Native Tongue

Chapter Four

The fervent emphasis that the government placed on traditional Christian values and on getting-back-to-one’s-Vacation-Bible-School-roots (never mind that it put a steady drag on American culture, like hanging lead weights on one side of a wheel, pulling all of life at a crazy angle back toward the twentieth century) was a big help to Brooks Showard in his cursing. He didn’t have to be inventive about it and use the resources of his Ph.D. to dredge, up exotic oaths. The sturdy fundamental godams and hells that had served his forefathers, glazed now with time like candied fruits studding an otherwise plain loaf of bread, served him perfectly well.

“God damn it to hell and back,” he said, therefore. “Oh god damn it all the way to hell and back, with side trips for the eager! Oh, shit!”

The other technicians had pulled back from the Interface, the oh so perfect and according to specs Interface, where Brooks stood holding the infant. They had formed themselves into a little group, that could behave as if it had nothing to do with whatever this regrettable latest development turned out to be. Who, them? They were just passing by. Just happened to be in the neighborhood, don’t you know…

“You get on over here!” he bellowed at them, shoving the baby under one armpit and shaking his free fist at them like the maniac, raving ranting maniac gone clear outaspace, that he considered himself to be at this moment. “You get on over here and look at this mess, you shits, you’re as guilty as I am in this! Get your asses on over here and see this!”

They moved an inch, maybe. And Showard began a steady dull cursing, bringing Job’s beard into it along with the private parts of the Twelve Disciples and a variety of forbidden practices and principles. They weren’t going to come over there to him. They weren’t going to participate in this, share the guilt, spread the horror around, not willingly. He was going to have to take it to them, the cowards! And it might be that next time he wouldn’t have the guts to go inside the Interface after what was squirming there either, and then they could all be cowards together in Christian fellowship, couldn’t they?

Behind him, safe in its special environment, the Alien-In-Residence existed, so far as anyone could tell. If it had died, presumably the various indicators on the walls would have told him that — that was the theory, anyhow. You couldn’t say that the AIRY sat, precisely, or that it stood, or that it did anything, or was in any particular state. It was, and that was all it was. If what had happened to the human infant was of any concern to it, there was no way to know that, and might never be any way to know that. Sometimes Showard wasn’t sure he saw the AIRY, really; the way it flickered (??), and never any pattern to the flickering (??), it drove the Terran eye to a constant search for order until there were great flat spots of color floating in the air between you and the source of the sensory stimulation. And then there were the other times, when you profoundly wished that you couldn’t see it.

The linguists called theirs Aliens-in-Residence, too, called them AIRY’s for short like the technicians did; but theirs were different. It was possible to look at one of theirs and at least assign labels roughly to its parts. That thing was a limb, say. That little lump there might well be a nose. There was its rosy butt, you see. Like that. It was possible to imagine that the creature had obligingly taken up “residence” in the simulated and sealed-off environment you had built for it within your house, and that it was delighted to visit for a while and share its language with your offspring. God knew the Lines had offspring to spare; the Lingoes bred like rats. But Brooks couldn’t imagine the thing inside this Interface being allowed to take up “residence” in a human dwelling. Did it even have “parts”? Who could tell?

And now, there was this baby.

“Gentlemen,” said Government Work Technician Brooks Everest Showard, holder of a secret rank of Colonel in the United States Air Force Space Command, Division of Extraterrestrial Intelligence: “I am sick unto death of killing innocent babies.”

They all were. This would be, they thought queasily, the forty-third human infant to be “volunteered” by its parents for Government Work. The ones that had lived had been far worse off than those that had died; it had not been possible to allow them to go on living. The thing that the Colonel carried under his arm like a package of meat must already be dead… it was something to be grateful for.

There were plenty of bleeding-hearts who called them, the G.W. staff, “mercenaries.” And so they were. You might do what they did for money; you surely would not do it for love. They liked to think they did it for honor and glory, sometimes, but that was wearing a little thin. And the parents? You couldn’t help wondering sometimes whether the parents, if they’d been allowed to see what went on here, would have considered the generous fee they had been paid to be an adequate compensation. You wondered if those who had volunteered baby boys would be interested in keeping the posthumous Infant Hero Medal in its black velvet box with the solid silver lock… if they’d had a little more information. The obligatory top secret classification on the procedure, the signed-for-in-advance permission to cremate — can’t chance Alien bacteria or viruses getting into the environment, you understand that, of course, Mr. and Mrs. X — they helped. But you wondered.

“Well, Brooks,” one of them said finally. “Happened again, I guess.”

“Oh! You can talk, can you?”

“Now, Brooks — ”

“Well this kid can’t talk! It can’t talk English, it can’t talk Beta-2, it can’t talk anything and it never is going to talk anything!” An obscene jingle ran crazily through his head, turning him sick… ALPHA-ONE, BETA-TWO, SEE ME MAKE A BABY STEW… sweet god in heaven, make it stop… “You know what it has done, thanks to our expert intervention in its exceedingly brief life?”

“Brooks, we don’t want to know.”

“Yeah! I expect you don’t!”

He advanced on them, inexorably, shaking the dead baby the way he had shaken his fist, shaking it in front of him like a limp folded stuff, and they saw the impossible condition that it had somehow come to be in. He made certain they saw it. He turned it all around for them so that they could get a clear view from all sides.

None of them threw up this time, although an infant that had literally turned itself inside out by the violence of its convulsions, so that its skin was mostly inside and its organs and its… what?… mostly outside, was something new. They didn’t throw up, because they had seen things just as bad before, if you were interested in trying to rank abominations on a scale of awfulness, and they weren’t.

“Get rid of it, Showard,” said one of the men. Lanky Pugh was his unfortunate name. Doubly unfortunate because he was shaped like a beer keg and not much taller. Doubly unfortunate because when he told you his name you might be inclined to grin a little, and to forget the respect that was due a man who could play a computer the way Liszt might have played a metasynthesizer. “Vaporizer time, Showard,” said Lanky Pugh. “Right now!”

“Yeah, Brooks,” said Beau St. Clair. He hadn’t been there as long as the rest of them, and he was looking green. “For the love of Christ,” said Beau.

“Christ,” Brooks ranted at them through gritted teeth, “would have had nothing to do with this! Even Christ would have been too merciful to raise this thing from the dead!”

The man allegedly in charge of the group, who had not had the guts to go into the Interface after the baby when it had seemed to them all to suddenly explode in there, felt as if he had to make some kind of leadership gesture. He cleared his throat a couple of times, to make sure that what came out wouldn’t be just a noise, and said, “Brooks, we do the best we can. For the greater good of all mankind, Brooks. I think Christ would understand.”

Christ would understand? Brooks stared at Arnold Dolbe, who watched him warily and backed off a step or two more. Arnold was not going to take a chance on being handed that baby, that was very clear.

“God allowed His beloved Son to be sacrificed, for a greater good,” explained Arnold solemnly. “You see the parallel, I’m sure.”

“Yeah,” spat Showard. “But God only allowed crucifixion and a whipping or two, you pitiful pious shit. He would not have allowed this.”

“We do what we have to do,” said Dolbe. “Somebody has to do it, and we do the best we can, like I said already.”

“Well, I won’t do it again.”

“Oh, you’ll do it again, Showard! You’ll do it again, because if you don’t we’ll see to it that you take the whole rap for this all to yourself. Won’t we, men?”

“Oh, shut up, Dolbe,” Showard said wearily. “You know what bemdung that is… one word about this, one word, and we will all — every one of us, right down to the lowliest servomechanism that cleans the toilets in this establishment — be dumped. Just like the babies, Dolbe. Mercilessly. Permanently. We’ll disappear like none of us had ever existed. And you know it, and I know it, and everybody knows it. So shut up already. Be your effing age, Dolbe.”

“Yeah,” agreed Lanky Pugh. “There’d be an ‘unfortunate incident’ that just conveniently happened to vaporize everything out to about two feet past the G.W. property lines. With no danger whatsoever to the population, of course, no cause for alarm, folks, it’s just one of our little routine explosions. Shitshingles, Dolbe… we’re all in this together.”

Brooks Showard laid the horrible pile of distorted tissues that had only recently been a healthy human infant down on the floor at his feet, and he sat down beside it very gently. He laid his head on his knees, wrapped his arms around them, and began to cry. It was only by the quick intervention of Arnold Dolbe that the servomechanism speeding across the floor to pick up what it interpreted as garbage was intercepted. Dolbe snatched the baby from under the edge of the cylinder and almost ran to the vaporizer slot… and when he had shoved the body through it he rubbed his hands violently against the sides of his lab coat, scrubbing them. There goes your boy, Mr. and Mrs. Ned Landry, he thought crazily, and have we got a medal for you!

“Thank you, Dolbe,” sighed Lanky. “I didn’t want to look at that thing any longer, either. It wasn’t really… decent.”

Lanky was thinking of Mr. and Mrs. Ned Landry too. Because he was the one who had to dump all the data out of the computers after each failure, and he remembered stuff like the names of the parents. He wasn’t supposed to. He was supposed to dump it out of his head at the same time. But he was the one who had to write the names down on a piece of paper before he dumped them, and he was the one that had to transfer the names to the data card in his lockbox, so there wouldn’t be any chance of losing what had been dumped. Lanky knew all forty-three sets of names by heart, in numerical order.

In the small conference room, with Showard in reasonable control of himself once again, if you ignored the shaking hands, the four G.W. techs sat and listened while the representative from the Pentagon laid it out for them. Neat and sweet, wasting nothing. He wasn’t overpoweringly pleased with them.

“We have got to crack that language,” he told them bluntly. “And I mean that one hundred percent. Whatever that thing in the Interface has for a language, we’ve got to get at it — it sure as hell can’t use PanSig to communicate. We absolutely must find a way to do that — communicate with it, I mean. With it, and all its flickering friends. This is a matter of the utmost urgency.”

“Oh, sure,” said Brooks Showard. “Sure it is.”

“Colonel,” snapped the Pentagon man, “it’s not a question of just wanting to chat with the things, you know. We need what they’ve got, and we can’t do without it. And there’s no way of getting it without negotiating with them.”

“We need what they’ve got… we always ‘need’ what something’s got, General. You mean we want what they’ve got, don’t you?”

“Not this time. Not this time! This time we really do have to have it.”

“At any cost.”

“At any cost. That’s correct.”

“What is it, the secret of eternal life?”

“You know I can’t tell you that,” the general said patiently, as he would have spoken to a fretful woman he was indulgent with.

“We’re supposed to take it on faith, as usual.”

“You can take it on anything you like, Showard! It makes no difference to me what you take it on. But I sit here, empowered by the federal government of this great nation to support you and a rather sizable staff in the carrying out of acts that are so far past illegal and criminal, and so far into unspeakable and unthinkable, that we can’t even keep records on them. And I’m here to give you my sacred oath that I’m not going to participate in that kind of thing for trinkets and gewgaws and a new variety of beads; and neither are the officials who — with tremendous reluctance, I assure you — authorize me to serve in this capacity.”

Arnold Dolbe flashed his teeth at the general, trying not to think that the uniform was quaint. There were good and excellent reasons for keeping the ancient uniforms, and he was familiar with them. Tradition. Respect for historical values. Antidote to Future Shock Syndrome. Etc. And he wanted to be certain that the general remembered him as a cooperative fellow, a real Team Player in the finest reaganic tradition. He meant to see to it that the general was fully aware of that. He felt that a brief speech was in order, something tasteful but still memorable, and he thought he was not overstating the case when he considered himself to be topnotch at the impromptu brief speech.

“We understand that, General,” he began, all sugar and snakeoil, “and we appreciate it. We are grateful for it. Beelieve you me, there’s not one member of this team, not one man on this team, that doesn’t support this effort all the way — those without a need to know always excepted, of course. Not that they don’t support the effort, that is — they just don’t know… in detail… what it is that they’re supporting. We do — those of us in the room — we do know. And we feel a certain humility at being chosen for this noble task. Colonel Showard is a little overstressed at the moment, understandably so, but he’s behind you all the way. It’s just been an unpleasant morning here at Government Work, don’t you see. And yet — ”

“I’m sure it has,” said the Pentagon man, cutting him off in a way that hurt Dolbe deeply. “I’m sure it has been bloody hell. We know what you men go through here, and we honor you for it. But it’s something that’s got to be done, for the sake of preserving civilization on this planet. I mean that, gentlemen! Literally for the sake of preventing the end of humankind on this green and golden Earth of ours — the permanent end, I might add. I’m not talking a few decades in the colonies while things cool off and then we can move back planetside. I’m talking the end. Period. Final. Total.”

He said it as if he believed it. It was in fact possible that he did believe it, if only because he was a good soldier and you cannot be a good soldier if you think that those up the chain of command from you are telling you lies. And of course they were good soldiers too, and they wouldn’t think that those who had fed them the same line were lying to them. Nobody knew precisely where the buck stopped in this business. The general had a feeling that the buck went around and around on a möbius strip. Sometimes he wondered who was in charge. Not the President, certainly. It was one of his primary duties to make certain that the President never knew much about this little twig on the executive branch. The general had no illusions about the Pentagon not being part of the executive branch.

He steepled his fingers, and he looked at them long and hard, noting automatically that only Dolbe began to squirm under his gaze.

“Well, gentlemen?” he asked. “What are you going to do now? I’ve got to take some kind of reasonable answer back to my superiors — no details, mind, just a rough idea — and they aren’t feeling all that patient these days. We’ve run out of fooling around time, gentlemen. We’re right up against the wire on this one.”

There was a thick silence, with the general’s fingers drumming lightly on the table, and the air exchange whirring high and thin, and the American flag jerking limply every now and then in the mechanical breeze.

“Gentlemen?” the general prodded. “I’m a very busy man.”

“Oh, hellfire,” said Brooks Showard. He knew. Either he did the talking, or they’d all sit there until the end of time. Which, to hear the general tell it, wouldn’t be all that long. “You know what we’ve got to do next. You know perfectly well. Since you government/military shits are too chicken to slap every last goddam linguist into prison for treason or murder or inciting to riot or pandering or sodomy or whatever the hell it takes to make the fucking Lingoes cooperate — ”

“You know we can’t do that, Colonel!” The general’s lips were as stiff as two slabs of frozen bacon. “If the linguists had any excuse, any excuse, they’d withdraw from every sensitive negotiation we have underway with Aliens, and that would be the end of us! And there wouldn’t be one damn thing we could do about it, Colonel — not one damn thing!”

“ — since, like I said, you’re too chicken to do that and do it right and make it stick, there’s only one thing left. You fellows want to keep your pretty hands clean, I’m sure. But we fellows have got to steal us a linguist infant, a baby Lingoe. On your behalf, or course. For the good of all mankind. How’s that for Plan B?”

They all squirmed, then. Volunteered babies, that was nasty. But stolen babies? It wasn’t that the effing linguists didn’t deserve it, and it wasn’t that they didn’t have babies in hordes and swarms enough to console themselves with if they came up one short. But the baby didn’t exactly deserve it, somehow. They were willing to go along with the religious party line, after a fashion, but none of them was really able to swallow that stuff about the sins of the fathers being visited, etc. Stealing a baby. That was not very nice.

“Their women whelp on the public wards,” Showard observed. “It won’t be difficult.”

“Oh dear.”

The general could hardly believe he’d said that. He tried again.

“Well, by heaven!”

“Yeah?”

“Is that the only alternative remaining to us, Colonel Showard? Are you absolutely certain?”

“You have some other suggestion?” Showard snarled.

“General,” Dolbe put in, “we’ve done everything else. We know that our Interface is an exact duplicate of those the linguists use. We know our procedure is exactly the same as theirs — not that it’s much of a procedure. You put the Alien — or better still, two Aliens, if you can get a pair — in one side. You put the baby in the other. And you get out of their way. That’s all there is to it. That’s what we do, just like that’s what they do — we’ve tried it again and again. And you know what happened when we tried the test-tube babies… it was the same, only it was worse somehow. Don’t ask me to explain that. And we’ve brought in every computer expert, every scientist, every technician, every — ”

“But see here, man — ”

“No, General! There’s nothing to see. We have checked and rechecked and re-rechecked. We have gone over every last variable not just once but many many times. And it has to be, General, it has to be that for some reason known only to the linguists — and I do feel, by the way, that it constitutes treason for them to keep that knowledge to themselves — for some reason known only to them, only linguist infants are capable of learning Alien languages.”

“Some genetic reason, you mean.”

“Well? Look how inbred they are, it’s on the fine line of incest, if you ask me! What are we talking about? Thirteen families! That’s not much of a gene pool. They bring in the odd bit of outside stock now and then, sure, but basically it’s those thirteen sets of genes over and over. Sure, I’d say it’s a genetic reason.”

“General,” Beau added, “all we’re doing here is sacrificing the innocent children of nonlinguists, in something that is never going to work. It’s got to be an infant born of one of the Lines, and that is all there is to it.”

“They deny it,” said the general.

“Well, wouldn’t you deny it, in their place? It suits the traitorous bastards, controlling the whole goddam government, doling out their nuggets of wisdom to us on whatever schedule happens to strike their fancy, living off the backs and the blood of decent people. And if we have to murder innocent babies trying to do what they ought to be doing for us, well, shit, they don’t care. That just puts every American citizen, and every citizen of every country on this globe and in its colonies, all the more at their mercy. Sure they deny it!”

“They’re lying,” Showard summed up, feeling that Beau St. Clair had said about all he was going to say. “Plain flat out lying.”

“You’re sure?”

“Damn right.”

The general made the noise a restless horse makes, and then he sat there and chewed his upper lip. He didn’t like it. If the Lingoes suspected… if there was a leak… and there always were leaks…

“Shit,” said Lanky Pugh, “they’ve got so many babies, they’ll never miss one, long as we can get by with a female. Can we get by with a female?”

“Why not, Mr. Pugh?”

“Well. I mean. Can a female do it?”

The general frowned at Pugh, and then looked at the others for explanation. This was beyond him.

“We keep telling Lanky,” Showard said. “We keep explaining it to him. There is no correlation between intelligence and the acquisition of languages by infants, except at the level of gross retardation where you’ve got a permanent infant. We keep telling him that, but it offends him or something. He can’t seem to handle it.”

“I should think,” said the general, “that Mr. Pugh would want to stay abreast of at least the basic literature on language acquisition. Considering.”

The general was wrong. Lanky Pugh, who had tried to learn three different foreign human languages, because he felt that a computer specialist ought to know at least one other language that wasn’t a computer language — and had had no success — was not about to keep up with the literature on native language acquisition. If Lingoe females could learn foreign languages… Alien languages, for chrissakes!… when they were only babies, then how come he couldn’t even master passable French? Every linguist kid had to have native fluency in one Alien language, three Terran languages from different language families, American Sign Language, and PanSig — plus reasonable control of as many other Terran languages as they could pick up on the side. And he’d heard that a lot of them were native in two Alien tongues. While he, Lanky Pugh, could speak English. Just English. No, he didn’t like it, and he didn’t want to take any close look at the question. It was something he carefully did not think about any longer.

“… throw his ass right out of here,” Showard was saying. “But it just so happens that he is the top computer tech in the whole world, the top hands-on man, and it just so happens that we can’t do without him, and if he chooses to know absolutely nothing but computers, that’s his privilege. That’s all he’s required to know, General, and he knows that better than anybody, anywhere, anytime. And nevertheless, we are not going to crack Beta-2 with a computer. Sorry.”

“I see,” said the general. He said it with utter finality. And he stood up and picked up his funny hat with all the spangled stuff on it. “None of my business, of course. I’m sure Dolbe here runs a tight ship.”

“General?”

“Yes, Dolbe?”

“Don’t you want to discuss — ”

“No, he doesn’t want to discuss how we do this cute little kidnapping caper, Dolbe!” shouted Brooks Showard. “For gods sakes, Dolbe!”

The general nodded smartly.

“Right on target,” he agreed. “Right on target. I wish I didn’t know what I already do know.”

“You asked us, General,” Showard pointed out.

“Yes. I know I did.”

He left, with a smile all around, and he was gone before they could say anything else. The general got in, he did his business, he got out. That was why he was a general, and they were in the baby-stealing business. And the baby-killing business.

The only question now was, which one of them was going to do it? Because it would have to be one of them. There wasn’t anybody you could trust to go snatch a linguist baby out of a hospital nursery. And it had better not be Lanky Pugh, because he was the only Lanky Pugh they could get, and he couldn’t be spared. They didn’t dare risk Lanky Pugh.

Arnold Dolbe and Brooks Showard and Beau St. Clair stared at each other, hating each other. And Lanky Pugh, he went after the straws.

Showard had thought he might feel nervous, but he didn’t. His white lab coat was the same one he wore at work. It wasn’t as if he had on a disguise. The corridors of the hospital were like the corridors of hospitals and laboratories everywhere; if it hadn’t been for the constant bustle and racket that went with changing shifts and visitors coming and going he could easily have been at G.W. The only concession he’d made to the fact that he was actually in this place to kidnap a living human child was the stethoscope that hung round his neck, and he had stopped being aware of it almost at once. People passing him mumbled, “Good evening, Doctor” automatically, without needing anything more than the antique symbol of his calling to identify him, even after he reached the maternity ward. Any other profession, they’d have switched a hundred years ago to something less grotesque then an entirely nonfunctional and obsolete instrument like the stethoscope — but not the doctors. No little insignia on a corner of the collar for them. No tasteful little button. They knew the power of tradition, did the doctors, and they never missed a beat.

“Good evening, Doctor.”

“Mmph,” said Showard.

Nobody was paying any attention to him. Women had babies at every hour of the day or night, and a doctor on the maternity floor at ten minutes to midnight was nothing to pay any attention to.

The call had come in twenty minutes ago — “A bitch Lingoe just whelped over at Memorial, about half an hour ago! Get your tail over there.” And here he was. It was no consolation at all to him that the baby was a female, but he assumed Lanky would be pleased.

This was an old hospital, one of the oldest in the country. He supposed it must have fancy wards somewhere, with medpods that took care of every whim a patient had, with no need for the bumbling hands of human beings; but those wards were high in the towers that looked down over the river. With private elevators to make sure that the wealthy patients going up to them, and their wealthy visitors, didn’t have to be offended by the crudity of the rest of the buildings. Here in the public wards there was very little change from what a hospital had looked like when he’d had his appendix out at the age of six. For all he could tell, except for the nurses’ uniforms and the computers at every bedside, it looked just like hospitals had looked for the last century or so. And the maternity ward, since it served only women, would be the last place anybody would spend money on renovation.

A light over a booth at the end of the hall showed him where to go. The night nurse there was bent over her own computer, making sure the entries from the bedside units matched the entries on the charts. Very inefficient, but he supposed she had to have something to do to make the night go by.

He pulled the forged charge slip from his coat pocket and handed it to her.

“Here,” he said. “Where’s the Lingoe kid?”

She looked at him, ducked her head deferentially, and then looked at the charge slip.

BABY ST. SYRUS, it read. EVOKED POTENTIALS, STAT.

And the indecipherable scrawl that was the graphic badge of the real doctor of real medicine.

“I’ll call a nurse to bring you the baby, Doctor,” she said at once, but he shook his head.

“I haven’t got time to wait around for your nurses,” he told her. As rudely as possible, keeping up the doctor act. “Just tell me where the kid is, and I’ll get it.”

“But, Doctor — ”

“I have sense enough, and training enough, to pick up one infant and carry it down to Neuro,” he snapped at her, doing his best to sound as if she were far less than the dirt beneath his valuable feet. “Now are you going to cooperate, or do I have to call a man to get some service around here?”

She backed down, of course. Well trained, in spite of being out in the big wide world of the ancient hospital. Her anxious face went white, and she stared at him with her mouth half open, frozen. Showard snapped his fingers under her nose.

“Come on, nurse!” he said fiercely. “I’ve got patients waiting!”

Three minutes later he had the St. Syrus baby tucked securely into the crook of his arm and was safely in the elevator to the back exit that led out into a quiet garden of orange trees and miscellaneous ugly plants and a few battered extruded benches. One light glowed over the garden, and at midnight you couldn’t see your own hand in front of your face out there — they’d checked that.

It was so easy to do that it was ridiculous. Out the door of the elevator, baby firmly tucked against him. “Pardon me, Doctor.” “Not at all, pardon me.” “Pardon me, Doctor.” “Good morning, Doctor.” They were very scientific in this place. Sixteen minutes past midnight and they were saying good morning.

Down the corridor, turn right. Another corridor. A small lobby, where another night nurse looked at him briefly and went back to her mindless fiddling with records. Another corridor. “Good morning, ‘Doctor.” An elderly man, carrying flowers. “God bless you, Doctor.” Almost bowing. Must be nice, being a medicoe and getting all that adoration. “Thank you,” Showard said curtly, and the man looked absurdly thrilled.

And then he was at the door. He felt a faint tingle at the back of his neck, walking toward it… if he were going to be stopped, if some alarm had already gone off and they were after him, this was where it would happen.

But nothing happened.

He opened the door, pulled the blanket up over the infant’s head, making sure it could still get enough air to breathe, and he was outside and headed for the flyer parked at the edge of the lot for him. With the Pink Cross/Pink Shield stickers on its doors.

It was, as they used to say, a piece of cake.