. Aside from the respirator/air supply/field generator, and a few air ducts, not much had needed to be done to prepare me for field suit use. Some of that's because I was already wired to a fare-thee-well, as the CC had pointed out on my direct interface jaunts. Some adjustments had been made to my eardrums to keep them from hurting in fluctuating pressures, and a new heads-up display had been added so that when I closed my eyes or just blinked, I saw figures concerning body temperature and remaining air supply and so forth. There were warning alarms I'd been told would sound in various situations, and I didn't intend ever to hear any of them. Mostly, with a field suit, you just wore it. And all but a tiny portion of that, you wore inside.

The air lock I'd used to get into the secret warrens was only for inanimate objects, or people wearing inanimate objects, like the old-style suit I'd been wearing. If you had a field suit in, you simply stepped into the wall of mirror and your own suit melted into it, like a drop of mercury falling into a quicksilver pool. That was the only way to get through a null-field barrier other than turning it off. They were completely reflective on both sides. Nothing got through, not air, not bullets, not light nor heat nor radio waves nor neutrinos. Nothing.

Well, gravity got through, whatever gravity is. Don't seek the answer to that one in these pages. But magnetism didn't, and Merlin was working on the gravity part. Follow-up on that still to come.

Just before Gretel and I stepped through I saw part of the mirror wall distorted in the shape of a face. That was the only way to see through the wall, just stick your face in, and even that was tough to get used to. Gretel and her brother-what else?-Hansel did it as naturally as I'd turn my head to glance out a window. Me, I had to swallow hard a few times because every reflex I had was telling me I was going to smash my nose against that reflection of myself.

But I had no trouble this time because I wanted very badly to be on the other side of that mirror. I was running by the time I hit it. And of course there was no sensation of hitting anything-my suit simply vanished as it went through the larger field-with the result that, because some part of me had been braced for impact, had been flinching, wincing, bracing myself, it was like reaching for that non-existent top step, and I did a comical cakewalk as if the floor was coated with banana peels and came that close to a pratfall any silent film comedian would have envied.

Before you snicker, you go and try it.

Gretel claimed to be able to distinguish people's faces when covered by a null suit. I supposed that if you grew up in one it would be possible; they were still all chrome-plated masks to me, and probably would be for a long time. But I'd figured it was Hansel who poked his face through, since that's where we'd left him, watching Winston, and it was indeed him who greeted me after my maiden voyage in the new suit. Hansel was a lad of fifteen, a tall, awkward, rather shy boy with a shock of blonde hair like his sister's and a certain look in his eye I'm sure he got from his father. I thought of it as the mad scientist's gleam. As if he'd like to take you apart to see how you worked, only he was too polite to ask if he could. He'd put you back together, I hasten to add, or at least he'd intend to, though the skills might not always be up to the intent. He got that from his father, too. Where the shyness came from I had no idea. It was not inherited paternally.

"I just got a phone call from the ranch," Hansel said. "Libby says the palomino mare is about to foal."

"I got it, too," Gretel said. "Let's go."

They were off while I was still catching my breath. It had been a long time since I'd tried to keep up with children, but I didn't dare let these get out of my sight. I wasn't sure if I could find my way back to the Heinlein alone. Sounds unlikely, doesn't it? If there's one thing Lunarians are good at, it's negotiating a three-dimensional maze, or at least we'd like to think so. But the mazes of King City tend to be of two types: radiating out from a central plaza, with circular ring roads, or a north/south up/down grid. The paths of the Delambre Dump were more like a plate of spaghetti. Two days in Delambre would have any urban planner ready for a padded cell. It just growed.

The paths I was now hurrying down had been made by nothing more mysterious than obsolescent tunneling machines-one of the other things Lunarians are good at. They usually bored their way through rock, but the sort of techno-midden stratigraphy found in Delambre presented them no problems; they'd laser their way through anything. The Heinleiners had a dozen of them, all found on site, repaired, and seemingly just sort of set loose to find their own way. Not really, but anyone who had tried to find a rhyme or reason in the pathways had to figure an earthworm would have done a tidier job.

Once the wormholes were there, human crews came in and installed the flooring out of whatever plastic panels were at hand. Since those panels had been a construction staple for over a century, they weren't hard to find. The last step was to provide an ALU every hundred meters or so. An ALU was an Air Lock Unit, and consisted of this: a null-field generator with logics to run their odd locking systems at each end, a big can of air serviced weekly by autobots, and a wire running to a solar panel on top of the heap of garbage to power the whole thing. When somebody got around to it glow- and heat-wires were strung along the top of the tunnel so they wouldn't be too cold or dark, but these were viewed as luxuries, and not all parts of the tunnels had them.

A more jack-leg, slip-shod system of keeping the Breathsucker at bay had never been seen on this tired old orb, and nobody with half a brain would trust her one and only body to it for a split second. And with good reason: breakdowns were frequent, repairs were slow. Heinleiners simply didn't care, and why should they? If part of the tunnel went down, your suit would switch on and you'd have plenty of time to get to the next segment. They just didn't worry much about vacuum.

It made for weird travel, and another reason to keep up with the children. Both of them were carrying flashlights, which were almost mandatory in the tunnels, and which I'd forgotten again. We came to a dark, cold section and it was all I could do to keep their darting lights in sight. Sure, I could call them back if I got lost, but I was determined not to. It wouldn't have been fun, you see, and above all kids just want to have fun. You don't want to get a reputation as somebody they have to keep waiting for.

It was cold, too, right up to the point of chattering teeth, and then my suit switched on automatically and before I got out of the dark I was warm again. Winston looked back at me and barked. He was still in his old-style suit, Hansel carrying his helmet. They'd wanted me to let them give him a null-suit, but I didn't know how to explain it to Liz.

The first time the children took me to the farm, I had been expecting to see a hydroponic or dirt-based plantation of the sort most Lunarians know must be out there somewhere, but would have to consult a directory to find, and had never actually seen. I'd been to one in the course of a story long ago-I've been most places in my century-and since you probably haven't I'll say they tend to be quite dull. Not worth you time. Whether the crop is corn or potatoes or chickens, what you see are low rooms with endless rows of cages or stalls or furrows or troughs. Machines bring food or nutrients, haul away waste, harvest the final product. Most animals are raised underground, most plants on the surface, under plastic roofs. All of it is kept distant from civilization and hardly ever talked about, since so many of us can't bear to think the things we eat ever grew in dirt, or at one time cackled, oinked, and defecated.

I was expecting a food factory, albeit one built to typical Heinleiner specs, as Aladdin once described them to me: "Jerry-rigged, about three-quarter-assed, and hellishly unsafe." Later I did see a farm just like that, but not the one belonging to Hansel and Gretel and their best friend, Libby. Once again I'd forgotten I was dealing with children.

The farm was behind a big pressure door aboard the old Heinlein that said CREW'S MESS #1. Inside a lot of tables had been shoved together and welded solid to make waist-high platforms. These had been heaped with soil and planted with mutant grasses and bonsai trees. The scene had been laced with little dirt roads and an HO Gauge railroad layout, dotted with dollhouses and doll-barns and little doll towns of often-incompatible scales. The whole thing was about one hundred by fifty meters, and it was here the children raised their horselets and other things. Lots of other things.

Being children, and Heinleiners, it was not as neat as it might have been. They'd forgotten to provide good drainage, so large parts suffered from erosion. A grandiose plan to make mountains against the back wall had the look of a project never finished and long-neglected, with bare orange plastic matting showing the bones of where the mountains would have been if they hadn't run out of both enthusiasm and plaster of Paris.

But if you squinted and used your imagination, it looked pretty good. And your nose didn't need to be fooled at all. Walk in the door and you'd immediately know you were in a place where horses and cattle roamed free.

Libby called to us from one of the little barns, so we climbed up a stile and onto the platform itself. I walked gingerly, afraid to step on a tree or, worse, a horse. When I got there the three of them were kneeling beside the red-sided barn. They had the roof lid raised and were peering down to where the mare was lying on her side on a bed of straw.

"Look! It's coming out!" Gretel squeaked. I did look, then looked away, and sat down beside the barn, knocking over a section of white rail fence as I did so. Hell, the fence was just for show, anyway; the cows and horses jumped over it like grasshoppers. I lowered my head a little and decided I was going to be all right. Probably.

"Something wrong, Hildy?" Libby asked. I felt his hand on my shoulder and made an effort to look up at him and smile. He was a red-headed boy of almost eighteen, even lankier than Hansel, and he had a crush on me. I patted his hand and said I was fine and he went back to his pets.

I'm not notably queasy, but I'd been having these spells associated with pregnancy. I still had a month to go, far too late to change my mind. It was an experience I wasn't likely to forget. Trust me, when you get up at three A.M. with an insatiable hunger for chocolate-coated oysters, you don't forget it. The sight of it coming back up in the morning is unlikely to slip your mind, either.

I'd been a little concerned about the pre-natal care I was getting. There was a problem, in that I could hardly go to a clinic in King City, as the medics were bound to notice my unorthodox left lung. The Heinleiners had a few doctors among them and the one I'd been seeing, "Hazel Stone," told me I had nothing to worry about. Part of me believed her, and part of me-a new part I was just beginning to understand: the paranoid mother-did not. It didn't seem to surprise her and she took the time to do what she could to put my mind at ease.

"It's true the stuff I have out here isn't as up-to-date as my equipment in King City," she had said. "But we're not talking trephining and leeches, either. The fact is that you're doing well enough I could deliver him by hand if I had to, with just some clean water and rubber gloves. I'll see you once a week and I guarantee I'll spot any possible complications instantly." She then offered to "just take him out now and pop him in a bottle, if you want to. I'll keep him right in my office, and I'll hook up as many machines as it takes to make you feel better."

I'd realized she was just humoring me, but I gave it some thought. Then I told her, no, I was determined to stick it out to the end, since I'd come this far, and I said I realized I was being silly.

"It's part of the territory," she had said. "You get mood swings, and irrational impulses, cravings. If it gets bad enough, I can do something about those, too." Maybe it was just a reaction to all the tampering the CC had recently been doing to me, but I refused her mood levelers. I didn't like the swings, and I'm not a masochist, but if you're going to do this, Hildy, I told myself, you should find out what it's like. Otherwise, you might as well just read about it.

But the real source of my nervousness was just as silly as a plate of pickles and ice cream. Since I was still living in Texas and commuting to Delambre, I had also been seeing Ned Pepper once a week, too. Ostensibly it was to keep him and others from getting suspicious, but I'm pretty sure it was also because I found him oddly reassuring. The thing is, while no one held any brief for his medical knowledge or skills, most people felt he was a damn good intuitive diagnostician. Had he been born in a simpler era he might have made quite a name for himself. And…

"Hildy," he told me, tapping his stethoscope against his lip, "I don't want to alarm you, but something about this pregnancy makes me nervous as a jacked-off polecat." He took another pull on his bottle and staggered to his feet as I settled my skirt back around my legs. That's the only reason I'd been able to go to him and not the King City sawbones; a West Texas gynecological exam barely disarranged your clothing. The Doctor would poke his cold metal heartbeat disc under my shirt and listen to my heart and the fetal one, thump my back and my belly, take my body temperature with a glass thermometer, then ask me to swing my feet up into these here stirrups, my dear. I knew he had a shiny brass speculum he was dying to try out but I drew the line at that. Just let him look and play doctor and we'd both go home happy. So what was this nervous shit? He didn't have any right to be nervous. He sure didn't have the right to tell me about it. He seemed to realize that as soon as the slug of red-eye hit his belly.

"I assume you're getting real medical care?" he asked, sheepishly. When I told him I was, he nodded, and snapped his suspenders. "Well, then. Don't fret yourself none. He'll probably come out a ridin' a wild bronc and dealin' five-card stud. Just like his mama."

Naturally, I did worry. Pregnancy is insanity, take it from me.

When I was sure my nausea had passed I stood up and saw I'd been sitting on the hen coop. It had a steel framework but my weight had loosened a lot of the fake wooden shingles glued to the sides. A rooster about the size of a mouse was protesting this outrage by pecking at my toes. Inside, several dozen hens were… well, egging him on. Sorry.

The colt wouldn't be standing on his own for a little while yet, but the show was basically over. Hansel and Gretel and Libby moved off to other pursuits. I stayed a little longer, empathizing with the mare, who looked up at me as if to say You'll get your turn soon enough, Miss Smarty. I reached in and stroked the new-born with my fingertip, and the mother tried to bite my hand. I didn't blame her. I got up, dusted my knees, and headed over to the farm house.

I knew the house lid was hinged; I'd seen the kids lift it up. But I was still ambivalent enough about these pets that I didn't want to do that. Instead I bent over and pushed the little doorbell. In a moment one of the male kewpies came out and looked up expectantly, hoping for a treat.

If the horselets and mini-kine and dwarfowl were cherry bombs in a scale of illegal explosiveness, then the kewpies were ten sticks of dynamite. Kewpies were little people, no more than twenty centimeters tall.

The children had named them well. These are not adult human beings, done to scale. In an effort to make them smarter, Libby had given them bigger brains, and thus bigger heads. Perfectly sane reasoning, for a child. It might even be right, for all I knew about it. But though he assured me the current generation was much more clever than the two preceding ones, they were no more intelligent than any of several species of monkey.

They were not human, let's get that out of the way right now. But they contained human genes, and that is strictly forbidden on Luna under laws over two centuries old. I didn't have any of these creepy little baby dolls to ride my little horselet when I was a nipper. I don't think anybody did. No, these were the result of Libby's enquiring young mind, and no one else's.

If you could get over the shock and horror almost every Lunarian would feel at first sight of the things, they were actually quite cute. They smiled a lot, and were eager to grasp your finger in their tiny little hands. Most of them could say a word or two, things like "candy!" and "Hi!" A few formed rudimentary sentences. Possibly they could have been trained to do more, but the children didn't take the time. In spite of their hands they were not tool users. They were not little people. And they were cute.

Enough of that. The fact is they made my skin crawl on some very primitive level. They were bad juju. They were the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Science. They were faerie sprites, and thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

So the real truth is I couldn't make up my mind about the damn things. On the one hand, what had attracted me to the Heinleiners was the fact that they were doing things no one else was doing. So… all reasonable and logical rationalizations aside… why did they have to do that?

While I was still pondering this question, not for the first time, someone came up beside me and lifted the lid of the farm house. I looked in with him, and we both frowned. The inside of the structure was furnished with little chairs and beds, the former tumbled over and the latter not occupied. Half a dozen kewpies were curled up here and there, sleeping where the urge had taken them, and there were piles of what you'd expect from animals where that urge had taken them. It went a long way toward helping me believe they weren't little people. It also recalled documentary horror films from the twentieth century of homes for the insane and the retarded.

The man let the lid drop, looked around, and bellowed for his children, who came running from where they had been racing model cars, guilty looks on their faces. He glowered down at them.

"I told you that if you can't keep your pets clean, you can't have them," he said.

"We were gonna clean them up, Dad," Hansel said. "Soon as we finished the race. Isn't that right, Hildy?"

The little bastard. Fearing that my sufferance here was still very much dependent on these precocious brats, I said, diplomatically I hope, "I'm sure they would have."

And I said that because I wasn't about to lie to the man standing beside me, father to Hansel and Gretel, and the man on whose good graces my continued presence among the Heinleiners really relied.

This is the man the media has always referred to as "Merlin," since he would never reveal his real name. I'm not even sure if I know his real name, and I think he trusts me by now, as much as he ever will. But I don't like the name of Merlin, so in this account I will refer to him as Mister Smith. Valentine Michael Smith.