Baby Makes Four
Copyright© 2010 by Prince von Vlox
Chapter 5
Science Fiction Sex Story: Chapter 5 - The United States settled the Project 1950s as a lifeboat in case of a nuclear war. The founders picked an alternate time line where humanity died out with the Mt. Toba eruption of 75,000 BC. It is currently some 18,000 BCE, and the height of one of the periodic ice ages. Wendy van Veldt is an engineer-in-training. Her plans for the next few years are to start her career, and live happily ever after with her husband and her wife. Things don't quite work out that way.
Caution: This Science Fiction Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Consensual Romantic Fiction Science Fiction Pregnancy
Sue was our next door neighbor and looked after Jenny while I was at work. When I knocked on her front door she wrinkled her nose at my condition, wet clothes, dirty hair, and the exhausted look on my face. “Mud wrestling again?” She knew the nickname my crews had, and liked to kid me about it.
I gave her a tired grin. “Yeah, but this time I won.”
“Only by bringing most of the river home with you,” she laughed. “I don’t know which gets dirtier, you or the kids.”
“What have they been up to now?” Sue’s daughter was the same age as Jenny, and they both had a fondness for dirt and mud. Chris often kidded me that that fondness was inherited.
“Nothing a bath won’t cure. Looks like you could use one, too.”
“Things occasionally get messy out in the field, but you know that.” I pushed at my hair. “I think I’ve always liked playing in the mud.”
She laughed and scooped up my daughter. “Chris is right. Your daughter picked that up from you! Go on, get out of here. Same time tomorrow?”
“I’ve got to go into the office, so it’ll be closer to 9:00 than 7:00.”
“I’ll see you then.”
Chris was just as tired as I was but met me at the front door with a hug and a kiss. He smelled of sweat and sawdust, and after a second kiss, he held me at arm’s length.
“Wading in the mud again?” He brushed at something on my cheek.
“We had a crisis,” I said, “and I had to get down and dirty.” I plucked at my clothes. “I need a shower.”
“So do I. Shall we save some water?”
I put Jenny in her room, and she made a beeline for the dollhouse Chris had built her. While she did that, I headed for the shower, shedding clothes on the way.
We didn’t fool around, not like we did just after we were married, but we got clean and we enjoyed a few minutes of just holding each other.
“When do you see the doctor?” he asked as we dried off. He patted my tummy meaningfully. I wasn’t showing yet, at least down there. My boobs felt heavier and a lot more tender. When I’d jumped in the water to look at that caisson, they’d actually sort of hurt.
“Friday.”
“Want to know if it’s a boy or a girl?” He grinned at me. I’d gone nuts while carrying Jenny, wanting to know. That day was long past, though, and I told him that. “I just want to know that the baby is healthy. I’ll worry about gender as we get closer to my due date.” I pulled on clean, dry clothes. The people in Seaside can extol the virtues of nudity all they want, but there’s nothing like warm, dry clothes sliding over your skin to make you feel comfortable.
Chris had started dinner—neither one of us liked cooking, and Amy had been ten times the cook both of us together could manage, so we took turns—when someone knocked on the door. I checked the peephole; it was Detective Perrin.
“Evening,” I said when I invited her in. “I wondered if I’d see you here.”
“This is more of a social visit than work-related,” she said. “And I assume we have more time to talk.” She looked around, and I saw the approval on her face.
I’m not sure what she expected, but we’d put a lot of effort into furnishing and decorating the house, and the living room was certainly a showpiece. We’d gone for a contrasting mixture of light and dark woods, and the effect was striking. Chris had built all of it, and I’d found a lacquer that gave the furniture a sheen usually found only on much more expensive things.
I laughed. “Yeah, things got a little exciting. But I wasn’t about to let a year of work wash away because someone was on the take.”
“Was that what it was?”
“The previous Site Manager cut a few corners and took payments under the table. That’s how I ended up with this job.”
“I wondered. I thought you were a little young to be a manager.”
“And I’m also a woman, but the crews accept me, and that’s helped.” I returned to the kitchen and continued to put out the dinnerware. “We were just starting dinner. Care to join us?”
“It depends. What are you having?”
I lifted the lid and took a look. “A stew.” I stirred the pot. “Yes, a stew. It looks like a stew, so it probably tastes like one, too.”
“You sound doubtful.”
“Neither of us is that good a cook, so sometimes we’re not sure, even when we follow a recipe.”
“I’ve already eaten, but that was hours ago. I could take a snack.”
I shrugged. “Fair enough. We’re also going to have a salad from our own garden, and I bought some hot bread on the way home.”
“Now that sounds yummy.”
I got busy setting the table. Jenny had been doing something with her crayons on the wall in her room, and Detective Perrin made a sound of surprise when she saw that.
“Chris found this stuff you put on the wall,” I said as I picked up my little girl. “It wipes right off with soap and hot water. And Jenny knows she’ll get in trouble if she takes her crayons into another room.” I touched her little nose and was rewarded with a giggle. “Don’t you, pumpkin.”
Jenny carried her booster seat to the dining room. I helped her climb up to the table and settle in. Chris brought out the stew, and after prayers, I relaxed with a sigh. “Been one of those days.”
“Trouble? I know you came home covered in mud.”
“We had a dike go at Cooper’s Point, and I had to get my hands dirty.”
“That’s not all you had to get dirty,” Detective Perrin said. “I know you’ve told me people here aren’t as conscious of nudity as they are elsewhere, but...”
“I didn’t get all the way nude,” I replied. “I still had my shorts on.”
“Your clothes were still drying next to the office when I left,” she said, looking down at the piece of bread she’d buttered. “That included your underwear. I saw it when I came back from where you were working.”
“Certain parts of the female body are not meant to be rubbed with grit and sand,” I replied. I tilted my head, giving her a look. “Are you living here now, or are you still in Center?”
“The Commission assigned me here, partly at my request,” she said. “I married someone from Terminus, and as far as possible, they like to honor people’s requests.”
“So you...?” I sort of knew what the Commission did; there were a couple of shows on TV about the adventures of their Operatives.
She shook her head. “I don’t go to the Alternates, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m in the Federal Police part of the Commission. When I moved here two months ago, my first assignment was investigating the previous Site Manager for your company. You’ll be happy to know that yesterday we arrested the people who’d been bribing him. Federal charges, not local ones.”
“Will you need me to testify?”
“Probably not. Most of the case involves accounting matters. But I thought you’d like to know. Anyway, that isn’t really why I’m here.”
“We try not to talk business at the dinner table,” Chris said.
“I will stick one thing in,” Detective Perrin said. “Has Wendy told you we found Amy?”
He dropped his bread, and a smile lit his face. “She just said she had news.”
“We’ll talk more after dinner.”
“Um, for that I think we can make an exception, detective.”
She smiled. “Call me Deborah. My official title is Investigator, but I don’t like to use it.
“Anyway, about three days ago, she rode into the town of Teays on a horse. She had a baby in a backpack and a small child on the saddle with her. She had a cuff and chain fastened to her ankle. From what she told the local police, she’d escaped from the man who’d kidnapped her four years ago and ridden cross-country for three days to safety.”
“How was she?” I asked.
“A little malnourished, which you’d expect, and suffering from exposure. She’d sacrificed to keep the kids warm and fed. Oh, and she’s also about five to six weeks pregnant.”
Chris and I looked at each other and communicated volumes.
“The kids are all right,” Deborah continued. “The local authorities contacted us because kidnapping is a Federal crime, and we asked them to send her downstream to Southport as soon as they could. We have someone going out there to investigate. The police chief told us that there were people who’d homesteaded out in the wilds. They didn’t think anything of it, but that cuff on her leg made them change their minds. They’re going to do some visiting.
“We’re not sure, but her kidnapper might not be there when the police get out to his place, assuming they know where it is. Amy told them how she got to town, but they might not be able to follow that back. They were hiring a local tracker to work backwards from her description.”
“So he’ll have gotten away with it.”
“Maybe. We’ll want to hear her side of the story. She may have done something to let her get away, such as chain him up. We’re not sure.” She pointed at the salad. “Mind if I have some?”
“No, go ahead.”
I’m not sure what either of us thought. While we were clearing the table, Chris nodded toward the living room. “Why don’t you get chummy with her? Maybe you can find out more.”
He joined us in the living room, more to make it look good than anything else, and we talked a little about what was going on in Cedar View. Then Chris asked Deborah about what she did for entertainment.
“I can’t believe how good the TV is here,” she said. I’d brought out dessert, and we sat on the sofa eating brownies and sipping milk. Jenny, of course, got crumbs all over her.
“We were originally founded as a telecommunications relay site,” Chris said. “That was mostly because of Seaside. That town is the shipping center for the area, and is also the haven port on the coast in the event of bad weather. We have plenty of infrastructure. Actually, we need it. Last year they finished wiring everyone into a computer network. I’m told only the University is as well-wired as we are.”
“We’ve been a test bed for a lot of things,” I added. “Things are tried here first, and if they work, they get extended to everyone else. You get so used to things being the way they are here that it’s almost a shock when you go elsewhere and they don’t have it.”
“The building in Center was thoroughly wired,” Chris said. “I understand they’re going to expand it, but the lack of computers is slowing things down.”
“Our computers came from Zero Phase,” I said. “I don’t think that’s too likely to happen in the future. It took a special act of Congress for that.”
Deborah nodded. “I wondered. We have this apartment in Terminus, and when we moved in, there was a computer sitting in one of the bedrooms. Neither of us knows how to use the thing. I’m supposed to take a class next week.”
“I thought your husband was from around here.”
Deborah shook her head. “His parents left when he was six. So he’s from here, but it doesn’t really count.”
“You’ll find that a computer is a tremendous sink of your time,” Chris said. “We have one, but I almost never use it because of that. I don’t even play games on it.”
“I use it,” I said, “but only when I absolutely have to. Right after we moved here, I found myself spending most of the night on the thing. Since then, I’ve vowed only to use the one at work. There I kind of have to.” I shrugged. “So far, I think I’ve kept to that promise, though tonight I’ll have to get on it and do some work-related things.”
“What about calculators?” Deborah asked. “We were given pocket PCs about a year ago.”
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