3 x T

by Harry Turtledove

  This time, the steaks were rare enough when it started.

  Pete Flowers had a potholder in his hand. He was opening the broiler door. Doug's wail went through him like the sudden malignant whine of a dentist's drill. Pete's hand jerked against the hot metal.

  "Shit," he snarled, snatching it away. He put a week's worth of glare into the two long strides that got him to the kitchen sink. "You said he was really down this time."

  "He was," Mary insisted. "He nursed like a champ. He burped. He was dry?you changed him yourself. And he didn't even wiggle when I put him in the crib. He didn't, Pete."

  "Shit," Pete Flowers said again, softly this time. He hadn't heard everything his wife said, not over the splash of cold water on his burned hand. Doug was still crying, though. There wasn't any place in the condo where he couldn't hear that. God knows I know it, too, he thought, reaching for a dish towel. He gingerly dried his hand.

  He looked so grim when he stamped past the dining room table that alarm sprang into Mary's tired blue eyes. "Where are you going?"

  "To get him, where else?" He started down the hall toward the room that, up until six weeks ago, had been his cherished study. Now the books were either in boxes or shoehorned into the master bedroom.

  Not, he thought, that he had done much reading in Japanese history?or anything else that took longer to go through than Bloom County?lately. He'd had to go all the way up to the assistant dean for academic affairs at San Flavio State to get his sabbatical approved a year early. He'd fought the good fight gladly, eager to take a year off to help Mary with the baby. Now he wondered how good an idea it had been.

  Doug's shrieks neared the pitch only dogs can hear. His father set his jaw so hard his teeth ground together. He turned on the light in the baby's room; even in Southern California, November twilight fades to darkness by six.

  The baby's head was turned toward Pete. As usual, his frustrated anger met tough sledding when he looked at his son. Doug's hair?the first, incredibly fine growth of baby hair, now being rubbed away toward temporary baldness by his crib sheets?was even fairer than Mary's, but his eyes were already darkening from infant gray-blue toward Pete's own unspectacular brown.

  He picked up Doug, slid a finger inside his Huggies. (Or was one of them just a Huggie?or even a Huggy? A fine point of language he'd never reached a firm conclusion about.)

  Doug was dry, and still yelling. Pete didn't know whether to be pleased or not. He wouldn't have to change him, but at least he would have known what the kid's problem was if his finger had come out dripping with liquid poop.

  He hoisted Doug up on his left shoulder, patted his back. "There, there," he crooned, "there, there." Maybe Doug would burp or fart or whatever he needed to do. He didn't sound gassy, though. Pete knew that cry. He wasn't drawing up his legs either. Pete sighed. Maybe Doug was yelling because he felt like yelling, too.

  Mary, bless her heart, had the steaks on the table. She'd already cut hers into bite-sized pieces, so she could eat with one hand. She held out her arms. "I'll take him, Pete."

  "Thanks." He got his hand behind Doug's head to cradle it, and hissed?it was the burned hand. He guided the baby into the crook of his wife's elbow. "Got him?"

  "Yes. How's your hand?"

  He looked at it. "Turning red. I'll live."

  "Put some Cort-Aid on it."

  "After dinner." He slathered A-1 Sauce on the steak, cut off a big bite. He made a dissatisfied noise, deep in his throat. "A little too done. He timed it just right."

  "I'm sorry. I should have gotten up sooner."

  "Never mind." Pete tried to sound as if he meant it. He hated overcooked beef. He ate his hamburgers rare too, which faintly revolted Mary. After five years of marriage, though, she had learned he fought change hard.

  The steak tasted fine to her. She dropped a green bean on Doug. She was eating righthanded because she held him in her left arm, but even after forced intensive practice she wasn't good at it.

  "He's calmed down, anyhow," she said, plucking the bean off Doug's thumbsuckers anonymous T-shirt and sticking it in her mouth.

  "Sure he has. Why not? His mission's accomplished?he's screwed up dinner."

  Mary had a glass of Zinfandel halfway to her mouth. She put it down so hard a little splashed onto the tablecloth. "Oh, for God's sake, Pete," she said, her voice low and calm in the way that meant she'd be shouting if she weren't watching herself. "He's just a teeny tiny baby. He doesn't know what he's doing. All he knows is that something's bothering him."

  "Usually he doesn't know what, though."

  "Pete." This time she was a little louder: last warning.

  "Yes, yes, yes." He gave in, settled down, and ate. But once lodged, the thought would not go away.

  * * *

  The first couple of weeks, of course, were chaos. Pete had thought he was ready. Looking back, he supposed he was, as ready as anyone could be who only knew about babies from hearsay. He started finding out how little that was even before Doug got home. Wrestling a car seat into place in the back of a two-door Toyota Tercel was an introduction of sorts.

  But only of sorts. Doug had been born just past four in the morning, and seemed convinced night was day, and vice versa. That first dreadful night at home, he was awake?and yowling?almost all the time from one till five.

  Even when he did catnap, it did Pete and Mary precious little good. They had the bassinet in their bedroom, and jumped every time Doug wriggled or breathed funny. Wriggling and breathing funny, Pete decided in a moment when he would have contemplated suicide had he been less tired, were about all newborns did. He soon revised that to include making frequent horrible messes.

  Once was enough to teach him to keep a spare diaper over Doug's middle whenever he was changing him. "The fountains of Versailles," Mary called it; she was writing her dissertation on Voltaire. What Pete called it did not bear repeating, but then he'd had to wash his face.

  The other thing Doug did was stay awake. Pawing through The First Twelve Months of Life one day, Pete protested, "The book says he's supposed to sleep seventeen to twenty hours a day." Before the baby was born, that had sounded reasonable. It even sounded as if it left parents a few hours a day to live their own lives.

  "I don't think he's read the book," Mary said wanly. "Here, you take him for a while. My shoulder's getting sore from rocking him in my arms."

  Pete took Doug. The baby squirmed and yarped and dozed off. Pete carried him into his room (the bassinet was in there now, though Doug still looked small and lost in a crib), set him down. Doug sighed. His mouth made little suck-suck sounds. Pete backed away and started down the hall.

  He'd got about halfway to the front room when Doug let out an "Ooo-wah!" behind him. He stiffened in outrage. Then his shoulders sagged. He turned around and went back to pick up the baby.

  "This all comes with the territory," he said when he reappeared, as much to himself as to Mary. Doug was already back to sleep in his arms. He tried to put him down again. This time he did not even get out of the room.

  It was Mary's turn to console him. "It gets better."

  "Sure it does," he said, and wondered if he would live that long.

  But it did, some. Doug began to sleep, if not more, at least at more consistent times. He was awake for longer stretches during the day and less during the night, though he still wanted to be fed every couple of hours around the clock. Mary's fair complexion made the circles under her eyes seem darker than they really were, or so Pete told himself. As for him, the two staples of his life were Visine and caffeine.

  Doug learned to smile. At first the expression was hard to tell from the one he wore when he had gas, but it soon became unmistakably an outlet for pleasure and the baby's first real communication other than screaming. Pete cherished it for that. The sight of his face or Mary's could touch it off.

  Doug also developed another expression, a way of looking at things out of the corner of his eye. It made him look absurdly wise and knowing, as i
f he had a secret and was doing his best not to let on. Pete loved it. He would even smile when Doug assumed it while being cuddled after a crying bout. "All right, you self-satisfied little beast, that's more like it," he would say.

  Doug seemed to reserve that smug look for him. Mary saw it much less often.

  However much Pete came to love his son, though, he never got used to the hour after hour of banshee wails that marked Doug's bad days. Calling them colic gave them a name, but not one that really helped. In the moments he could grab, Pete read about colic with desperate intensity, trying to find some clue to making Doug feel better, or at least shut up.

  The more Pete read, the less he found he knew. Colic wasn't the digestive upset people used to think it was. At least, the babies who were having fits didn't show any unusual intestinal activity. Also, breastfed babies got it as often as babies who used bottles. Colicky babies put on weight just as fast as any others.

  They made a hell of a lot more noise, though.

  Pete noticed early on that Doug owned an exquisite sense of timing. A couple of times Mary drove down to the Seven-Eleven to tide them over on diapers. Pete did the big Saturday shopping; he welcomed the chance to get out of the condo.

  Both times, Doug had been out like a light when Mary left on the diaper run. Once he made Pete forget to put chili powder in a recipe, which wasn't the same without it. The other time, he caught his father with his hand on his zipper. Pete was about to burst by the time Mary got back. By then Doug was quiet, and looking smug.

  Sometimes he wouldn't be quiet, no matter what. Those were the worst. Evolution designed a baby's cry to be noticed, to make its parents want to fix whatever was wrong. Evolution did not design parents to listen to a squawking baby at close range for hours, not and keep their marbles too.

  They tried everything they could think of. Pete put a cotton ball in his left ear while he was toting Doug around. Sometimes, when the din was very bad, he put cotton balls in both ears. They didn't block Doug's racket, or come close. They did blunt the edge of it. Out of some perverse mommy equivalent of machismo, Mary refused to have anything to do with earplugs.

  In any case, they were only for Pete's sake, as he put it one frazzled middle of the night. Except on the days when nothing helped, two things helped with Doug. One was bouncing him while sitting on the edge of the mattress. The other was cranking up the rock on the stereo. The rhythmic thump of the bass seemed to soothe him. He especially like Led Zeppelin, which dismayed Pete and horrified Mary.

  Bouncing and Led Zep or not, though, Doug kept his gift for interrupting his parents, and Pete in particular. He wished he'd never thought, even as a sour joke, that the baby was doing it on purpose. It made him notice just exactly how often Doug's crying sabotaged things he needed to do or, worse, wanted to do.

  The baby started yowling out of the blue one morning, for instance, just when Pete was shaving that impossible spot above the center of his upper lip. His hand jumped. He didn't quite slice off his lip, but he gave it the old college try.

  "I haven't needed that much styptic pencil since I was fifteen years old and just learning how," he grumbled as he poured himself a bowl of Special K.

  "There's still some blood under your chin," Mary told him. She was holding Doug, who by this time had calmed down considerably. He turned his head to try to follow his father across the kitchen as Pete walked over to wet a paper towel and watched him out of the corner of his eye while he dabbed at himself.

  Pete threw the crumpled towel in the trash. He scowled back at his son. "Pleased with yourself?" He didn't sound as if he was kidding, or as if he was talking to a baby. He sounded more like someone talking to a fellow who had just done him a dirty trick.

  Mary caught his tone. "For heaven's sake, Pete, he's just a baby. He doesn't know what he's doing."

  "Yeah, you said that before. But enough things have happened with this crazy kid that I swear I'm beginning to wonder."

  Mary felt Doug's diaper. "I can tell you what's happened with this crazy kid. I can also tell you that you're going to change him, because if I don't take a leak you'll have to change me too. Here." She thrust Doug at him.

  He grinned a lopsided grin. "I'd have more fun putting the powder on you." She made a face back over her shoulder at him as she hurried down the hall.

  Doug somehow missed interfering with dinner that evening, which gave Pete hope for the future. The baby nursed vigorously just after eight and was sound asleep (better yet, soundless asleep) by nine. Mary levered herself out of the rocking chair with her free hand, carried him over to his father on the couch. "Give him a kiss and I'll put him in his crib."

  Pete leaned forward to kiss Doug's fine sparse fair hair. It had a sweet, clean smell that only had a little to do with being just washed. Pete knew he could do his own hair with Suave baby shampoo from now till doomsday and it would never smell like that. Doug was fresher-baked than he, and that was all there was to it.

  Mary toted Doug away. He hadn't stirred for the kiss. "Down. That was almost too easy to stand," she said when she came back.

  "Tell me about it. If it were this easy all the time, I'd like having the little critter around more." Pete saw her face cloud, said quickly. "I didn't mean it like that. But he is a strain."

  "That he is." Mary stretched. Something in her back crackled. "Ooh. Nice. Now, what shall I do with this rare and priceless gift of privacy at a civilized hour?" Pete had an idea about that, but before he could say anything she went on, "I know?I'll take a shower. I think the flies were homing on me instead of the garbage when I took it out this afternoon."

  Pete waited till the blow drier stopped whirring in the bathroom. Then he threw open the door, grabbed Mary around the waist, and lifted her off her feet. She let out an indignant squawk as he carried her away. "What are you doing, you maniac? You'll hurt yourself! Put me down, Pete, right now!"

  He did, on the bed. Through the shirt he was pulling over his head, he told her, "What better way to spend an early evening when we're both awake and someone else isn't?" He fumbled with the brass button on his Levi's.

  "I can't think of one." Mary sat up. "Here, let me help you."

  "Much more help like that," Pete said a moment later, "and you'll have to wash these jeans." He kicked them off.

  "Ah. I'll stop, then." Mary lay back again. Pete joined her on the bed. After a minute, she laughed. "My milk's letting down."

  As always, Pete marveled at how sweet it was. Babies, he thought, had things a lot better than calves. They also got their milk in much more attractive containers.

  His kisses drifted down her belly. He raised an eyebrow. "Shall I commit a felony for you?"

  "What are you talking about?" Her golden hair slid across bare shoulders as she shook her head.

  "Thanks to the wisdom of our duly elected Assembly, and to our know-nothing governor who wants to be president?and with a big hand for the Supreme Court?this" (he stopped talking; Mary murmured with pleasure) "is illegal again. Fortunately, it's not immoral or fattening."

  After some little while, Mary pushed Pete down flat on the bed. Her eyes were enormous in the dim light. "You shouldn't be the only criminal in the family," she said softly. Her voice was low and heavy. He could feel the warmth of her breath on him.

  Doug started to cry.

  "Oh, no," Mary said. Pete heard something odd in her voice: not only annoyance over being interrupted, but also concern at how he would take it.

  He surprised both of them by laughing, and by meaning it. "What the hell," he said, climbing back into his jeans. "I'll change him, or whatever he needs. He ought to go back to sleep pretty soon, and then, my lovely dear, I shall return."

  "I'll be waiting," Mary promised.

  "Of course you will. Dressed like that, where would you go?"

  Her snort followed him into Doug's room. What the hell, what the hell, he repeated to himself: the kid's only a baby, after all. He wondered how often he'd said that in the last couple of m
onths. Enough that if he'd had a dollar for every time, he could have afforded a nanny and not needed to worry about any of this, that was for sure.

  Which was a damn sight more than he could say for his sex life. A dollar for each time there wouldn't have bought him dinner for one at any place fancier than the local Sizzler.

  He stopped worrying about it as he stooped to pick up Doug. The baby really did sound upset, and the nightlight showed Pete that he had somehow managed to twist himself at right angles to the way Mary always set him down.

  "All right, sport, what's going on here?" Doug yelled louder than ever as Pete lifted him. His father's hands under his chest squeezed the air from him until Pete shifted him into the crook of his left elbow. Pete stuck his right hand into Doug's diaper. The baby was dry. Pete frowned, just a little. There went the most obvious reason for Doug's distress.

  "Maybe you spit up," Pete muttered. Doug's chin was damp, but then Doug's chin was often damp. This was only drool, not spit-up sour milk. Pete ran his hand over the crib sheet. It was dry too. Not only that, Doug threw out his arms and shrieked when his father bent down.

  "I'm not going to drop you," Pete told him, though for an instant the prospect seemed tempting, if for no other reason than to get the little squawkbox away from his ear.

  He felt Doug's forehead, to see if his son had a fever. Doug was cool. He stuck a finger in the baby's mouth, felt around to see if he was cutting a tooth. It was early, but still possible. It was possible, but not true.

  "What's happening in there?" Mary asked from the master bedroom.

  "Beats me." Pete remembered what he'd said at breakfast a couple of weeks before. "Maybe he's doing it on purpose."

  He looked at Doug, who was still hollering?now probably in resentment at having something that wasn't a nipple shoved in his mouth. Then Doug met Pete's eye. He stopped crying for a moment, cocked his head to one side so he could peer up at his father out of the corner of his eye. It was his smug look, but something more was there, too. Gotcha, was what Pete thought.