Robert Heinlein - The Number of the Beast

Jacob and I moved into marriage like ham and eggs. Jacob is not tall (178 centimeters) but tall compared with my scant one fiftv-two~ and his hairline recedes and he has a paunch from years at a desk-hut he looks just right to me. If I wanted to look at male beauty, I could always look at Deety's giant- appreciate him without lusting: my own loving goat kept Sharpie quite blunted.

I did not decide, when Zebbie came on campus, to make a pet of him for his looks but for his veering sense of humor. But if there was ever a man who could have played the role of John Carter, Warlord of Mars, it was Zebadiah Carter whose middle name just happens to be "John." Indoors with clothes and wearing his fake horn-rims he looks awkward, too big, clumsy. I did not realize that he was beautiful and graceful until the first time he used my pool. (That afternoon I was tempted to seduce him. But, as little dignity as I have, I had resolved to stick to older men, so I shut off the thought.)

Outdoors at Snug Harbor, wearing little or no clothes, Zebbie looked at home-a mountain lion in grace and muscle. An incident one later afternoon showed me how much he was like the Warlord of Mars. A sword- Those old stories were familiar to me. My father had acquired the Ballantine Del Rey paperback reissues; they were around the house when I was a little girl. Once I learned to read, I read everything, and vastly preferred Barsoom stories to "girls" books given to me for birthdays and Christmas. Thuvia was the heroine I identified with-"toy" of the cruel priests of Issus, then with virginity miraculously restored in the next book: Thuvia, Maid of Mars. I resolved to change my name to Thuvia when I was old enough. When I was eighteen, I did not consider it; I had always been "Hilda," a new name held no attraction.

I was responsible in part for Deety's name, one that embarrassed her until she discovered that her husband liked it. Jacob had wanted to name his daughter "Dejah Thoris" (Jacob looks like and is a professor, but he is incurably romantic). Jane had misgivings. I told her, "Don't be a chump, Janie. If your man wants something, and you can accommodate him with no grief, give it to him! Do you want him to love this child or to resent her?" Jane looked thoughtful and "Doris Anne" became "Dejah Thoris" at christening, then "Deety" before she could talk-which satisfied everyone.

We settled into a routine: Up early every day; our men worked on instruments and wires and things and installing the time-space widget into Gay Deceiver's gizzard-while Deety and I gave the housework a lick and a promise (our mountain home needed little attention-more of Jacob's genius), then Deety and I got busy on a technical matter that Deety could do with some help from me.

I'm not much use for technical work, biology being the only thing I studied in depth and never finished my degree. This was amplified by almost six thousand hours as volunteer nurse's aid in our campus medical center and I took courses that make me an uncertified nurse or medical tech or even jackleg paramedic-I don't shriek at the sight of blood and can clean up vomit without a qualm and would not hesitate to fill in as scrub nurse. Being a campus widow with too much money is fun but not soul filling. I like to feel that I've paid rent on the piece of earth I'm using.

Besides that, I have a smattering of everything from addiction to the printed page, plus attending campus lectures that sound intriguing... then sometimes auditing a related course. I audited descriptive astronomy, took the final as if for credit_got an "A." I had even figured a cometary orbit correctly, to my surprise (and the professor's).

I can wire a doorbell or clean out a stopped-up soil pipe with a plumber's "snake"-but if it's really technical, I hire specialists.

So Hilda can help but usually can't do the job alone. Gay Deceiver had to be reprogrammed-and Deety, who does not look like a genius, is one. Jacob's daughter should be a genius and her mother had an I.Q. that startled even me, her closest friend. I ran across it while helping poor grief-stricken Jacob to decide what to save, what to burn. (I burned unflattering pictures, useless papers, and clothes. A dead person's clothes should be given away or burned; nothing should be kept that does not inspire happy memories. I cried a bit and that saved Jacob and Deety from having to cry later.)

We all held private duo licenses; Zebbie, as Captain Z. J. Carter, U.S.A.S.R., held "command" rating as well-he told us that his space rating was largely honorary, just some free-fall time and one landing of a shuttle. Zebbie is mendacious, untruthful, and tells fibs; I got a chance to sneak a look at his aerospace log and shamelessly took it. He had logged more than he claimed in one exchange tour with Australia. Someday I'm going to sit on his chest and make him tell Mama Hilda the truth. Should be interesting... if I can sort out fact from fiction. I do not believe his story about intimate relations with a female kangaroo.

Zebbie and Jacob decided that we all must be able to control Gay Deceiver all four ways, on the road, in the air, in trajectory (she's not a spaceship but can make high-trajectory jumps), and in space-time, i.e. among the universes to the Number of the Beast, plus variants impossible to count.

I had fingers crossed about being able to learn that, but both men assured me that they had worked out a fail-safe that would get me out of a crunch if I ever had to do it alone.

Part of the problem lay in the fact that Gay Deceiver was a one-man girl; her doors unlocked only to her master's voice or to his thumbprint, or to a tapping code if he were shy both voice and right thumb; Zeb tended to plan ahead-"Outwitting Murphy's Law," he called it, "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." (Grandma called it "The Butter-Side Down Rule.")

First priority was to introduce us to Gay Deceiver-teach her that all four voices and right thumbprints were acceptable.

That took a couple of hours, with Deety helping Zebbie. The tapping code took even less, it being based on an old military cadence-its trickiness being that a thief would be unlikely to guess that this car would open if tapped a certain way and in guessing the correct cadence. Zebbie called the cadence "Drunken Soldier." Jacob said that it was "Bumboat." Deety claimed that its title was "Pay Day," because she had heard it from Jane's grandfather.

Our men conceded that she must be right, as she had words for it. Her words included "Drunken Sailor" instead of "Drunken Soldier"-plus both "Pay Day" and "Bumboat."

Introductions taken care of, Zeb dug out Gay's anatomy, one volume her body, one her brain. He handed the latter to Deety, took the other into our basement. The next two days were easy for me, hard for Deety. I held lights and made notes on a clip board while she studied that book and frowned and got smudged and sweaty getting herself into impossible positions and once she cursed in a fashion that would have caused Jane to scold. She added, "Aunt Nanny Goat, your step-son-in-law has done things to this mass of spaghetti that no decent computer should put up with! It's a bastard hybrid."

"You shouldn't call Gay 'it,' Deety. And she's not a bastard."

"She can't hear us; I've got her ears unhooked-except that piece that is monitoring news retrieval programs-and that goes through this wire to that jack in the wall; she can talk with Zebadiah only in the basement now. Oh, I'm sure she was a nice girl until that big ape of mine raped her. Aunt Hilda, don't worry about hurting Gay's feelings; she hasn't any. This is an idiot as computers go. Any one-horse college and most high schools own or share time in computers much more complex. This one is primarily cybernetics, an autopilot plus limited digital capacity and limited storage. But the mods Zebadiah has tacked on make it more than an autopilot but not a general-purpose computer. A misbegotten hybrid. It has far more random-number options than it needs and it has extra functions that IBM never dreamed of."