Heinlein, Robert A - Time Enough for Love, page 33
“Good afternoon, Mr. Gibbons. Why, it’s Dora! We missed you, dear; what happened! And— Is that a bruise?” She looked closely, said nothing about the fact that the little girl was filthy dirty.
She straightened up. “Seems to be just a smudge. I’m glad to see her; I fretted a little this morning when she didn’t show up with the Parkinson children. It’s almost Marjorie Brandon’s time—perhaps you knew?”
“Vaguely. Where can I put Dora down for a few minutes? Conference. Private.”
Mrs. Mayberry’s eyes widened slightly, but she answered at once. “The couch— No, put her on my bed.” She led the way, said nothing about getting her white coverlet dirty, went back into the schoolroom with him after he assured Dora that they would be gone only a few moments.
Gibbons explained what had happened. “Dora doesn’t know that her parents are dead, Helen—nor do I think it’s time to tell her,”
Mrs. Mayberry considered it. “Ernest, are you sure they both died? Bud would have seen the fire if he had been working his own fields, but he sometimes works for Mr. Parkinson.”
“Helen, that was not a woman’s hand I saw. Unless Marje Brandon has thick black hair on the back of her hands.”
“No. No, that would be Bud.” She sighed. “Then she’s an orphan. Poor little Dora! A nice child. Bright, too.”
“Helen, can you take care of her a few days? Will you?”
“Ernest, the way you phrase that is almost offensive. I will take care of Dora as long as I am needed.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to phrase it unpleasingly. I don’t expect it to be long; some family will adopt her. In the meantime keep track of your expense, then we’ll work out what her room and board should be.”
“Ernest, that will come to exactly zero. The only cost will be aboout enough food to feed a bird. Which I can certainly do for Marjorie Brandon’s little girl.”
“So? Well, I can find some family to board her. The Learners. Someone—”
“Ernest!”
“Get your feathers down, Helen. That child was placed in my hands, her father’s last dying act. And don’t be a dumb fool; I know to the penny how much you manage to save. As well as how often you have to take tuition in food rather than cash. This is a cash deal. The Learners would jump at it—as well as several others. I don’t have to leave Dora here—and won’t, unless you are sensible.”
Mrs. Mayberry looked grim—then suddenly smiled and looked years younger. “Ernest, you’re a bully. And a bastard. And other things I never say out of bed. All right—room-and-board.”
“And tuition. Plus any special expenses. Doctor’s bills, maybe.”
“Triple bastard. You always pay for anything you get, don’t you? As I should know.” She glanced at the unshuttered windows. “Step out here in the hall and seal it with a kiss. Bastard.”
They moved, she placed Herself so that the angle, did not permit anyone to see them, then delivered a kiss that would have astounded her neighbors.
“Helen—”
She brushed her lips against his. “The answer is; No, Mr. Gibbons. Tonight I’ll be busy reassuring a baby girl.”
“I was about to say, Don’t give her that bath I know you intend to until I get hold of Doc Krausmeyer and have him examine her. She seems all right—but she may have anything from broken ribs to a skull concussion. Oh, get her clothes off and sponge her a little for the worst of the dirt; that won’t hurt her and it will make it easier for Doc to examine her.”
“Yes, dear. Get your lecherous hands off my bottom and I’ll get to work. You find Doc.”
“Right away, Mrs. Mayberry.”
“Until later, Mr. Gibbons. Au ‘voir.”
Gibbons told Buck to wait, walked over to the Waldorf, found (as he expected), Dr. Krausmeyer in the bar. The physician looked up from his drink. “Ernest! What’s this I hear about the Harper place?’
‘Well, what do you hear about it? Put down that glass and grab your hat. Emergency.”
“Now, now! Haven’t seen the emergency yet that wouldn’t leave time to finish a drink. Clyde Learner was just in and bought us a round of drinks—bought this one you urged me to abandon—and told us that the Harper place had burned and killed the whole Brandon family. Says he tried to rescue them, but it was too late.”
Gibbons briefly considered the desirability of a fatal accident happening to both Clyde Learner and Doe Krausmeyer some dark night—but, damn it, while Clyde would be no loss, if Doc died, Gibbons would be forced to hang out his own shingle—and his diplomas did not read “Ernest Gibbons.” Besides, Doc was a good doctor when sober—and, anyhow, it’s your own fault, old son; twenty years ago you interviewed him and okayed the subsidy. All you saw was a bright young intern and failed to spot the incipient lush.
“Now that you mention it, Doc, I did see Clyde hurrying toward the Harper place. If he says he was too late to save them I would have to back his story. However, it was not the whole family; their little girl, Dora, was saved.”
“Well, yes, Clyde did say that. He said it was her parents he couldn’t save.”
“That’s right. It’s the little girl I want you to attend. She’s suffering from multiple abrasions and contusions, possibly broken bones, possible internal injuries, a strong possibility of smoke poisoning—and a certainty of extreme emotional shock; very serious in a child that age. She’s across the street at Mrs. Mayberry’s place.” He added softly, “I think you ought to hurry, Doctor, I really do. Don’t you?”
Dr. Krausmeyer looked unhappily at his drink, then straightened up and said, “Mine host, if you will be so kind as to put this on the back of the bar, I shall return.” He picked up his bag.
Dr. Krausmeyer found nothing wrong with the child, gave her a sedative. Gibbons waited until Dora was asleep, then went to arrange temporary board for his mule. He went to Jones Brothers (“Fine Stock—Mules Bought, Sold, Traded, Auctioned—Registered Stallions Standing at Stud”) because his bank held a mortgage on their place.
Minerva, it wasn’t planned; it just grew. I expected Dora to be adopted in a few days, a few weeks, some such. Pioneers don’t feel about kids the way city people do. If they didn’t like kids, they wouldn’t have the temperament to pioneer. And as soon as pioneer kids stop being babies, the investment starts paying off. Kids are an asset in pioneer country.
I certainly did not plan to raise an ephemeral, or hold any fear that it would be necessary—nor was it necessary. I was beginning to simplify my affairs, expecting to leave soon, as my son Zaccur should show up any year.
Zack was my partner then, in a loose arrangement based on mutual trust. He was young, a century and a half or such, but steady and smart—out of Phyllis Briggs-Sperling by my last marriage but two. A fine woman, Phyllis, as well as a number-one mathematician. We made seven children together and every one of them smarter than I am. She married several times—I was her fourth* (* Fifth, James Matthew Libby was her fourth. J.F. 45th) and, as I recall, the first woman to win the Ira Howard Memorial Century Medal for contributing one hundred registered offspring to the Families. Took her less than two centuries but Phyllis was a girl of simple tastes, the other being pencil and paper and time to think about geometry.
I digress. To engage in the pioneering business profitably takes a minimax of a suitable ship and two partners, both shipmasters, both qualified to mount a migration and lead it—otherwise you are taking a shipload of city folks and abandoning them in wilderness…which often- happened in the early days of the Diaspora.
Zack and I did it properly, each fully qualified as captain in space, or as leader on a strange planet—taking turns. The one who stays behind when the ship leaves really does pioneer; he can’t fake it, he can’t just wave the baton. He may not be political head of the colony—I preferred not to be; talk is so time consuming. What he does have to be is a survivor, a man who can force that planet to feed him, and by his example show others how—and advise them if they want it.
The first wave is a break-even; the captain unloads and goes back for more migrants; the planet offers nothing for export that soon. The trip has been paid for by fares charged the migrants; profit, if any, will come from the partner on the ground selling what else the ship has carried—mules, hardware, swine, fertile chicken eggs—to the pioneers, on credit at first. Which means the partner on the ground has to look sharp and mind his rear; it doesn’t take much to convince migrants who are having a tough time that this bloke is profiteering and should be lynched.
Minerva, the six times I did this—let myself be left behind with the first wave of a colony—I never once plowed a field without weapons at hand and I was always far more cautious with my own breed than I was with any dangerous animals that planet held.
But on New Beginnings we were past most such hazards. The first wave had made it, though just barely that terrible first winter—Helen Mayberry was not the only widow who had married a widower as a result of a weather cycle that Andy Libby and I had not anticipated; the star there—called “the Sun’ as always, but you can check your memories for catalog designation—New Beginnings’ Sun was a variable star by about the amount that old Sol is, just enough to give “unusual” wheather—and when we arrived we hit the bad weather jackpot.
But those who made it through that winter were tough enough to stand anything; the second wave had a much easier time.
I had disposed of my farm to migrants of the second wave and was putting my attention on business and trade to build up a cargo for the Andy J. to take back after Zack unloaded the third wave—and I would go back, too. Go somewhere, that is. What and where and how would be settled after I saw Zack.
In the meantime I was bored, getting ready to wind up my on-planet affairs, and found this waif an interesting diversion.
Delightful, I should say. Dora was a baby who was born grown-up. Utterly innocent, ignorant in the fashion that a small child necessarily is but most intelligent and delighted to learn anything. There was no meanness in her anywhere, Minerva, and I found her naïve conversation more entertaining than most talk of adults—usually trivial and rarely new.
Helen Mayberry took as much interest in Dora, and we two found ourselves in loco parentis without planning it.
We consulted each other and kept the baby girl away from the burial—some charred bones, including tiny ones of the baby that had never been born—and kept her away from the memorial service, too. Some weeks later, when Dora seemed to be in good shape and after I had had time to have a gravestone cut and erected, I took her out there and let her see it. She could read, and did—names and dates of her parents, and the single date for the baby,
She looked it over solemnly, then said, “That means Mama and Daddy won’t ever be coming back. Doesn’t it?”
“Yes, Dora.”
“That’s what the kids at school said. I wasn’t sure.”
“I know, dear. Aunt Helen told me. So I thought you had better see for yourself.”
She looked again at the headstone, then said gravely, “I see. I guess I do. Thank you, Uncle Gibbie.”
She didn’t cry, so I didn’t have any excuse to pick her up and console her. All I could think of to say was; “Do you want to go now, dear?”
“Yes.”
We had ridden out on Buck, but I had left him at the foot of the hill, there being an unwritten rule against letting mules or tamed lopers walk on graves. I asked if she wanted mc to carry her—piggyback, perhaps. She decided to walk.
Halfway down-she stopped. “Uncle Gibbie?”
“Yes, Dora?”
“Let’s not tell Buck about this.”
“All right, Dora.”
“He might cry.”
“We won’t tell him, Dora.”
She did not say any more until we were back at Mrs. Mayberry’s school. Then she was very quiet for about two weeks, and never mentioned it again to me, nor—I think—to anyone. She never asked to go back there, although we went riding almost every afternoon and often within sight of graveyard hill.
About two Earth-years later the Andy J. arrived, and Captain Zack, my son by Phyllis, came down in the gig to make arrangements for landing the third wave of migrants. We had a drink together, and I told him I was staying over another trip, and why. He stared. “Lazarus, you are out of your mind.”
I said quietly, “Don’t call me ‘Lazarus.’ That name has had too much publicity.”
He said, “All right. Although there is no one around but our hostess—Mrs. Mayberry, did you say?—and she’s gone out to the kitchen. Look, uh, Gibbons, I was thinking of making a couple of trips to Secundus. Profit in it, and ways to invest our net on Secundus—safer than investing on Earth now, things being the way they are.”
I agreed that he was almost certainly right.
“Yes,” he said, “but here’s the point. If I do, I won’t be back this way for, oh, maybe ten standard years. Or longer. Oh, I will if you insist; you’re majority shareholder. But you’ll be wasting your money and mine, too. Look, Laz— Ernest, if you must take care of this kid—though I don’t see that it’s your obligation—come with me and bring her along. You could put her in school on Earth—as long as you post bond to insure that she leaves. Or perhaps she could settle on Secundus, although I don’t know what the immigration rules are there now; it’s been a long time since I’ve been there.”
I shook my head. “What’s ten years? I can hold my breath that long. Zack, I want to see this child grown up and able to make it on her own—married, I hope, but that’s her business. But I won’t uproot her; she’s had one shock of that sort and shouldn’t have to soak up another while she’s still a child.”
“On your head be it. You want me back in ten years? Is that long enough?”
“More or less but don’t rush. Take time enough to show a profit. If it takes longer, you’ll pick up a better cargo here next time. Something better than food and soft goods.”
Zack said, “There is nothing better than food to ship to Earth these days. Sometime soon we’re going to have to stop touching at Earth, just trade among the colonies.”
“As bad as that?”
“Pretty bad. They won’t learn. What’s this about trouble over your bank? Do you need a show of force while the ‘Andy J.’ is overhead?”
I shook my head. “Thanks, Captain, but that’s not the way to do it. Or I would have to go along with you. Force is an argument to use when nothing else will do and the issue is that important. Instead I’m going to go limp on them.”
Ernest Gibbons did not worry about his bank. He never worried over any issue less important than life-and-death.
Instead he applied his brain to all problems large and small as they came along, and enjoyed life. Especially he enjoyed helping raise Dora. Right after he acquired her and the mule Buck—or they acquired him—he discarded the savage curb bit Learner had used (salvaging the metal) and had the Jones Brothers’ harnessmaker convert the bridle into a hackamore. He ordered also another saddle, sketching what he wanted and offering a bonus for early delivery. The leather crafter shook his head over that sketch, but delivered.
Thereafter Gibbons and the baby girl rode Buck in a saddle built for two: a man-sized saddle in the usual position, with a tiny saddle with tiny stirrups an integral part of it in that forward position where a normal saddle carries its pommel horn. A little wooden arch, leather covered, curved up from this, a safety bar the child could grab. Gibbons also had this extended saddle fitted with two belly bands, more comfortable for the mule, safer on steep trails for riders.
They rode that way several seasons, usually an hour or more after school—holding three-cornered conversations at a walk, or singing as a trio with Buck loudly off key but always on beat with his gait acting as a metronome, Gibbons carrying the lead, and Dora learning to harmonize. It was often the “Paunshot” song, which Dora regarded as her own, and to which she gradually added verses, including one about the paddock next to the schoolhouse, where Buck lived.
But soon there was too much girl for the tiny forward saddle as Dora grew straight and slender and tall. Gibbons bought a mare mule, after trying two others—one was rejected by Buck because she was (so he said) “shdoop’d” and the other because she failed to appreciate a hackamore and tried to run away.
Gibbons let Buck pick the third, with advice from Dora but none from him—and Buck acquired a mate in his paddock, and Gibbons had the stable enlarged. Buck still stood at stud for a fee but seemed pleased to have Beulah at home. However, Beulah did not learn to sing and talked very little. Gibbons suspected that she was afraid to open her mouth in Buck’s presence—she was willing to talk, or at least to answer, when Gibbons rode tier alone…for it worked out, to Gibbons’ surprise, that Beulah was his saddle mule; Dora rode the big male brute, even when the stirrups of the stock saddle had to be shortened ridiculously to fit her child’s legs.
But steadily the stirrups had to be lengthened as Dora grew toward young womanhood. Beulah dropped a foal; Gibbons kept her and Dora named her “Betty” and trained the baby mule as she grew, at first letting her amble along behind with an empty saddle, then teaching her to accept a rider in the paddock. There followed a time when their daily rides became sixsomes and often picnics, with Mrs. Mayberry up on Buck, the steadiest, and with the lightest load—Dora——on Betty, and with Gibbons as usual riding Beulah. Gibbons remembered that summer as a most happy one: Helen and himself knee to knee on the older mounts while Dora and the frisky youngster galloped ahead, then turning back with Dora’s long brown hair flying in the breeze.
One such time he asked, “Helen, are the boys beginning to sniff around her?”
“You old stud, don’t you think about anything else?”
“Come off it, dear; I asked for information.”
