Tuesday’s Child

Ah, when to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

Of a love or a season.

Robert Frost, Reluctance st. 4

 

“Oh my God, she’s changed!”, I thought to myself as I looked at the shrunken body of my chief assistant wreathed in the smoke from the destroyed machine.

All the tests had gone perfectly and were hadn’t expected anything to go wrong when we put our first human subject into the matter transmitter. I couldn’t understand it, we had teleported objects hundreds of times without the slightest problem. All last week we had sent test animals across and they had been fine after teleportation. We had tried to think of everything to insure her safety; we had even scheduled the experiment on a Tuesday so everyone could recover from their weekend before attempting a test on a human subject. Gina looked healthy, which was a blessing. But it was her size and apparent age that concerned me, her body looked like it had rejuvenated into that of an four or five month old baby. I had one of the medical researchers examine Gina while we replaced the charred remains of the output amplifier stage and put another test animal in the machine. This time the chimpanzee we were using for a test animal regressed into its infancy.

I wondered what could be going on. I was in a panic, I had no idea what to do to restore Gina to her former state. I sat in my office wondering what my next move would be. I didn’t know how to take care of a baby, I just didn’t have the training or experience. Then it came to me, I’d call Pauline! She knew how to take care of babies. We could care for Gina until I found some sort of solution. I punched in my home phone number on the keypad and waited impatiently for her to pick up the phone. She answered and I told her breathlessly what had happened and asked for her help. She told charge of the situation immediately and said she’d be right over.

The researcher had just finished his examination of Gina when Pauline arrived. Pauline met me in the office and was demanding more details of the mishap when the researcher arrived with Gina. She was a sight! She smiled and cooed at the sight of Pauline and put out her arms to Pauline to be held. Pauline turned to me and said coldly, “Why isn’t that baby in diapers?”

I was astonished at the stunning simplicity of her question. If Gina was a baby again why hadn’t we diapered her? I turned to the researcher and said, “Pauline’s right. Well?”

“Uhhh,” the male researcher temporized, displaying typical male ineptitude with infant care, “we don’t have any baby diapers.”

“What do you put on the chimps when you handle them? I don’t recall there being an item for chimp diapers in the lab’s budget, but I do recall there being several items listed that were described on the supply list as various sizes of baby diapers.”, I told him firmly.

The researcher stood in front of us without moving as if he was waiting to be told what to do next. Pauline looked at him with a gimlet eye and said, “Well?”

He looked at her stupidly and I sighed in exasperation, then I said patiently, “Go and get some diapers on that baby!”

After he left with Gina, I asked, “What do you think I should do?”

“Can you change her back?”, she asked.

“We don’t know at this point,” I explained, “We have to find out why the machine has suddenly started regressing the test subjects. Once we know why the machine malfunctioned we might have a chance at restoring Gina to her proper age.”

“It’s obvious Gina can’t care for herself in her present state. Have you decided who will look after her until you can restore her?”, she asked.

“I hadn’t gotten that far in my thinking,” I told her.