Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

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.