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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/32011-8.txt b/32011-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7aa0c7d --- /dev/null +++ b/32011-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,1505 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Special Delivery, by Damon Francis Knight + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Special Delivery + +Author: Damon Francis Knight + +Illustrator: Ashman + +Release Date: April 16, 2010 [EBook #32011] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPECIAL DELIVERY *** + + + + +Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + + + + + + + Transcriber's Note: + + This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1954. + Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. + copyright on this publication was renewed. + + + _Special Delivery_ + + + By DAMON KNIGHT + + + Illustrated by ASHMAN + + + _All Len had to hear was the old gag: "We've never lost a + father yet." His child was not even born and it was + thoroughly unbearable!_ + + * * * * * + + + + +Len and Moira Connington lived in a rented cottage with a small yard, +a smaller garden, and too many fir trees. The lawn, which Len seldom +had time to mow, was full of weeds, and the garden was overgrown with +blackberry brambles. The house itself was clean and smelled better +than most city apartments, and Moira kept geraniums in the windows. + +[Illustration] + +However, it was dark on account of the firs. Approaching the door one +late spring afternoon, Len tripped on an unnoticed flagstone and +scattered examination papers all the way to the porch. + +When he picked himself up, Moira was giggling in the doorway. "That +was funny." + +"The hell it was," said Len. "I banged my nose." He picked up his +Chemistry B papers in a stiff silence. A red drop fell on the last +one. "_Damn_ it!" + +Moira held the screen door for him, looking contrite and faintly +surprised. She followed him into the bathroom. "Len, I didn't mean to +laugh. Does it hurt much?" + +"No," said Len, staring fiercely at his scraped nose in the mirror. It +was throbbing like a gong. + +"That's good. It was the funniest thing--I mean funny-peculiar," she +clarified hastily. + + * * * * * + +Len stared at her; the whites of her eyes were showing: "Is there +anything the matter with you?" he demanded. + +"I don't know," she said on a rising note. "Nothing like that ever +happened to me before. I didn't think it was funny at all. I was +worried about you, and I didn't know I was going to laugh--" She +laughed again, a trifle nervously. "Maybe I'm cracking up." + +Moira was a dark-haired young woman with a placid, friendly +disposition. Len had met her in his senior year at Columbia, +with--looking at it impartially, which Len seldom did--regrettable +results. At present, in her seventh month, she was shaped like a +rather bosomy kewpie doll. + +_Emotional upsets_, he remembered, _may occur frequently during this +period_. He leaned to get past her belly and kissed her forgivingly. +"You're probably tired. Go sit down and I'll get you some coffee." + +Except that Moira had never had any hysterics till now, or morning +sickness, either--she burped instead--and anyhow, was there anything +in the literature about fits of giggling? + +After supper, he marked seventeen sets of papers desultorily in red +pencil, then got up to look for the baby book. There were four +dog-eared paperbound volumes with smiling infants' faces on the +covers, but the one he wanted wasn't there. He looked behind the +bookcase and on the wicker table beside it. "Moira!" + +"Hm?" + +"Where the devil is the other baby book?" + +"I've got it." + +Len went and looked over her shoulder. She was staring at a drawing of +a fetus lying in a sort of upside-down Yoga position inside a +cross-sectioned woman's body. + +"That's what he looks like," she said. "_Mama._" + +The diagram was of a fetus at term. + +"What was that about your mother?" Len asked, puzzled. + +"Don't be silly," she said abstractedly. + +He waited, but she didn't look up or turn the page. After a while, he +went back to his work. He watched her. + +Eventually she leafed through to the back of the book, read a few +pages, and put it down. She lighted a cigarette and immediately put it +out again. She fetched up a belch. + +"That was a good one," said Len admiringly. + +Moira sighed. + +Feeling tense, Len picked up his coffee cup and started toward the +kitchen. He halted beside Moira's chair. On the side table was her +after-dinner cup, still full of coffee ... black, scummed with oil +droplets, stone-cold. + +"Didn't you want your coffee?" he asked solicitously. + +She looked at the cup. "I did, but--" She paused and shook her head, +looking perplexed. + +"Well, do you want another cup now?" + +"Yes, please. _No._" + +Len, who had begun a step, rocked back on his heels. "Which, damn it?" + +Her face got all swollen. "Oh, Len, I'm so mixed up," she said, and +began to tremble. + +Len felt part of his irritation spilling over into protectiveness. +"What you need," he said firmly, "is a drink." + + * * * * * + +He climbed a stepladder to get at the top cabinet shelf which cached +their liquor when they had any. Small upstate towns and their school +boards being what they were, this was one of many necessary financial +precautions. + +Inspecting the doleful few fingers of whisky in the bottle, Len swore +under his breath. They couldn't afford a decent supply of booze or new +clothes for Moira. The original idea had been for Len to teach for a +year while they saved enough money so that he could go back for his +master's degree. More lately, this proving unlikely, they had merely +been trying to put aside enough for summer school, and even that was +beginning to look like the wildest optimism. + +High-school teachers without seniority weren't supposed to be married. + +Or graduate physics students, for that matter. + +He mixed two stiff highballs and carried them back into the living +room. "Here you are. Skoal." + +"Ah," she said appreciatively. "That tastes--_Ugh_." She set the glass +down and stared at it with her mouth half open. + +"What's the matter now?" + +She turned her head carefully, as if she were afraid it would come +off. "Len, I don't know. _Mama._" + +"That's the second time you've said that. What is this all--" + +"Said what?" + +"Mama. Look, kid, if you're--" + +"I didn't." She appeared a little feverish. + +"Sure you did," said Len reasonably. "Once when you were looking at +the baby book, and then again just now, after you said ugh to the +highball. Speaking of which--" + +"_Mama drink milk_," said Moira, speaking with exaggerated clarity. + +Moira hated milk. + +Len swallowed half his highball, turned and went silently into the +kitchen. + +When he came back with the milk, Moira looked at it as if it contained +a snake. "Len, I didn't say that." + +"Okay." + +"I didn't. I didn't say mama and I didn't say that about the milk." +Her voice quavered. "And I didn't laugh at you when you fell down." + +Len tried to be patient. "It was somebody else." + +"It _was_." She looked down at her gingham-covered bulge. "You won't +believe me. Put your hand there. No, a little lower." + +Under the cloth, her flesh was warm and solid against his palm. +"Kicks?" he inquired. + +"Not yet. Now," she said in a strained voice, "you in there--if you +want your milk, kick three times." + +Len opened his mouth and shut it again. Under his hand there were +three explicit kicks, one after the other. + +Moira closed her eyes, held her breath and drank the milk down in one +long horrid gulp. + + * * * * * + +"Once in a great while," Moira read, "cell cleavage will not have +followed the orderly pattern that produces a normal baby. In these +rare cases some parts of the body will develop excessively, while +others do not develop at all. This disorderly cell growth, which is +strikingly similar to the wild cell growth that we know as cancer--" +Her shoulders moved convulsively in a shudder. "_Bluh!_" + +"Why do you keep reading that stuff, if it makes you feel that way?" + +"I have to," she said absently. She picked up another book from the +stack. "There's a page missing." + +Len attacked the last of his medium-boiled egg in a noncommittal +manner. "It's a wonder it's held together this long," he said, which +was perfectly just. + +The book had had something spilled on it, partially dissolving the +glue, and was in an advanced state of anarchy. However, the fact was +that Len had torn out the page in question four nights ago, after +reading it carefully. The topic was "Psychoses in Pregnancy." + +Moira had now decided that the baby was male, that his name was +Leonardo (not referring to Len, but to da Vinci), that he had informed +her of these things along with a good many others, that he was keeping +her from her favorite foods and making her eat things she detested, +like liver and tripe, and that she had to read books of his choice all +day long in order to keep him from kicking. + +It was miserably hot. With Commencement only two weeks away, Len's +students were torpid and galvanic by turns. Then there was the matter +of his contract for next year, and the possible opening at Oster High +which would mean more money, and the Parent-Teachers thing tonight at +which Superintendent Greer and his wife would be regally present. + +Moira was knee-deep in Volume I of _Der Untergang des Abendlandes_, +moving her lips; an occasional guttural escaped her. + +Len cleared his throat. "Moy?" + +"--_und also des tragischen_--what in God's name does he mean by +that--? What, Len?" + +He made an irritated noise. "Why not try the English edition?" + +"Leo wants to learn German. What were you going to say?" + +Len closed his eyes for a moment. "About this PTA business--you sure +you want to go?" + +"Well, of course. It's pretty important, isn't it? Unless you think I +look too sloppy--" + +"No. No, damn it! But are you feeling up to it?" + +There were faint violet crescents under Moira's eyes; she had been +sleeping badly. "Sure," she said. + +"All right. And you'll go see the doctor tomorrow?" + +"I said I would." + +"And you won't say anything about Leo to Mrs. Greer or anybody?" + + * * * * * + +She looked slightly embarrassed. "Not till he's born, I think, don't +you? It would be an awful hard thing to prove--even you wouldn't have +believed me if you hadn't felt him kick." + +This experiment had not been repeated, though Len had asked often +enough. All little Leo had wanted, Moira said, was to establish +communication with his mother--he didn't seem to be interested in Len +at all. "Too young," she explained. + +And still--Len recalled the frogs his biology class had dissected last +semester. One of them had had two hearts. _This disorderly cell growth ... +like a cancer._ Unpredictable: extra fingers or toes or a double dose of +cortex? + +"And I'll burp like a lady, if at all," Moira assured him cheerfully +as they got ready to leave. + + * * * * * + +The room was empty, except for the ladies of the Committee, two +nervously smiling male teachers and the impressive bulk of +Superintendent Greer when the Conningtons arrived. Card-table legs +skreeked on the bare floor; the air was heavy with wood polish and +musk. + +Greer advanced, beaming fixedly. "Well, isn't this nice? How are you +young folks this warm evening?" + +"Oh, we thought we'd be earlier, Mr. Greer," said Moira with pretty +vexation. She looked surprisingly schoolgirlish and chic; the lump +that was Leo was hardly noticeable unless you caught her in profile. +"I'll go right now and help the ladies. There must be something I can +still do." + +"No, now, we won't hear of it. But I'll tell you what you can do--you +can go right over there and say hello to Mrs. Greer. I know she's +dying to sit down and have a good chat with you. Go ahead now, don't +worry about this husband of yours; I'll take care of him." + +Moira receded into a scattering of small shrieks of pleasure, at least +half of them arcing across a gap of mutual dislike. + +Greer, exhibiting perfect dentures, exhaled Listerine. His pink skin +looked not only scrubbed but disinfected; his gold-rimmed glasses +belonged in an optometrist's window, and his tropical suit had +obviously come straight from the cleaner's. It was impossible to think +of Greer unshaven, Greer smoking a cigar, Greer with a smudge of axle +grease on his forehead, or Greer making love to his wife. + +"Well, sir, this weather--" + +"When I think of what this valley was like twenty years ago--" + +"At today's prices--" + +Len listened with growing admiration, putting in comments where +required. He had never realized before that there were so many +absolutely neutral topics of conversation. + +A few more people straggled in, raising the room temperature about +half a degree per capita. Greer did not perspire; he merely glowed. + + * * * * * + +Across the room, Moira was now seated chummily with Mrs. Greer, a +large-bosomed woman in an outrageously unfashionable hat. Moira +appeared to be telling a joke; Len knew perfectly well that it was a +clean one, but he listened tensely, all the same, until he heard Mrs. +Greer yelp with laughter. Her voice carried well: "Oh, that's +_priceless_! Oh, dear, I _only_ hope I can remember it!" + +Len had resolutely not been thinking of ways to turn the conversation +toward the Oster vacancy. He stiffened again when he realized that +Greer had abruptly begun to talk shop. His heart began pounding +absurdly; Greer was asking highly pertinent questions in a +good-humored but businesslike way--drawing Len out, and not even +bothering to be the slightest bit Machiavellian about it. + +Len answered candidly, except when he was certain that he knew what +the Superintendent wanted to hear; then he lied like a Trojan. + +Mrs. Greer had conjured up a premature pot of tea and, oblivious of +the stares of the thirsty teachers present, she and Moira were hogging +it, heads together, as if they were plotting the overthrow of the +Republic or exchanging recipes. + +Greer listened attentively to Len's final reply, which was delivered +with as pious an air as if Len had been a Boy Scout swearing on the +Manual. But since the question had been "Do you plan to make teaching +your career?" there was not a word of truth in it. + +He then inspected his paunch and assumed a mild theatrical frown. Len, +with that social sixth sense which is unmistakable when it operates, +knew that his next words were going to be: "You may have heard that +Oster High will be needing a new science teacher next fall...." + +At this point Moira made a noise like a seal. + +The ensuing silence was broken a moment later by a hearty scream, +followed instantly by a clatter and a bone-shaking thud. + +Mrs. Greer was sitting on the floor, legs sprawled, hat over her eye. +She appeared to be attempting to perform some sort of excessively +pagan dance. + + * * * * * + +"It was Leo," Moira incoherently told Len at home. "You know she's +English--she said of course a cup of tea wouldn't hurt me, and she +insisted I go ahead and drink it while it was hot, and I couldn't--" + +"No, no--wait," said Len in a controlled fury. "What--" + +"So I _drank_ some. And Leo kicked up and made me burp the burp I was +saving. And--" + +"Oh, Lord!" + +"--then he kicked the teacup out of my hand into her lap, and I wish I +was _dead_!" + +[Illustration] + +On the following day, Len took Moira to the doctor's office, where +they read dog-eared copies of _The Rotarian_ and _Field and Stream_ +for an hour. + +Dr. Berry was a round little man with soulful eyes and a +twenty-four-hour bedside manner. On the walls of his office, where it +is customary for doctors to hang all sorts of diplomas and +certificates of membership, Berry had only three. The rest of the +space was filled with enlarged colored photographs of beautiful, +beautiful children. + +When Len followed Moira determinedly into the consulting room, Berry +looked mildly shocked for a moment, then apparently decided to carry +on as if nothing outré had happened. You could not say that he spoke, +or even whispered; he rustled. + +"Now, Mrs. Connington, we're looking just fine today. How have we been +feeling?" + +"Just fine. My husband thinks I'm insane." + +"That's g--Well, that's a funny thing for him to think, isn't it?" +Berry glanced at the wall midway between himself and Len, then +shuffled some file cards rather nervously. "Now. Have we had any +soreness in our stomach?" + +[Illustration] + +"Yes. He's been kicking me black and blue." + +Berry misinterpreted Moira's brooding glance at Len, and his eyebrows +twitched involuntarily. + +"The baby," said Len. "The _baby_ kicks her." + +Berry coughed. "Any headaches? Dizziness? Vomiting? Swelling in our +legs or ankles?" + +"No." + +"All rightie. Now let's just find out how much we've gained, and then +we'll get up on the examination table." + +Berry drew the sheet down over Moira's abdomen as if it were an +exceptionally fragile egg. He probed delicately with his fat +fingertips, then used the stethoscope. + +"Those X-rays," said Len. "Have they come back yet?" + +"Mm-hm," said Berry. "Yes, they have." He moved the stethoscope and +listened again. + +"Did they show anything unusual?" Len asked. + +Berry's eyebrows twitched a polite question. + +"We've been having a little argument," Moira said in a strained voice, +"about whether this is an ordinary baby or not." + +Berry took the stethoscope tubes away from his ears. He gazed at Moira +like an anxious spaniel. + +"Now let's not worry about _that_. We're going to have a perfectly +healthy wonderful baby, and if anybody tells us differently, why, +we'll just tell them to go jump in the lake, won't we?" + +"The baby is absolutely normal?" Len said in a marked manner. + +"Absolutely." Berry applied the stethoscope again. His face blanched. + +"What's the matter?" Len asked after a moment. + +The doctor's gaze was fixed and glassy. + +"Vagitus uterinus," Berry muttered. He pulled the stethoscope off +abruptly and stared at it. "No, of course it couldn't be. Now isn't +that a nuisance? We seem to be picking up a radio broadcast with our +little stethoscope here. I'll just go and get another instrument." + +Moira and Len exchanged glances. Moira's was almost excessively bland. + +Berry confidently came in with a new stethoscope, put the diaphragm +against Moira's belly, listened for an instant and twitched once all +over, as if his mainspring had snapped. Visibly jangling, he stepped +away from the table. His jaw worked several times before any sound +came out. + +"Excuse me," he said, and walked out in an uneven line. + +Len snatched up the instrument he had dropped. + +Like a bell ringing under water, muffled but clear, a tiny voice was +shouting: "_You bladder-headed pillpusher! You bedside vacuum! You +fifth-rate tree surgeon! You inflated--_" A pause. "_Is that you, +Connington? Get off the line; I haven't finished with Dr. Bedpan +yet._" + +Moira smiled, like a Buddha-shaped bomb. + +"Well?" she said. + + * * * * * + +"We've got to think," Len kept saying over and over. + +"_You've_ got to think." Moira was combing her hair, snapping the comb +smartly at the end of each stroke. "I've had plenty of time to think, +ever since it happened. When you catch up--" + +Len flung his tie at the carved wooden pineapple on the corner of the +footboard. "Moy, be _reasonable_. The chances against the kid kicking +three times in any one-minute period are only about one in a hundred. +The chances against anything like--" + +Moira grunted and stiffened for a moment. Then she cocked her head to +one side with a listening expression ... a new mannerism of hers that +was beginning to send intangible snakes crawling up Len's spine. + +"What now?" he asked sharply. + +"He says to keep our voices down. He's thinking." + +Len's fingers clenched convulsively, and a button flew off his shirt. +Shaking, he pulled his arms out of the sleeves and dropped the shirt +on the floor. "Look. I just want to get this straight. When he talks +to you, you don't hear him shouting all the way up past your liver and +lights. What--" + +"You know perfectly well he reads my mind." + +"That isn't the same as--" Len took a deep breath. "Let's not get off +on that. What I want to know is, what is it like? Do you seem to hear +a real voice, or do you just know what he's telling you, without +knowing how you know?" + +Moira put the comb down in order to think better. "It isn't like +hearing a voice. You'd never confuse one with the other. It's +more--the nearest I can come to it, it's like remembering a voice. +Except that you don't know what's coming." + +Len picked his tie off the floor and abstractedly began knotting it on +his bare chest. "And he sees what you see, he knows what you're +thinking, he can hear when people talk to you?" + +"Of course." + +"This is tremendous!" Len began to blunder around the bed-room, not +looking where he was going. "They thought Macaulay was a genius. This +kid isn't even born. I _heard_ him. He was cussing Berry out like +Monty Woolley." + +"He had me reading _The Man Who Came to Dinner_ two days ago." + +Len made his way around a small bedside table by trial and error. +"That's another thing. How much could you say about his--his +personality? I mean does he seem to know what he's doing, or is he +just striking out wildly in all directions?" He paused. "Are you sure +he's really conscious at all?" + + * * * * * + +Moira began, "That's a silly--" and stopped. "Define consciousness," +she said doubtfully. + +"All right, what I really mean--_why_ am I wearing this necktie?" He +ripped it off and threw it over a lampshade. "What I mean--" + +"Are you sure you're really conscious?" + +"Okay. You make joke, I laugh, ha-ha. What I'm trying to ask is, have +you seen any evidence of creative thought, organized thought, or is he +just--integrating, along the lines of--of instinctive responses? Do +you--" + +"I know what you mean. Shut up a minute.... I don't know." + +"I mean is he awake, or asleep and dreaming about us, like the Red +King?" + +"I don't _know_!" + +"And if that's it, what'll happen when he wakes up?" + +Moira took off her robe, folded it neatly, and maneuvered herself +between the sheets. "Come to bed." + +Len got one sock off before another thought struck him. "He reads your +mind. Can he read other people's?" He looked appalled. "Can he read +mine?" + +"He doesn't. Whether it's because he can't, I don't know. I think he +just doesn't care." + +Len pulled the other sock halfway down and left it there. In a stiffer +tone, he said, "One of the things he doesn't care about is whether I +have a job." + +"No. He thought it was funny. I wanted to sink through the floor, but +I had all I could do to keep from laughing when she fell down.... Len, +what are we going to do?" + +He swiveled around and looked at her. + +"Look," he said, "I didn't mean to sound that gloomy. We'll do +something. We'll fix it. Really." + +"I hope so." + +Careful of his elbows and knees, Len climbed into the bed beside her. +"Okay now?" + +"Mm.... Ugh." Moira tried to sit up suddenly, and almost made it. She +wound up propped on one elbow, and said indignantly, "Oh, no!" + +Len stared at her in the dimness. "What--?" + +She grunted again. "Len, get up. All _right_. Len, _hurry_!" + +Len fought his way convulsively past a treacherous sheet and staggered +up, goose-pimpled and tense. "What's wrong?" + +"You'll have to sleep on the couch. The sheets are in the bottom--" + +"On that couch? Are you crazy?" + +"I can't help it," she said in a small faint voice. "Please don't +let's argue. You'll just have to." + +"_Why?_" + +"We can't sleep in the same bed," she wailed. "He says +it's--oh!--unhygienic!" + + * * * * * + +Len's contract was not renewed. He got a job waiting on tables in a +resort hotel, an occupation which pays more money than teaching future +citizens the rudiments of three basic sciences, but for which Len had +no aptitude. He lasted three days at it; he was then idle for a week +and a half until his four years of college physics earned him +employment as a clerk in an electrical shop. His employer was a +cheerfully aggressive man who assured Len that there were great +opportunities in radio and television, and firmly believed that +atom-bomb tests were causing all the bad weather. + +Moira, in her eighth month, walked to the county library every day and +trundled a load of books home in the perambulator. Little Leo, it +appeared, was working his way simultaneously through biology, +astrophysics, phrenology, chemical engineering, architecture, +Christian Science, psychosomatic medicine, marine law; business +management, Yoga, crystallography, metaphysics and modern literature. + +His domination of Moira's life remained absolute, and his experiments +with her regimen continued. One week, she ate nothing but nuts and +fruit, washed down with distilled water; the next, she was on a diet +of porterhouse steak, dandelion greens and Hadacol. + +With the coming of full summer, fortunately, few of the high school +staff were in evidence. Len met Dr. Berry once on the street. Berry +started, twitched, and walked off rapidly in an entirely new +direction. + +[Illustration] + +The diabolical event was due on or about July 29th. Len crossed off +each day on their wall calendar with an emphatic black grease pencil. +It would, he supposed, be an uncomfortable thing at best to be the +parent of a super-prodigy. Leo would no doubt be dictator of the world +by the time he was fifteen, unless he would be assassinated first, but +almost anything would be a fair price for getting Leo out of his +maternal fortress. + +Then there was the day when Len came home to find Moira weeping over +the typewriter, with a half-inch stack of manuscript beside her. + +"It isn't anything. I'm just tired. He started this after lunch. +Look." + +Len turned the face-down sheaf the right way up. + + Droning. Abrasing + the demiurge. + Hier begrimms the tale: + Eyes undotted, grewling + and looking, turns off + a larm, seizes cloes. + Stewed Bierly a wretch + Pence, therefore tchews we. Pons! + Let the pants take air of themsulves. + + * * * * * + +The first three sheets were all like that. The fourth was a perfectly +good Petrarchian sonnet reviling the current administration and the +political party of which Len was a registration-day member. + +The fifth was hand-lettered in the Cyrillic alphabet and illustrated +with geometric diagrams. Len put it down and stared shakily at Moira. + +"No, go on," she said, "read the rest." + +The sixth and seventh were obscene limericks; and the eighth, ninth +and so on to the end of the stack were what looked like the first +chapters of a rattling good historical adventure novel. + +Its chief characters were Cyrus the Great, his jaunty-bosomed daughter +Lygea, of whom Len had never previously heard, and a one-armed +Graeco-Mede adventurer named Xanthes. There were also courtesans, +spies, apparitions, scullery slaves, oracles, cutthroats, lepers, +priests and men-at-arms in magnificent profusion. + +"He's decided," said Moira, "what he wants to be when he's born." + +Leo refused to bothered with mundane details. When there were eighty +pages of the manuscript, it was Moira who invented a title and by-line +for it--_The Virgin of Persepolis_ by Leon Lenn--and mailed it off to +a literary agent in New York. His response, a week later, was +cautiously enthusiastic. He asked for an outline of the remainder of +the novel. + +Moira replied that this was impossible, trying to sound as unworldly +and impenetrably artistic as she could. She enclosed the thirty-odd +pages Leo had turned out through her in the meantime. + +Nothing was heard from the agent for two weeks. At the end of this +time, Moira received an astonishing document, exquisitely printed and +bound in imitation leather, thirty-two pages including the index, +containing three times as many clauses as a lease. + +This turned out to be a book contract. With it came the agent's check +for nine hundred dollars. + + * * * * * + +Len tilted his mop-handle against the wall and straightened carefully, +conscious of every individual gritty muscle in his back. How did women +do housework every day, seven days a week, fifty-two goddam weeks a +year? + +It was a little cooler now that the Sun was down, and he was working +stripped to shorts and bath slippers; but he might as well have been +wearing an overcoat in a Turkish bath. + +The faint whisper of Moira's monstrous new electrical typewriter +stopped, leaving a fainter hum. Len went into the living room and +sagged on the arm of a chair. Moira, gleaming sweatily in a flowered +housecoat, was lighting a cigarette. + +"How's it going?" he asked, hoping for an answer. He hadn't always +received one. + +She switched off the machine wearily. "Page two-eighty-nine. Xanthes +killed Anaxander." + +"Thought he would. How about Ganesh and Zeuxias?" + +"I don't know." She frowned. "I can't figure it out. You know who it +was that raped Marianne in the garden?" + +"No, who?" + +"Ganesh." + +"You're kidding!" + +"Nope." She pointed to the stack of typescript. "See for yourself." + +Len didn't move. "But Ganesh was in Lydia, buying back the sapphire. +He didn't return till--" + +"I know, I know. But he _wasn't_. That was Zeuxias in a putty nose +with his beard dyed. It's all perfectly logical, the way Leo explains +it. Zeuxias overheard Ganesh talking to the three Mongols--you +remember, Ganesh thought there was somebody behind the curtain, only +that was when they heard Lygea scream, and while their backs were +turned--" + +"All right. But for God's sake, this fouls everything up. If Ganesh +never went to Lydia, then he _couldn't_ have had anything to do +distempering Cyrus's armor. And Zeuxias couldn't, either, because--" + +"It's exasperating. I know he's going to pull another rabbit out of +the hat and clear everything up, but I don't see how." + +Len brooded. "It beats me. It had to be either Ganesh or Zeuxias. Or +Philomenes, though that doesn't seem possible. Look, damn it, if +Zeuxias knew about the sapphire all the time, that rules out +Philomenes once and for all. Unless--no. I forgot about that business +in the temple. Umm. Do you think Leo really knows what he's doing?" + +"I'm certain. Lately I've been able to tell what he's thinking even +when he isn't talking to me. I mean just generally, like when he's +puzzling over something, or when he's feeling mean. It's going to be +something brilliant and he knows what it is, but he won't tell me. +We'll just have to wait." + +"I guess so." Len stood up, grunting. "You want me to see if there's +anything in the pot?" + +"Please." + +Len wandered into the kitchen, turned the flame on under the silex, +stared briefly at the dishes waiting in the sink, and wandered out +again. Since the onslaught of The Novel, Leo had relinquished his +interest in Moira's diet, and she had been living on coffee. Small +blessings.... + + * * * * * + +Moira was leaning back with her eyes closed, looking very tired. +"How's the money?" she asked without moving. + +"Lousy. We're down to twenty-one bucks." + +She raised her head and opened her eyes wide. "We couldn't be! Len, +how could anybody go through nine hundred dollars that fast?" + +"Typewriter. And the dictaphone that Leo thought he wanted, till about +half an hour after it was paid for. We spent less than fifty on +ourselves, I think. Rent. Groceries. It goes, when there isn't any +coming in." + +She sighed. "I thought it would last longer." + +"So did I. If he doesn't finish this thing in a few days, I'll have to +go look for work again." + +"Oh. That isn't so good. How am I going to take care of the house and +do Leo's writing for him?" + +"I know, but--" + +"All right. If it works out, fine. If it doesn't--he must be near the +end by now." She stubbed out her cigarette abruptly and sat up, hands +over the keyboard. "He's getting ready again. See about that coffee, +will you? I'm half dead." + +Len poured two cups and carried them in. Moira was still sitting +poised in front of the typewriter, with a curious half-formed +expression on her face. + +Abruptly the carriage whipped over, muttered to itself briefly and +thumped the paper up twice. Then it stopped. Moira's eyes got bigger +and rounder. + +"What's the matter?" said Len. He looked over her shoulder. + +The last line on the page read: + +TO BE CONTINUED IN OUR NEXT + +Moira's hands curled into small helpless fists. After a moment, she +turned off the machine. + +"What?" said Len incredulously. "To be continued--what kind of talk is +that?" + +"He says he's bored with the novel," Moira replied dully. "He says he +knows the ending, so it's artistically complete; it doesn't matter +whether anybody else thinks so or not." She paused. "But he says that +isn't the real reason." + +"Well?" + +"He's got two reasons. One is that he doesn't want to finish the book +till he's certain he'll have complete control of the money it earns." + +"Yes," said Len, swallowing a lump of anger, "that makes a certain +amount of sense. It's his book. If he wants guarantees...." + +"You haven't heard the other one." + +"All right, let's have it." + +"He wants to teach us--so we'll never forget--who the boss is in this +family." + + * * * * * + +"Len, I'm awfully tired," Moira complained piteously, late that night. + +"Let's just go over it once more. There has to be some way. He still +isn't talking to you?" + +"I haven't felt anything from him for the last twenty minutes. I think +he's asleep." + +"All right, let's suppose he _isn't_ going to listen to reason--" + +"I think we'd better." + +Len made an incoherent noise. "Well, okay. I still don't see why we +can't write the last chapter ourselves. It'd only be a few pages." + +"Go ahead and try." + +"Not me. You've done a little writing. Damned good, too. And if you're +so sure all the clues are there--Look, if you say you can't do it, all +right, we'll hire somebody. A professional writer. It happens all the +time. Thorne Smith's last novel--" + +"It wasn't Thorne Smith's and it wasn't a novel," she said +dogmatically. + +"But it sold. What one writer starts, another can finish." + +"Nobody ever finished _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_." + +"Oh, hell." + +"Len, it's impossible. It is! Let me finish--if you're thinking we +could have somebody rewrite the last part Leo did--" + +"Yeah, I just thought of that." + +"--even that wouldn't do any good. You'd have to go all the way back, +almost to page one. It would be another story when you got through. +Let's go to bed." + +"Moy, do you remember when we used to worry about the law of +opposites?" + +"Mm?" + +"The law of _opposites_. When we used to be afraid the kid would turn +out to be a pick-and-shovel man with a pointy head." + +"Uh. Mm." + +He turned. Moira was standing with one hand on her belly and the other +behind her back. She looked as if she were about to start practicing a +low bow and doubted she could make it. + +"What's the matter now?" he asked. + +"Pain in the small of my back." + +"Bad one?" + +"No...." + +"Belly hurt, too?" + +She frowned. "Don't be foolish. I'm feeling for the contraction. There +it comes." + +"The--but you just said the small of your back." + +"Where do you think labor pains usually start?" + + * * * * * + +The pains were coming at twenty-minute intervals and the taxi had not +arrived. Moira was packed and ready. Len was trying to set her a good +example by remaining calm. He strolled over to the wall calendar, +gazed at it in an offhand manner, and turned away. + +"Len, I know it's only the fifteenth of July," she said impatiently. + +"Huh? I didn't say anything about that." + +"You said it seven times. Sit down. You're making me nervous." + +Len perched on the corner of the table, folded his arms, and +immediately got up to look out the window. On the way back, he circled +the table in an aimless way, picked up a bottle of ink and shook it to +see if the cap was on tight, stumbled over a wastebasket, carefully +up-ended it, and sat down with an air of _Ici je suis, ici je reste_. + +"Nothing to worry about," he said firmly. "Women have kids all the +time." + +"True." + +"What for?" he demanded violently. + +Moira grinned at him, then winced slightly and looked at the clock. +"Eighteen minutes this time. They're getting closer." + +When she relaxed, Len put a cigarette in his mouth and lighted it in +only two tries. "How's Leo taking it?" + +"Isn't saying. He feels--" she concentrated--"apprehensive. He tells +me he's feeling strange and he doesn't like it. I don't think he's +entirely awake. Funny--" + +"I'm glad this is happening now," Len announced. + +"So am I, but--" + +"Look," said Len, moving energetically to the arm of her chair. "We've +always had it pretty good, haven't we? Not that it hasn't been tough +at times, but--you know." + +"I know." + +"Well, that's the way it'll be again, once this is over. I don't care +how much of a superbrain he is, once he's born--you know what I mean? +The only reason he's had the edge on us all this time is he could get +at us and we couldn't get at him. If he's got the mind of an adult, he +can learn to act like one. It's that simple." + +Moira hesitated. "You can't take him out to the woodshed. He's going +to be a helpless baby, physically, like anybody else's. He has to be +taken care of." + +"All right, there are plenty of other ways. If he behaves, he gets +read to. Things like that." + +"That's right, but there's one other thing I thought of. You remember +when you said suppose he's asleep and dreaming, and what happens if he +wakes up?" + +"Yeah." + +"That reminded me of something else, or maybe it's the same thing. Did +you know that a fetus in the womb only gets about half the amount of +oxygen in his blood that he'll have when he starts to breathe?" + +Len looked thoughtful. "I forgot. Well, that's just one more thing Leo +does that babies aren't supposed to do." + +"Use as much energy as he does, you mean. What I'm getting at is, it +can't be because he's getting more than the normal amount of oxygen, +can it? I mean he's the prodigy, not me. He must be using it more +efficiently. And if that's it, what will happen when he gets twice as +much?" + + * * * * * + +They had prepared and disinfected her, along with other indignities, +and now she could see herself in the reflector of the big +delivery-table light--the image clear and bright, like everything +else, but very haloed and swimmy, and looking like a bad statue of +Sita. She had no idea how long she had been here--that was the dope, +probably--but she was getting pretty tired. + +"Bear down," said the staff doctor kindly, and before she could +answer, the pain came up like violins and she had to gulp at the +tingly coldness of laughing gas. + +When the mask lifted, she said, "I _am_ bearing down," but the doctor +had gone back to work and wasn't listening. + +Anyhow, she had Leo. _How are you feeling?_ + +His answer was muddled--because of the anesthetic?--but she didn't +really need it. Her perception of him was clear: darkness and +pressure, impatience, a slow Satanic anger ... and something else. +Uncertainty? Dread? + +"Two or three more ought to do it. Bear down." + +Fear. Unmistakable now. And a desperate determination-- + +"Doctor, he doesn't want to be born!" + +"Seems that way sometimes, doesn't it? Now bear down good and hard." + +_Tell him stop blurrrr too dangerrrr stop I feel worrrr stop I +tellrrrr stop_ + +"What, Leo? What?" + +"Bear down," the doctor said abstractedly. + +Faintly, like a voice under water, gasping before it drowns: _Hurry I +hate you tell him sealed incubator tenth oxygen nine-tenths inert +gases hurry hurry hurry_ + +"An incubator!" she panted. "He'll need an incubator ... to live ... +won't he?" + +"Not this baby. A fine, normal, healthy one." + +_He's idiot lying stupid fool need incubator tenth oxygen tenth tenth +hurry before it's_ + +The pressure abruptly ceased. + +Leo was born. + +The doctor was holding him up by the heels, red, wrinkled, puny. But +the voice was still there, very small, very far away: _Too late same +as death_ + +Then a hint of the old cold arrogance: _Now you'll never know who +killed Cyrus._ + +The doctor slapped him smartly on the minuscule behind. The wizened, +malevolent face writhed open, but it was only the angry squall of an +ordinary infant that came out. + +Leo was gone, like a light turned off beneath the measureless ocean. + +Moira raised her head weakly. + +"Give him one for me," she said. + + --DAMON KNIGHT + + * * * * * + + + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's Special Delivery, by Damon Francis Knight + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPECIAL DELIVERY *** + +***** This file should be named 32011-8.txt or 32011-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/2/0/1/32011/ + +Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Special Delivery + +Author: Damon Francis Knight + +Illustrator: Ashman + +Release Date: April 16, 2010 [EBook #32011] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPECIAL DELIVERY *** + + + + +Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + + + + + +</pre> + + +<div class="tr"><p class="center">Transcriber's Note:</p> +<p class="center">This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.</p></div> +<p> </p> + +<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"> +<img class="img1" src="images/cover.jpg" width="400" height="533" alt="" title="" /> +</div> +<p> </p> + +<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"> +<img src="images/image_001.jpg" width="600" height="382" alt="" title="" /> +</div> +<p> </p> + +<h1><i>Special Delivery</i></h1> +<p> </p> +<h2>By DAMON KNIGHT</h2> +<p> </p> +<h3>Illustrated by ASHMAN</h3> +<p> </p> +<div class="blockquot"><p><i>All Len had to hear was the old gag: "We've never lost a +father yet." His child was not even born and it was +thoroughly unbearable!</i></p></div> + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_l1.jpg" alt="L" width="42" height="50" /></div> +<p>en and Moira Connington lived in a rented cottage with a small yard, +a smaller garden, and too many fir trees. The lawn, which Len seldom +had time to mow, was full of weeds, and the garden was overgrown with +blackberry brambles. The house itself was clean and smelled better +than most city apartments, and Moira kept geraniums in the windows.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"> +<img src="images/image_002.jpg" width="400" height="506" alt="" title="" /> +</div> + +<p>However, it was dark on account of the firs. Approaching the door one +late spring afternoon, Len tripped on an unnoticed flagstone and +scattered examination papers all the way to the porch.</p> + +<p>When he picked himself up, Moira was giggling in the doorway. "That +was funny."</p> + +<p>"The hell it was," said Len. "I banged my nose." He picked up his +Chemistry B papers in a stiff silence. A red drop fell on the last +one. "<i>Damn</i> it!"</p> + +<p>Moira held the screen door for him, looking contrite and faintly +surprised. She followed him into the bathroom. "Len, I didn't mean to +laugh. Does it hurt much?"</p> + +<p>"No," said Len, staring fiercely at his scraped nose in the mirror. It +was throbbing like a gong.</p> + +<p>"That's good. It was the funniest thing—I mean funny-peculiar," she +clarified hastily.</p> + +<hr style="width: 45%;" /> +<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_l.jpg" alt="L" width="33" height="40" /></div> +<p>en stared at her; the whites of her eyes were showing: "Is there +anything the matter with you?" he demanded.</p> + +<p>"I don't know," she said on a rising note. "Nothing like that ever +happened to me before. I didn't think it was funny at all. I was +worried about you, and I didn't know I was going to laugh—" She +laughed again, a trifle nervously. "Maybe I'm cracking up."</p> + +<p>Moira was a dark-haired young woman with a placid, friendly +disposition. Len had met her in his senior year at Columbia, +with—looking at it impartially, which Len seldom did—regrettable +results. At present, in her seventh month, she was shaped like a +rather bosomy kewpie doll.</p> + +<p><i>Emotional upsets</i>, he remembered, <i>may occur frequently during this +period</i>. He leaned to get past her belly and kissed her forgivingly. +"You're probably tired. Go sit down and I'll get you some coffee."</p> + +<p>Except that Moira had never had any hysterics till now, or morning +sickness, either—she burped instead—and anyhow, was there anything +in the literature about fits of giggling?</p> + +<p>After supper, he marked seventeen sets of papers desultorily in red +pencil, then got up to look for the baby book. There were four +dog-eared paperbound volumes with smiling infants' faces on the +covers, but the one he wanted wasn't there. He looked behind the +bookcase and on the wicker table beside it. "Moira!"</p> + +<p>"Hm?"</p> + +<p>"Where the devil is the other baby book?"</p> + +<p>"I've got it."</p> + +<p>Len went and looked over her shoulder. She was staring at a drawing of +a fetus lying in a sort of upside-down Yoga position inside a +cross-sectioned woman's body.</p> + +<p>"That's what he looks like," she said. "<i>Mama.</i>"</p> + +<p>The diagram was of a fetus at term.</p> + +<p>"What was that about your mother?" Len asked, puzzled.</p> + +<p>"Don't be silly," she said abstractedly.</p> + +<p>He waited, but she didn't look up or turn the page. After a while, he +went back to his work. He watched her.</p> + +<p>Eventually she leafed through to the back of the book, read a few +pages, and put it down. She lighted a cigarette and immediately put it +out again. She fetched up a belch.</p> + +<p>"That was a good one," said Len admiringly.</p> + +<p>Moira sighed.</p> + +<p>Feeling tense, Len picked up his coffee cup and started toward the +kitchen. He halted beside Moira's chair. On the side table was her +after-dinner cup, still full of coffee ... black, scummed with oil +droplets, stone-cold.</p> + +<p>"Didn't you want your coffee?" he asked solicitously.</p> + +<p>She looked at the cup. "I did, but—" She paused and shook her head, +looking perplexed.</p> + +<p>"Well, do you want another cup now?"</p> + +<p>"Yes, please. <i>No.</i>"</p> + +<p>Len, who had begun a step, rocked back on his heels. "Which, damn it?"</p> + +<p>Her face got all swollen. "Oh, Len, I'm so mixed up," she said, and +began to tremble.</p> + +<p>Len felt part of his irritation spilling over into protectiveness. +"What you need," he said firmly, "is a drink."</p> + +<hr style="width: 45%;" /> +<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_h.jpg" alt="H" width="41" height="40" /></div> +<p>e climbed a stepladder to get at the top cabinet shelf which cached +their liquor when they had any. Small upstate towns and their school +boards being what they were, this was one of many necessary financial +precautions.</p> + +<p>Inspecting the doleful few fingers of whisky in the bottle, Len swore +under his breath. They couldn't afford a decent supply of booze or new +clothes for Moira. The original idea had been for Len to teach for a +year while they saved enough money so that he could go back for his +master's degree. More lately, this proving unlikely, they had merely +been trying to put aside enough for summer school, and even that was +beginning to look like the wildest optimism.</p> + +<p>High-school teachers without seniority weren't supposed to be married.</p> + +<p>Or graduate physics students, for that matter.</p> + +<p>He mixed two stiff highballs and carried them back into the living +room. "Here you are. Skoal."</p> + +<p>"Ah," she said appreciatively. "That tastes—<i>Ugh</i>." She set the glass +down and stared at it with her mouth half open.</p> + +<p>"What's the matter now?"</p> + +<p>She turned her head carefully, as if she were afraid it would come +off. "Len, I don't know. <i>Mama.</i>"</p> + +<p>"That's the second time you've said that. What is this all—"</p> + +<p>"Said what?"</p> + +<p>"Mama. Look, kid, if you're—"</p> + +<p>"I didn't." She appeared a little feverish.</p> + +<p>"Sure you did," said Len reasonably. "Once when you were looking at +the baby book, and then again just now, after you said ugh to the +highball. Speaking of which—"</p> + +<p>"<i>Mama drink milk</i>," said Moira, speaking with exaggerated clarity.</p> + +<p>Moira hated milk.</p> + +<p>Len swallowed half his highball, turned and went silently into the +kitchen.</p> + +<p>When he came back with the milk, Moira looked at it as if it contained +a snake. "Len, I didn't say that."</p> + +<p>"Okay."</p> + +<p>"I didn't. I didn't say mama and I didn't say that about the milk." +Her voice quavered. "And I didn't laugh at you when you fell down."</p> + +<p>Len tried to be patient. "It was somebody else."</p> + +<p>"It <i>was</i>." She looked down at her gingham-covered bulge. "You won't +believe me. Put your hand there. No, a little lower."</p> + +<p>Under the cloth, her flesh was warm and solid against his palm. +"Kicks?" he inquired.</p> + +<p>"Not yet. Now," she said in a strained voice, "you in there—if you +want your milk, kick three times."</p> + +<p>Len opened his mouth and shut it again. Under his hand there were +three explicit kicks, one after the other.</p> + +<p>Moira closed her eyes, held her breath and drank the milk down in one +long horrid gulp.</p> + +<hr style="width: 45%;" /> +<div class="figleft1"><img src="images/image_o1.jpg" alt="O" width="47" height="40" /></div> +<p>nce in a great while," Moira read, "cell cleavage will not have +followed the orderly pattern that produces a normal baby. In these +rare cases some parts of the body will develop excessively, while +others do not develop at all. This disorderly cell growth, which is +strikingly similar to the wild cell growth that we know as cancer—" +Her shoulders moved convulsively in a shudder. "<i>Bluh!</i>"</p> + +<p>"Why do you keep reading that stuff, if it makes you feel that way?"</p> + +<p>"I have to," she said absently. She picked up another book from the +stack. "There's a page missing."</p> + +<p>Len attacked the last of his medium-boiled egg in a noncommittal +manner. "It's a wonder it's held together this long," he said, which +was perfectly just.</p> + +<p>The book had had something spilled on it, partially dissolving the +glue, and was in an advanced state of anarchy. However, the fact was +that Len had torn out the page in question four nights ago, after +reading it carefully. The topic was "Psychoses in Pregnancy."</p> + +<p>Moira had now decided that the baby was male, that his name was +Leonardo (not referring to Len, but to da Vinci), that he had informed +her of these things along with a good many others, that he was keeping +her from her favorite foods and making her eat things she detested, +like liver and tripe, and that she had to read books of his choice all +day long in order to keep him from kicking.</p> + +<p>It was miserably hot. With Commencement only two weeks away, Len's +students were torpid and galvanic by turns. Then there was the matter +of his contract for next year, and the possible opening at Oster High +which would mean more money, and the Parent-Teachers thing tonight at +which Superintendent Greer and his wife would be regally present.</p> + +<p>Moira was knee-deep in Volume I of <i>Der Untergang des Abendlandes</i>, +moving her lips; an occasional guttural escaped her.</p> + +<p>Len cleared his throat. "Moy?"</p> + +<p>"—<i>und also des tragischen</i>—what in God's name does he mean by +that—? What, Len?"</p> + +<p>He made an irritated noise. "Why not try the English edition?"</p> + +<p>"Leo wants to learn German. What were you going to say?"</p> + +<p>Len closed his eyes for a moment. "About this PTA business—you sure +you want to go?"</p> + +<p>"Well, of course. It's pretty important, isn't it? Unless you think I +look too sloppy—"</p> + +<p>"No. No, damn it! But are you feeling up to it?"</p> + +<p>There were faint violet crescents under Moira's eyes; she had been +sleeping badly. "Sure," she said.</p> + +<p>"All right. And you'll go see the doctor tomorrow?"</p> + +<p>"I said I would."</p> + +<p>"And you won't say anything about Leo to Mrs. Greer or anybody?"</p> + +<hr style="width: 45%;" /> +<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_s.jpg" alt="S" width="26" height="40" /></div> +<p>he looked slightly embarrassed. "Not till he's born, I think, don't +you? It would be an awful hard thing to prove—even you wouldn't have +believed me if you hadn't felt him kick."</p> + +<p>This experiment had not been repeated, though Len had asked often +enough. All little Leo had wanted, Moira said, was to establish +communication with his mother—he didn't seem to be interested in Len +at all. "Too young," she explained.</p> + +<p>And still—Len recalled the frogs his biology class had dissected last +semester. One of them had had two hearts. <i>This disorderly cell growth ... +like a cancer.</i> Unpredictable: extra fingers or toes or a double dose of +cortex?</p> + +<p>"And I'll burp like a lady, if at all," Moira assured him cheerfully +as they got ready to leave.</p> + +<hr style="width: 45%;" /> +<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_t.jpg" alt="T" width="36" height="40" /></div> +<p>he room was empty, except for the ladies of the Committee, two +nervously smiling male teachers and the impressive bulk of +Superintendent Greer when the Conningtons arrived. Card-table legs +skreeked on the bare floor; the air was heavy with wood polish and +musk.</p> + +<p>Greer advanced, beaming fixedly. "Well, isn't this nice? How are you +young folks this warm evening?"</p> + +<p>"Oh, we thought we'd be earlier, Mr. Greer," said Moira with pretty +vexation. She looked surprisingly schoolgirlish and chic; the lump +that was Leo was hardly noticeable unless you caught her in profile. +"I'll go right now and help the ladies. There must be something I can +still do."</p> + +<p>"No, now, we won't hear of it. But I'll tell you what you can do—you +can go right over there and say hello to Mrs. Greer. I know she's +dying to sit down and have a good chat with you. Go ahead now, don't +worry about this husband of yours; I'll take care of him."</p> + +<p>Moira receded into a scattering of small shrieks of pleasure, at least +half of them arcing across a gap of mutual dislike.</p> + +<p>Greer, exhibiting perfect dentures, exhaled Listerine. His pink skin +looked not only scrubbed but disinfected; his gold-rimmed glasses +belonged in an optometrist's window, and his tropical suit had +obviously come straight from the cleaner's. It was impossible to think +of Greer unshaven, Greer smoking a cigar, Greer with a smudge of axle +grease on his forehead, or Greer making love to his wife.</p> + +<p>"Well, sir, this weather—"</p> + +<p>"When I think of what this valley was like twenty years ago—"</p> + +<p>"At today's prices—"</p> + +<p>Len listened with growing admiration, putting in comments where +required. He had never realized before that there were so many +absolutely neutral topics of conversation.</p> + +<p>A few more people straggled in, raising the room temperature about +half a degree per capita. Greer did not perspire; he merely glowed.</p> + +<hr style="width: 45%;" /> +<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_a.jpg" alt="A" width="37" height="40" /></div> +<p>cross the room, Moira was now seated chummily with Mrs. Greer, a +large-bosomed woman in an outrageously unfashionable hat. Moira +appeared to be telling a joke; Len knew perfectly well that it was a +clean one, but he listened tensely, all the same, until he heard Mrs. +Greer yelp with laughter. Her voice carried well: "Oh, that's +<i>priceless</i>! Oh, dear, I <i>only</i> hope I can remember it!"</p> + +<p>Len had resolutely not been thinking of ways to turn the conversation +toward the Oster vacancy. He stiffened again when he realized that +Greer had abruptly begun to talk shop. His heart began pounding +absurdly; Greer was asking highly pertinent questions in a +good-humored but businesslike way—drawing Len out, and not even +bothering to be the slightest bit Machiavellian about it.</p> + +<p>Len answered candidly, except when he was certain that he knew what +the Superintendent wanted to hear; then he lied like a Trojan.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Greer had conjured up a premature pot of tea and, oblivious of +the stares of the thirsty teachers present, she and Moira were hogging +it, heads together, as if they were plotting the overthrow of the +Republic or exchanging recipes.</p> + +<p>Greer listened attentively to Len's final reply, which was delivered +with as pious an air as if Len had been a Boy Scout swearing on the +Manual. But since the question had been "Do you plan to make teaching +your career?" there was not a word of truth in it.</p> + +<p>He then inspected his paunch and assumed a mild theatrical frown. Len, +with that social sixth sense which is unmistakable when it operates, +knew that his next words were going to be: "You may have heard that +Oster High will be needing a new science teacher next fall...."</p> + +<p>At this point Moira made a noise like a seal.</p> + +<p>The ensuing silence was broken a moment later by a hearty scream, +followed instantly by a clatter and a bone-shaking thud.</p> + +<p>Mrs. Greer was sitting on the floor, legs sprawled, hat over her eye. +She appeared to be attempting to perform some sort of excessively +pagan dance.</p> + +<hr style="width: 45%;" /> +<div class="figleft1"><img src="images/image_i1.jpg" alt="I" width="35" height="40" /></div> +<p>t was Leo," Moira incoherently told Len at home. "You know she's +English—she said of course a cup of tea wouldn't hurt me, and she +insisted I go ahead and drink it while it was hot, and I couldn't—"</p> + +<p>"No, no—wait," said Len in a controlled fury. "What—"</p> + +<p>"So I <i>drank</i> some. And Leo kicked up and made me burp the burp I was +saving. And—"</p> + +<p>"Oh, Lord!"</p> + +<p>"—then he kicked the teacup out of my hand into her lap, and I wish I +was <i>dead</i>!"</p> + +<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"> +<img src="images/image_003.jpg" width="600" height="547" alt="" title="" /> +</div> + +<p>On the following day, Len took Moira to the doctor's office, where +they read dog-eared copies of <i>The Rotarian</i> and <i>Field and Stream</i> +for an hour.</p> + +<p>Dr. Berry was a round little man with soulful eyes and a +twenty-four-hour bedside manner. On the walls of his office, where it +is customary for doctors to hang all sorts of diplomas and +certificates of membership, Berry had only three. The rest of the +space was filled with enlarged colored photographs of beautiful, +beautiful children.</p> + +<p>When Len followed Moira determinedly into the consulting room, Berry +looked mildly shocked for a moment, then apparently decided to carry +on as if nothing outré had happened. You could not say that he spoke, +or even whispered; he rustled.</p> + +<p>"Now, Mrs. Connington, we're looking just fine today. How have we been +feeling?"</p> + +<p>"Just fine. My husband thinks I'm insane."</p> + +<p>"That's g—Well, that's a funny thing for him to think, isn't it?" +Berry glanced at the wall midway between himself and Len, then +shuffled some file cards rather nervously. "Now. Have we had any +soreness in our stomach?"</p> + +<p>"Yes. He's been kicking me black and blue."</p> + +<p>Berry misinterpreted Moira's brooding glance at Len, and his eyebrows +twitched involuntarily.</p> + +<p>"The baby," said Len. "The <i>baby</i> kicks her."</p> + +<p>Berry coughed. "Any headaches? Dizziness? Vomiting? Swelling in our +legs or ankles?"</p> + +<p>"No."</p> + +<p>"All rightie. Now let's just find out how much we've gained, and then +we'll get up on the examination table."</p> + +<p>Berry drew the sheet down over Moira's abdomen as if it were an +exceptionally fragile egg. He probed delicately with his fat +fingertips, then used the stethoscope.</p> + +<p>"Those X-rays," said Len. "Have they come back yet?"</p> + +<p>"Mm-hm," said Berry. "Yes, they have." He moved the stethoscope and +listened again.</p> + +<p>"Did they show anything unusual?" Len asked.</p> + +<p>Berry's eyebrows twitched a polite question.</p> + +<p>"We've been having a little argument," Moira said in a strained voice, +"about whether this is an ordinary baby or not."</p> + +<p>Berry took the stethoscope tubes away from his ears. He gazed at Moira +like an anxious spaniel.</p> + +<p>"Now let's not worry about <i>that</i>. We're going to have a perfectly +healthy wonderful baby, and if anybody tells us differently, why, +we'll just tell them to go jump in the lake, won't we?"</p> + +<p>"The baby is absolutely normal?" Len said in a marked manner.</p> + +<p>"Absolutely." Berry applied the stethoscope again. His face blanched.</p> + +<p>"What's the matter?" Len asked after a moment.</p> + +<p>The doctor's gaze was fixed and glassy.</p> + +<p>"Vagitus uterinus," Berry muttered. He pulled the stethoscope off +abruptly and stared at it. "No, of course it couldn't be. Now isn't +that a nuisance? We seem to be picking up a radio broadcast with our +little stethoscope here. I'll just go and get another instrument."</p> + +<p>Moira and Len exchanged glances. Moira's was almost excessively bland.</p> + +<p>Berry confidently came in with a new stethoscope, put the diaphragm +against Moira's belly, listened for an instant and twitched once all +over, as if his mainspring had snapped. Visibly jangling, he stepped +away from the table. His jaw worked several times before any sound +came out.</p> + +<p>"Excuse me," he said, and walked out in an uneven line.</p> + +<p>Len snatched up the instrument he had dropped.</p> + +<p>Like a bell ringing under water, muffled but clear, a tiny voice was +shouting: "<i>You bladder-headed pillpusher! You bedside vacuum! You +fifth-rate tree surgeon! You inflated—</i>" A pause. "<i>Is that you, +Connington? Get off the line; I haven't finished with Dr. Bedpan +yet.</i>"</p> + +<p>Moira smiled, like a Buddha-shaped bomb.</p> + +<p>"Well?" she said.</p> + +<hr style="width: 45%;" /> +<div class="figleft1"><img src="images/image_w1.jpg" alt="W" width="62" height="40" /></div> +<p>e've got to think," Len kept saying over and over.</p> + +<p>"<i>You've</i> got to think." Moira was combing her hair, snapping the comb +smartly at the end of each stroke. "I've had plenty of time to think, +ever since it happened. When you catch up—"</p> + +<p>Len flung his tie at the carved wooden pineapple on the corner of the +footboard. "Moy, be <i>reasonable</i>. The chances against the kid kicking +three times in any one-minute period are only about one in a hundred. +The chances against anything like—"</p> + +<p>Moira grunted and stiffened for a moment. Then she cocked her head to +one side with a listening expression ... a new mannerism of hers that +was beginning to send intangible snakes crawling up Len's spine.</p> + +<p>"What now?" he asked sharply.</p> + +<p>"He says to keep our voices down. He's thinking."</p> + +<p>Len's fingers clenched convulsively, and a button flew off his shirt. +Shaking, he pulled his arms out of the sleeves and dropped the shirt +on the floor. "Look. I just want to get this straight. When he talks +to you, you don't hear him shouting all the way up past your liver and +lights. What—"</p> + +<p>"You know perfectly well he reads my mind."</p> + +<p>"That isn't the same as—" Len took a deep breath. "Let's not get off +on that. What I want to know is, what is it like? Do you seem to hear +a real voice, or do you just know what he's telling you, without +knowing how you know?"</p> + +<p>Moira put the comb down in order to think better. "It isn't like +hearing a voice. You'd never confuse one with the other. It's +more—the nearest I can come to it, it's like remembering a voice. +Except that you don't know what's coming."</p> + +<p>Len picked his tie off the floor and abstractedly began knotting it on +his bare chest. "And he sees what you see, he knows what you're +thinking, he can hear when people talk to you?"</p> + +<p>"Of course."</p> + +<p>"This is tremendous!" Len began to blunder around the bed-room, not +looking where he was going. "They thought Macaulay was a genius. This +kid isn't even born. I <i>heard</i> him. He was cussing Berry out like +Monty Woolley."</p> + +<p>"He had me reading <i>The Man Who Came to Dinner</i> two days ago."</p> + +<p>Len made his way around a small bedside table by trial and error. +"That's another thing. How much could you say about his—his +personality? I mean does he seem to know what he's doing, or is he +just striking out wildly in all directions?" He paused. "Are you sure +he's really conscious at all?"</p> + +<hr style="width: 45%;" /> +<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_m.jpg" alt="M" width="43" height="40" /></div> +<p>oira began, "That's a silly—" and stopped. "Define consciousness," +she said doubtfully.</p> + +<p>"All right, what I really mean—<i>why</i> am I wearing this necktie?" He +ripped it off and threw it over a lampshade. "What I mean—"</p> + +<p>"Are you sure you're really conscious?"</p> + +<p>"Okay. You make joke, I laugh, ha-ha. What I'm trying to ask is, have +you seen any evidence of creative thought, organized thought, or is he +just—integrating, along the lines of—of instinctive responses? Do +you—"</p> + +<p>"I know what you mean. Shut up a minute.... I don't know."</p> + +<p>"I mean is he awake, or asleep and dreaming about us, like the Red +King?"</p> + +<p>"I don't <i>know</i>!"</p> + +<p>"And if that's it, what'll happen when he wakes up?"</p> + +<p>Moira took off her robe, folded it neatly, and maneuvered herself +between the sheets. "Come to bed."</p> + +<p>Len got one sock off before another thought struck him. "He reads your +mind. Can he read other people's?" He looked appalled. "Can he read +mine?"</p> + +<p>"He doesn't. Whether it's because he can't, I don't know. I think he +just doesn't care."</p> + +<p>Len pulled the other sock halfway down and left it there. In a stiffer +tone, he said, "One of the things he doesn't care about is whether I +have a job."</p> + +<p>"No. He thought it was funny. I wanted to sink through the floor, but +I had all I could do to keep from laughing when she fell down.... Len, +what are we going to do?"</p> + +<p>He swiveled around and looked at her.</p> + +<p>"Look," he said, "I didn't mean to sound that gloomy. We'll do +something. We'll fix it. Really."</p> + +<p>"I hope so."</p> + +<p>Careful of his elbows and knees, Len climbed into the bed beside her. +"Okay now?"</p> + +<p>"Mm.... Ugh." Moira tried to sit up suddenly, and almost made it. She +wound up propped on one elbow, and said indignantly, "Oh, no!"</p> + +<p>Len stared at her in the dimness. "What—?"</p> + +<p>She grunted again. "Len, get up. All <i>right</i>. Len, <i>hurry</i>!"</p> + +<p>Len fought his way convulsively past a treacherous sheet and staggered +up, goose-pimpled and tense. "What's wrong?"</p> + +<p>"You'll have to sleep on the couch. The sheets are in the bottom—"</p> + +<p>"On that couch? Are you crazy?"</p> + +<p>"I can't help it," she said in a small faint voice. "Please don't +let's argue. You'll just have to."</p> + +<p>"<i>Why?</i>"</p> + +<p>"We can't sleep in the same bed," she wailed. "He says +it's—oh!—unhygienic!"</p> + +<hr style="width: 45%;" /> +<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_l.jpg" alt="L" width="33" height="40" /></div> +<p>en's contract was not renewed. He got a job waiting on tables in a +resort hotel, an occupation which pays more money than teaching future +citizens the rudiments of three basic sciences, but for which Len had +no aptitude. He lasted three days at it; he was then idle for a week +and a half until his four years of college physics earned him +employment as a clerk in an electrical shop. His employer was a +cheerfully aggressive man who assured Len that there were great +opportunities in radio and television, and firmly believed that +atom-bomb tests were causing all the bad weather.</p> + +<p>Moira, in her eighth month, walked to the county library every day and +trundled a load of books home in the perambulator. Little Leo, it +appeared, was working his way simultaneously through biology, +astrophysics, phrenology, chemical engineering, architecture, +Christian Science, psychosomatic medicine, marine law; business +management, Yoga, crystallography, metaphysics and modern literature.</p> + +<p>His domination of Moira's life remained absolute, and his experiments +with her regimen continued. One week, she ate nothing but nuts and +fruit, washed down with distilled water; the next, she was on a diet +of porterhouse steak, dandelion greens and Hadacol.</p> + +<p>With the coming of full summer, fortunately, few of the high school +staff were in evidence. Len met Dr. Berry once on the street. Berry +started, twitched, and walked off rapidly in an entirely new +direction.</p> + +<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"> +<img src="images/image_004.jpg" width="400" height="510" alt="" title="" /> +</div> + +<p>The diabolical event was due on or about July 29th. Len crossed off +each day on their wall calendar with an emphatic black grease pencil. +It would, he supposed, be an uncomfortable thing at best to be the +parent of a super-prodigy. Leo would no doubt be dictator of the world +by the time he was fifteen, unless he would be assassinated first, but +almost anything would be a fair price for getting Leo out of his +maternal fortress.</p> + +<p>Then there was the day when Len came home to find Moira weeping over +the typewriter, with a half-inch stack of manuscript beside her.</p> + +<p>"It isn't anything. I'm just tired. He started this after lunch. +Look."</p> + +<p>Len turned the face-down sheaf the right way up.</p> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Droning. Abrasing<br /></span> +<span class="i0">the demiurge.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Hier begrimms the tale:<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Eyes undotted, grewling<br /></span> +<span class="i0">and looking, turns off<br /></span> +<span class="i0">a larm, seizes cloes.<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Stewed Bierly a wretch<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Pence, therefore tchews we. Pons!<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Let the pants take air of themsulves.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<hr style="width: 45%;" /> +<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_t.jpg" alt="T" width="36" height="40" /></div> +<p>he first three sheets were all like that. The fourth was a perfectly +good Petrarchian sonnet reviling the current administration and the +political party of which Len was a registration-day member.</p> + +<p>The fifth was hand-lettered in the Cyrillic alphabet and illustrated +with geometric diagrams. Len put it down and stared shakily at Moira.</p> + +<p>"No, go on," she said, "read the rest."</p> + +<p>The sixth and seventh were obscene limericks; and the eighth, ninth +and so on to the end of the stack were what looked like the first +chapters of a rattling good historical adventure novel.</p> + +<p>Its chief characters were Cyrus the Great, his jaunty-bosomed daughter +Lygea, of whom Len had never previously heard, and a one-armed +Graeco-Mede adventurer named Xanthes. There were also courtesans, +spies, apparitions, scullery slaves, oracles, cutthroats, lepers, +priests and men-at-arms in magnificent profusion.</p> + +<p>"He's decided," said Moira, "what he wants to be when he's born."</p> + +<p>Leo refused to bothered with mundane details. When there were eighty +pages of the manuscript, it was Moira who invented a title and by-line +for it—<i>The Virgin of Persepolis</i> by Leon Lenn—and mailed it off to +a literary agent in New York. His response, a week later, was +cautiously enthusiastic. He asked for an outline of the remainder of +the novel.</p> + +<p>Moira replied that this was impossible, trying to sound as unworldly +and impenetrably artistic as she could. She enclosed the thirty-odd +pages Leo had turned out through her in the meantime.</p> + +<p>Nothing was heard from the agent for two weeks. At the end of this +time, Moira received an astonishing document, exquisitely printed and +bound in imitation leather, thirty-two pages including the index, +containing three times as many clauses as a lease.</p> + +<p>This turned out to be a book contract. With it came the agent's check +for nine hundred dollars.</p> + +<hr style="width: 45%;" /> +<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_l.jpg" alt="L" width="33" height="40" /></div> +<p>en tilted his mop-handle against the wall and straightened carefully, +conscious of every individual gritty muscle in his back. How did women +do housework every day, seven days a week, fifty-two goddam weeks a +year?</p> + +<p>It was a little cooler now that the Sun was down, and he was working +stripped to shorts and bath slippers; but he might as well have been +wearing an overcoat in a Turkish bath.</p> + +<p>The faint whisper of Moira's monstrous new electrical typewriter +stopped, leaving a fainter hum. Len went into the living room and +sagged on the arm of a chair. Moira, gleaming sweatily in a flowered +housecoat, was lighting a cigarette.</p> + +<p>"How's it going?" he asked, hoping for an answer. He hadn't always +received one.</p> + +<p>She switched off the machine wearily. "Page two-eighty-nine. Xanthes +killed Anaxander."</p> + +<p>"Thought he would. How about Ganesh and Zeuxias?"</p> + +<p>"I don't know." She frowned. "I can't figure it out. You know who it +was that raped Marianne in the garden?"</p> + +<p>"No, who?"</p> + +<p>"Ganesh."</p> + +<p>"You're kidding!"</p> + +<p>"Nope." She pointed to the stack of typescript. "See for yourself."</p> + +<p>Len didn't move. "But Ganesh was in Lydia, buying back the sapphire. +He didn't return till—"</p> + +<p>"I know, I know. But he <i>wasn't</i>. That was Zeuxias in a putty nose +with his beard dyed. It's all perfectly logical, the way Leo explains +it. Zeuxias overheard Ganesh talking to the three Mongols—you +remember, Ganesh thought there was somebody behind the curtain, only +that was when they heard Lygea scream, and while their backs were +turned—"</p> + +<p>"All right. But for God's sake, this fouls everything up. If Ganesh +never went to Lydia, then he <i>couldn't</i> have had anything to do +distempering Cyrus's armor. And Zeuxias couldn't, either, because—"</p> + +<p>"It's exasperating. I know he's going to pull another rabbit out of +the hat and clear everything up, but I don't see how."</p> + +<p>Len brooded. "It beats me. It had to be either Ganesh or Zeuxias. Or +Philomenes, though that doesn't seem possible. Look, damn it, if +Zeuxias knew about the sapphire all the time, that rules out +Philomenes once and for all. Unless—no. I forgot about that business +in the temple. Umm. Do you think Leo really knows what he's doing?"</p> + +<p>"I'm certain. Lately I've been able to tell what he's thinking even +when he isn't talking to me. I mean just generally, like when he's +puzzling over something, or when he's feeling mean. It's going to be +something brilliant and he knows what it is, but he won't tell me. +We'll just have to wait."</p> + +<p>"I guess so." Len stood up, grunting. "You want me to see if there's +anything in the pot?"</p> + +<p>"Please."</p> + +<p>Len wandered into the kitchen, turned the flame on under the silex, +stared briefly at the dishes waiting in the sink, and wandered out +again. Since the onslaught of The Novel, Leo had relinquished his +interest in Moira's diet, and she had been living on coffee. Small +blessings....</p> + +<hr style="width: 45%;" /> +<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_m.jpg" alt="M" width="43" height="40" /></div> +<p>oira was leaning back with her eyes closed, looking very tired. +"How's the money?" she asked without moving.</p> + +<p>"Lousy. We're down to twenty-one bucks."</p> + +<p>She raised her head and opened her eyes wide. "We couldn't be! Len, +how could anybody go through nine hundred dollars that fast?"</p> + +<p>"Typewriter. And the dictaphone that Leo thought he wanted, till about +half an hour after it was paid for. We spent less than fifty on +ourselves, I think. Rent. Groceries. It goes, when there isn't any +coming in."</p> + +<p>She sighed. "I thought it would last longer."</p> + +<p>"So did I. If he doesn't finish this thing in a few days, I'll have to +go look for work again."</p> + +<p>"Oh. That isn't so good. How am I going to take care of the house and +do Leo's writing for him?"</p> + +<p>"I know, but—"</p> + +<p>"All right. If it works out, fine. If it doesn't—he must be near the +end by now." She stubbed out her cigarette abruptly and sat up, hands +over the keyboard. "He's getting ready again. See about that coffee, +will you? I'm half dead."</p> + +<p>Len poured two cups and carried them in. Moira was still sitting +poised in front of the typewriter, with a curious half-formed +expression on her face.</p> + +<p>Abruptly the carriage whipped over, muttered to itself briefly and +thumped the paper up twice. Then it stopped. Moira's eyes got bigger +and rounder.</p> + +<p>"What's the matter?" said Len. He looked over her shoulder.</p> + +<p>The last line on the page read:</p> + +<p class="smcap"> +to be continued in our next<br /> +</p> + +<p>Moira's hands curled into small helpless fists. After a moment, she +turned off the machine.</p> + +<p>"What?" said Len incredulously. "To be continued—what kind of talk is +that?"</p> + +<p>"He says he's bored with the novel," Moira replied dully. "He says he +knows the ending, so it's artistically complete; it doesn't matter +whether anybody else thinks so or not." She paused. "But he says that +isn't the real reason."</p> + +<p>"Well?"</p> + +<p>"He's got two reasons. One is that he doesn't want to finish the book +till he's certain he'll have complete control of the money it earns."</p> + +<p>"Yes," said Len, swallowing a lump of anger, "that makes a certain +amount of sense. It's his book. If he wants guarantees...."</p> + +<p>"You haven't heard the other one."</p> + +<p>"All right, let's have it."</p> + +<p>"He wants to teach us—so we'll never forget—who the boss is in this +family."</p> + +<hr style="width: 45%;" /> +<div class="figleft1"><img src="images/image_l2.jpg" alt="L" width="42" height="40" /></div> +<p>en, I'm awfully tired," Moira complained piteously, late that night.</p> + +<p>"Let's just go over it once more. There has to be some way. He still +isn't talking to you?"</p> + +<p>"I haven't felt anything from him for the last twenty minutes. I think +he's asleep."</p> + +<p>"All right, let's suppose he <i>isn't</i> going to listen to reason—"</p> + +<p>"I think we'd better."</p> + +<p>Len made an incoherent noise. "Well, okay. I still don't see why we +can't write the last chapter ourselves. It'd only be a few pages."</p> + +<p>"Go ahead and try."</p> + +<p>"Not me. You've done a little writing. Damned good, too. And if you're +so sure all the clues are there—Look, if you say you can't do it, all +right, we'll hire somebody. A professional writer. It happens all the +time. Thorne Smith's last novel—"</p> + +<p>"It wasn't Thorne Smith's and it wasn't a novel," she said +dogmatically.</p> + +<p>"But it sold. What one writer starts, another can finish."</p> + +<p>"Nobody ever finished <i>The Mystery of Edwin Drood</i>."</p> + +<p>"Oh, hell."</p> + +<p>"Len, it's impossible. It is! Let me finish—if you're thinking we +could have somebody rewrite the last part Leo did—"</p> + +<p>"Yeah, I just thought of that."</p> + +<p>"—even that wouldn't do any good. You'd have to go all the way back, +almost to page one. It would be another story when you got through. +Let's go to bed."</p> + +<p>"Moy, do you remember when we used to worry about the law of +opposites?"</p> + +<p>"Mm?"</p> + +<p>"The law of <i>opposites</i>. When we used to be afraid the kid would turn +out to be a pick-and-shovel man with a pointy head."</p> + +<p>"Uh. Mm."</p> + +<p>He turned. Moira was standing with one hand on her belly and the other +behind her back. She looked as if she were about to start practicing a +low bow and doubted she could make it.</p> + +<p>"What's the matter now?" he asked.</p> + +<p>"Pain in the small of my back."</p> + +<p>"Bad one?"</p> + +<p>"No...."</p> + +<p>"Belly hurt, too?"</p> + +<p>She frowned. "Don't be foolish. I'm feeling for the contraction. There +it comes."</p> + +<p>"The—but you just said the small of your back."</p> + +<p>"Where do you think labor pains usually start?"</p> + +<hr style="width: 45%;" /> +<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_t.jpg" alt="T" width="36" height="40" /></div> +<p>he pains were coming at twenty-minute intervals and the taxi had not +arrived. Moira was packed and ready. Len was trying to set her a good +example by remaining calm. He strolled over to the wall calendar, +gazed at it in an offhand manner, and turned away.</p> + +<p>"Len, I know it's only the fifteenth of July," she said impatiently.</p> + +<p>"Huh? I didn't say anything about that."</p> + +<p>"You said it seven times. Sit down. You're making me nervous."</p> + +<p>Len perched on the corner of the table, folded his arms, and +immediately got up to look out the window. On the way back, he circled +the table in an aimless way, picked up a bottle of ink and shook it to +see if the cap was on tight, stumbled over a wastebasket, carefully +up-ended it, and sat down with an air of <i>Ici je suis, ici je reste</i>.</p> + +<p>"Nothing to worry about," he said firmly. "Women have kids all the +time."</p> + +<p>"True."</p> + +<p>"What for?" he demanded violently.</p> + +<p>Moira grinned at him, then winced slightly and looked at the clock. +"Eighteen minutes this time. They're getting closer."</p> + +<p>When she relaxed, Len put a cigarette in his mouth and lighted it in +only two tries. "How's Leo taking it?"</p> + +<p>"Isn't saying. He feels—" she concentrated—"apprehensive. He tells +me he's feeling strange and he doesn't like it. I don't think he's +entirely awake. Funny—"</p> + +<p>"I'm glad this is happening now," Len announced.</p> + +<p>"So am I, but—"</p> + +<p>"Look," said Len, moving energetically to the arm of her chair. "We've +always had it pretty good, haven't we? Not that it hasn't been tough +at times, but—you know."</p> + +<p>"I know."</p> + +<p>"Well, that's the way it'll be again, once this is over. I don't care +how much of a superbrain he is, once he's born—you know what I mean? +The only reason he's had the edge on us all this time is he could get +at us and we couldn't get at him. If he's got the mind of an adult, he +can learn to act like one. It's that simple."</p> + +<p>Moira hesitated. "You can't take him out to the woodshed. He's going +to be a helpless baby, physically, like anybody else's. He has to be +taken care of."</p> + +<p>"All right, there are plenty of other ways. If he behaves, he gets +read to. Things like that."</p> + +<p>"That's right, but there's one other thing I thought of. You remember +when you said suppose he's asleep and dreaming, and what happens if he +wakes up?"</p> + +<p>"Yeah."</p> + +<p>"That reminded me of something else, or maybe it's the same thing. Did +you know that a fetus in the womb only gets about half the amount of +oxygen in his blood that he'll have when he starts to breathe?"</p> + +<p>Len looked thoughtful. "I forgot. Well, that's just one more thing Leo +does that babies aren't supposed to do."</p> + +<p>"Use as much energy as he does, you mean. What I'm getting at is, it +can't be because he's getting more than the normal amount of oxygen, +can it? I mean he's the prodigy, not me. He must be using it more +efficiently. And if that's it, what will happen when he gets twice as +much?"</p> + +<hr style="width: 45%;" /> +<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_t.jpg" alt="T" width="36" height="40" /></div> +<p>hey had prepared and disinfected her, along with other indignities, +and now she could see herself in the reflector of the big +delivery-table light—the image clear and bright, like everything +else, but very haloed and swimmy, and looking like a bad statue of +Sita. She had no idea how long she had been here—that was the dope, +probably—but she was getting pretty tired.</p> + +<p>"Bear down," said the staff doctor kindly, and before she could +answer, the pain came up like violins and she had to gulp at the +tingly coldness of laughing gas.</p> + +<p>When the mask lifted, she said, "I <i>am</i> bearing down," but the doctor +had gone back to work and wasn't listening.</p> + +<p>Anyhow, she had Leo. <i>How are you feeling?</i></p> + +<p>His answer was muddled—because of the anesthetic?—but she didn't +really need it. Her perception of him was clear: darkness and +pressure, impatience, a slow Satanic anger ... and something else. +Uncertainty? Dread?</p> + +<p>"Two or three more ought to do it. Bear down."</p> + +<p>Fear. Unmistakable now. And a desperate determination—</p> + +<p>"Doctor, he doesn't want to be born!"</p> + +<p>"Seems that way sometimes, doesn't it? Now bear down good and hard."</p> + +<p><i>Tell him stop blurrrr too dangerrrr stop I feel worrrr stop I +tellrrrr stop</i></p> + +<p>"What, Leo? What?"</p> + +<p>"Bear down," the doctor said abstractedly.</p> + +<p>Faintly, like a voice under water, gasping before it drowns: <i>Hurry I +hate you tell him sealed incubator tenth oxygen nine-tenths inert +gases hurry hurry hurry</i></p> + +<p>"An incubator!" she panted. "He'll need an incubator ... to live ... +won't he?"</p> + +<p>"Not this baby. A fine, normal, healthy one."</p> + +<p><i>He's idiot lying stupid fool need incubator tenth oxygen tenth tenth +hurry before it's</i></p> + +<p>The pressure abruptly ceased.</p> + +<p>Leo was born.</p> + +<p>The doctor was holding him up by the heels, red, wrinkled, puny. But +the voice was still there, very small, very far away: <i>Too late same +as death</i></p> + +<p>Then a hint of the old cold arrogance: <i>Now you'll never know who +killed Cyrus.</i></p> + +<p>The doctor slapped him smartly on the minuscule behind. The wizened, +malevolent face writhed open, but it was only the angry squall of an +ordinary infant that came out.</p> + +<p>Leo was gone, like a light turned off beneath the measureless ocean.</p> + +<p>Moira raised her head weakly.</p> + +<p>"Give him one for me," she said.</p> + +<p class="p1"><b>—DAMON KNIGHT</b></p> + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> + + + + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's Special Delivery, by Damon Francis Knight + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPECIAL DELIVERY *** + +***** This file should be named 32011-h.htm or 32011-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/2/0/1/32011/ + +Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Special Delivery + +Author: Damon Francis Knight + +Illustrator: Ashman + +Release Date: April 16, 2010 [EBook #32011] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPECIAL DELIVERY *** + + + + +Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + + + + + + + Transcriber's Note: + + This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1954. + Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. + copyright on this publication was renewed. + + + _Special Delivery_ + + + By DAMON KNIGHT + + + Illustrated by ASHMAN + + + _All Len had to hear was the old gag: "We've never lost a + father yet." His child was not even born and it was + thoroughly unbearable!_ + + * * * * * + + + + +Len and Moira Connington lived in a rented cottage with a small yard, +a smaller garden, and too many fir trees. The lawn, which Len seldom +had time to mow, was full of weeds, and the garden was overgrown with +blackberry brambles. The house itself was clean and smelled better +than most city apartments, and Moira kept geraniums in the windows. + +[Illustration] + +However, it was dark on account of the firs. Approaching the door one +late spring afternoon, Len tripped on an unnoticed flagstone and +scattered examination papers all the way to the porch. + +When he picked himself up, Moira was giggling in the doorway. "That +was funny." + +"The hell it was," said Len. "I banged my nose." He picked up his +Chemistry B papers in a stiff silence. A red drop fell on the last +one. "_Damn_ it!" + +Moira held the screen door for him, looking contrite and faintly +surprised. She followed him into the bathroom. "Len, I didn't mean to +laugh. Does it hurt much?" + +"No," said Len, staring fiercely at his scraped nose in the mirror. It +was throbbing like a gong. + +"That's good. It was the funniest thing--I mean funny-peculiar," she +clarified hastily. + + * * * * * + +Len stared at her; the whites of her eyes were showing: "Is there +anything the matter with you?" he demanded. + +"I don't know," she said on a rising note. "Nothing like that ever +happened to me before. I didn't think it was funny at all. I was +worried about you, and I didn't know I was going to laugh--" She +laughed again, a trifle nervously. "Maybe I'm cracking up." + +Moira was a dark-haired young woman with a placid, friendly +disposition. Len had met her in his senior year at Columbia, +with--looking at it impartially, which Len seldom did--regrettable +results. At present, in her seventh month, she was shaped like a +rather bosomy kewpie doll. + +_Emotional upsets_, he remembered, _may occur frequently during this +period_. He leaned to get past her belly and kissed her forgivingly. +"You're probably tired. Go sit down and I'll get you some coffee." + +Except that Moira had never had any hysterics till now, or morning +sickness, either--she burped instead--and anyhow, was there anything +in the literature about fits of giggling? + +After supper, he marked seventeen sets of papers desultorily in red +pencil, then got up to look for the baby book. There were four +dog-eared paperbound volumes with smiling infants' faces on the +covers, but the one he wanted wasn't there. He looked behind the +bookcase and on the wicker table beside it. "Moira!" + +"Hm?" + +"Where the devil is the other baby book?" + +"I've got it." + +Len went and looked over her shoulder. She was staring at a drawing of +a fetus lying in a sort of upside-down Yoga position inside a +cross-sectioned woman's body. + +"That's what he looks like," she said. "_Mama._" + +The diagram was of a fetus at term. + +"What was that about your mother?" Len asked, puzzled. + +"Don't be silly," she said abstractedly. + +He waited, but she didn't look up or turn the page. After a while, he +went back to his work. He watched her. + +Eventually she leafed through to the back of the book, read a few +pages, and put it down. She lighted a cigarette and immediately put it +out again. She fetched up a belch. + +"That was a good one," said Len admiringly. + +Moira sighed. + +Feeling tense, Len picked up his coffee cup and started toward the +kitchen. He halted beside Moira's chair. On the side table was her +after-dinner cup, still full of coffee ... black, scummed with oil +droplets, stone-cold. + +"Didn't you want your coffee?" he asked solicitously. + +She looked at the cup. "I did, but--" She paused and shook her head, +looking perplexed. + +"Well, do you want another cup now?" + +"Yes, please. _No._" + +Len, who had begun a step, rocked back on his heels. "Which, damn it?" + +Her face got all swollen. "Oh, Len, I'm so mixed up," she said, and +began to tremble. + +Len felt part of his irritation spilling over into protectiveness. +"What you need," he said firmly, "is a drink." + + * * * * * + +He climbed a stepladder to get at the top cabinet shelf which cached +their liquor when they had any. Small upstate towns and their school +boards being what they were, this was one of many necessary financial +precautions. + +Inspecting the doleful few fingers of whisky in the bottle, Len swore +under his breath. They couldn't afford a decent supply of booze or new +clothes for Moira. The original idea had been for Len to teach for a +year while they saved enough money so that he could go back for his +master's degree. More lately, this proving unlikely, they had merely +been trying to put aside enough for summer school, and even that was +beginning to look like the wildest optimism. + +High-school teachers without seniority weren't supposed to be married. + +Or graduate physics students, for that matter. + +He mixed two stiff highballs and carried them back into the living +room. "Here you are. Skoal." + +"Ah," she said appreciatively. "That tastes--_Ugh_." She set the glass +down and stared at it with her mouth half open. + +"What's the matter now?" + +She turned her head carefully, as if she were afraid it would come +off. "Len, I don't know. _Mama._" + +"That's the second time you've said that. What is this all--" + +"Said what?" + +"Mama. Look, kid, if you're--" + +"I didn't." She appeared a little feverish. + +"Sure you did," said Len reasonably. "Once when you were looking at +the baby book, and then again just now, after you said ugh to the +highball. Speaking of which--" + +"_Mama drink milk_," said Moira, speaking with exaggerated clarity. + +Moira hated milk. + +Len swallowed half his highball, turned and went silently into the +kitchen. + +When he came back with the milk, Moira looked at it as if it contained +a snake. "Len, I didn't say that." + +"Okay." + +"I didn't. I didn't say mama and I didn't say that about the milk." +Her voice quavered. "And I didn't laugh at you when you fell down." + +Len tried to be patient. "It was somebody else." + +"It _was_." She looked down at her gingham-covered bulge. "You won't +believe me. Put your hand there. No, a little lower." + +Under the cloth, her flesh was warm and solid against his palm. +"Kicks?" he inquired. + +"Not yet. Now," she said in a strained voice, "you in there--if you +want your milk, kick three times." + +Len opened his mouth and shut it again. Under his hand there were +three explicit kicks, one after the other. + +Moira closed her eyes, held her breath and drank the milk down in one +long horrid gulp. + + * * * * * + +"Once in a great while," Moira read, "cell cleavage will not have +followed the orderly pattern that produces a normal baby. In these +rare cases some parts of the body will develop excessively, while +others do not develop at all. This disorderly cell growth, which is +strikingly similar to the wild cell growth that we know as cancer--" +Her shoulders moved convulsively in a shudder. "_Bluh!_" + +"Why do you keep reading that stuff, if it makes you feel that way?" + +"I have to," she said absently. She picked up another book from the +stack. "There's a page missing." + +Len attacked the last of his medium-boiled egg in a noncommittal +manner. "It's a wonder it's held together this long," he said, which +was perfectly just. + +The book had had something spilled on it, partially dissolving the +glue, and was in an advanced state of anarchy. However, the fact was +that Len had torn out the page in question four nights ago, after +reading it carefully. The topic was "Psychoses in Pregnancy." + +Moira had now decided that the baby was male, that his name was +Leonardo (not referring to Len, but to da Vinci), that he had informed +her of these things along with a good many others, that he was keeping +her from her favorite foods and making her eat things she detested, +like liver and tripe, and that she had to read books of his choice all +day long in order to keep him from kicking. + +It was miserably hot. With Commencement only two weeks away, Len's +students were torpid and galvanic by turns. Then there was the matter +of his contract for next year, and the possible opening at Oster High +which would mean more money, and the Parent-Teachers thing tonight at +which Superintendent Greer and his wife would be regally present. + +Moira was knee-deep in Volume I of _Der Untergang des Abendlandes_, +moving her lips; an occasional guttural escaped her. + +Len cleared his throat. "Moy?" + +"--_und also des tragischen_--what in God's name does he mean by +that--? What, Len?" + +He made an irritated noise. "Why not try the English edition?" + +"Leo wants to learn German. What were you going to say?" + +Len closed his eyes for a moment. "About this PTA business--you sure +you want to go?" + +"Well, of course. It's pretty important, isn't it? Unless you think I +look too sloppy--" + +"No. No, damn it! But are you feeling up to it?" + +There were faint violet crescents under Moira's eyes; she had been +sleeping badly. "Sure," she said. + +"All right. And you'll go see the doctor tomorrow?" + +"I said I would." + +"And you won't say anything about Leo to Mrs. Greer or anybody?" + + * * * * * + +She looked slightly embarrassed. "Not till he's born, I think, don't +you? It would be an awful hard thing to prove--even you wouldn't have +believed me if you hadn't felt him kick." + +This experiment had not been repeated, though Len had asked often +enough. All little Leo had wanted, Moira said, was to establish +communication with his mother--he didn't seem to be interested in Len +at all. "Too young," she explained. + +And still--Len recalled the frogs his biology class had dissected last +semester. One of them had had two hearts. _This disorderly cell growth ... +like a cancer._ Unpredictable: extra fingers or toes or a double dose of +cortex? + +"And I'll burp like a lady, if at all," Moira assured him cheerfully +as they got ready to leave. + + * * * * * + +The room was empty, except for the ladies of the Committee, two +nervously smiling male teachers and the impressive bulk of +Superintendent Greer when the Conningtons arrived. Card-table legs +skreeked on the bare floor; the air was heavy with wood polish and +musk. + +Greer advanced, beaming fixedly. "Well, isn't this nice? How are you +young folks this warm evening?" + +"Oh, we thought we'd be earlier, Mr. Greer," said Moira with pretty +vexation. She looked surprisingly schoolgirlish and chic; the lump +that was Leo was hardly noticeable unless you caught her in profile. +"I'll go right now and help the ladies. There must be something I can +still do." + +"No, now, we won't hear of it. But I'll tell you what you can do--you +can go right over there and say hello to Mrs. Greer. I know she's +dying to sit down and have a good chat with you. Go ahead now, don't +worry about this husband of yours; I'll take care of him." + +Moira receded into a scattering of small shrieks of pleasure, at least +half of them arcing across a gap of mutual dislike. + +Greer, exhibiting perfect dentures, exhaled Listerine. His pink skin +looked not only scrubbed but disinfected; his gold-rimmed glasses +belonged in an optometrist's window, and his tropical suit had +obviously come straight from the cleaner's. It was impossible to think +of Greer unshaven, Greer smoking a cigar, Greer with a smudge of axle +grease on his forehead, or Greer making love to his wife. + +"Well, sir, this weather--" + +"When I think of what this valley was like twenty years ago--" + +"At today's prices--" + +Len listened with growing admiration, putting in comments where +required. He had never realized before that there were so many +absolutely neutral topics of conversation. + +A few more people straggled in, raising the room temperature about +half a degree per capita. Greer did not perspire; he merely glowed. + + * * * * * + +Across the room, Moira was now seated chummily with Mrs. Greer, a +large-bosomed woman in an outrageously unfashionable hat. Moira +appeared to be telling a joke; Len knew perfectly well that it was a +clean one, but he listened tensely, all the same, until he heard Mrs. +Greer yelp with laughter. Her voice carried well: "Oh, that's +_priceless_! Oh, dear, I _only_ hope I can remember it!" + +Len had resolutely not been thinking of ways to turn the conversation +toward the Oster vacancy. He stiffened again when he realized that +Greer had abruptly begun to talk shop. His heart began pounding +absurdly; Greer was asking highly pertinent questions in a +good-humored but businesslike way--drawing Len out, and not even +bothering to be the slightest bit Machiavellian about it. + +Len answered candidly, except when he was certain that he knew what +the Superintendent wanted to hear; then he lied like a Trojan. + +Mrs. Greer had conjured up a premature pot of tea and, oblivious of +the stares of the thirsty teachers present, she and Moira were hogging +it, heads together, as if they were plotting the overthrow of the +Republic or exchanging recipes. + +Greer listened attentively to Len's final reply, which was delivered +with as pious an air as if Len had been a Boy Scout swearing on the +Manual. But since the question had been "Do you plan to make teaching +your career?" there was not a word of truth in it. + +He then inspected his paunch and assumed a mild theatrical frown. Len, +with that social sixth sense which is unmistakable when it operates, +knew that his next words were going to be: "You may have heard that +Oster High will be needing a new science teacher next fall...." + +At this point Moira made a noise like a seal. + +The ensuing silence was broken a moment later by a hearty scream, +followed instantly by a clatter and a bone-shaking thud. + +Mrs. Greer was sitting on the floor, legs sprawled, hat over her eye. +She appeared to be attempting to perform some sort of excessively +pagan dance. + + * * * * * + +"It was Leo," Moira incoherently told Len at home. "You know she's +English--she said of course a cup of tea wouldn't hurt me, and she +insisted I go ahead and drink it while it was hot, and I couldn't--" + +"No, no--wait," said Len in a controlled fury. "What--" + +"So I _drank_ some. And Leo kicked up and made me burp the burp I was +saving. And--" + +"Oh, Lord!" + +"--then he kicked the teacup out of my hand into her lap, and I wish I +was _dead_!" + +[Illustration] + +On the following day, Len took Moira to the doctor's office, where +they read dog-eared copies of _The Rotarian_ and _Field and Stream_ +for an hour. + +Dr. Berry was a round little man with soulful eyes and a +twenty-four-hour bedside manner. On the walls of his office, where it +is customary for doctors to hang all sorts of diplomas and +certificates of membership, Berry had only three. The rest of the +space was filled with enlarged colored photographs of beautiful, +beautiful children. + +When Len followed Moira determinedly into the consulting room, Berry +looked mildly shocked for a moment, then apparently decided to carry +on as if nothing outre had happened. You could not say that he spoke, +or even whispered; he rustled. + +"Now, Mrs. Connington, we're looking just fine today. How have we been +feeling?" + +"Just fine. My husband thinks I'm insane." + +"That's g--Well, that's a funny thing for him to think, isn't it?" +Berry glanced at the wall midway between himself and Len, then +shuffled some file cards rather nervously. "Now. Have we had any +soreness in our stomach?" + +[Illustration] + +"Yes. He's been kicking me black and blue." + +Berry misinterpreted Moira's brooding glance at Len, and his eyebrows +twitched involuntarily. + +"The baby," said Len. "The _baby_ kicks her." + +Berry coughed. "Any headaches? Dizziness? Vomiting? Swelling in our +legs or ankles?" + +"No." + +"All rightie. Now let's just find out how much we've gained, and then +we'll get up on the examination table." + +Berry drew the sheet down over Moira's abdomen as if it were an +exceptionally fragile egg. He probed delicately with his fat +fingertips, then used the stethoscope. + +"Those X-rays," said Len. "Have they come back yet?" + +"Mm-hm," said Berry. "Yes, they have." He moved the stethoscope and +listened again. + +"Did they show anything unusual?" Len asked. + +Berry's eyebrows twitched a polite question. + +"We've been having a little argument," Moira said in a strained voice, +"about whether this is an ordinary baby or not." + +Berry took the stethoscope tubes away from his ears. He gazed at Moira +like an anxious spaniel. + +"Now let's not worry about _that_. We're going to have a perfectly +healthy wonderful baby, and if anybody tells us differently, why, +we'll just tell them to go jump in the lake, won't we?" + +"The baby is absolutely normal?" Len said in a marked manner. + +"Absolutely." Berry applied the stethoscope again. His face blanched. + +"What's the matter?" Len asked after a moment. + +The doctor's gaze was fixed and glassy. + +"Vagitus uterinus," Berry muttered. He pulled the stethoscope off +abruptly and stared at it. "No, of course it couldn't be. Now isn't +that a nuisance? We seem to be picking up a radio broadcast with our +little stethoscope here. I'll just go and get another instrument." + +Moira and Len exchanged glances. Moira's was almost excessively bland. + +Berry confidently came in with a new stethoscope, put the diaphragm +against Moira's belly, listened for an instant and twitched once all +over, as if his mainspring had snapped. Visibly jangling, he stepped +away from the table. His jaw worked several times before any sound +came out. + +"Excuse me," he said, and walked out in an uneven line. + +Len snatched up the instrument he had dropped. + +Like a bell ringing under water, muffled but clear, a tiny voice was +shouting: "_You bladder-headed pillpusher! You bedside vacuum! You +fifth-rate tree surgeon! You inflated--_" A pause. "_Is that you, +Connington? Get off the line; I haven't finished with Dr. Bedpan +yet._" + +Moira smiled, like a Buddha-shaped bomb. + +"Well?" she said. + + * * * * * + +"We've got to think," Len kept saying over and over. + +"_You've_ got to think." Moira was combing her hair, snapping the comb +smartly at the end of each stroke. "I've had plenty of time to think, +ever since it happened. When you catch up--" + +Len flung his tie at the carved wooden pineapple on the corner of the +footboard. "Moy, be _reasonable_. The chances against the kid kicking +three times in any one-minute period are only about one in a hundred. +The chances against anything like--" + +Moira grunted and stiffened for a moment. Then she cocked her head to +one side with a listening expression ... a new mannerism of hers that +was beginning to send intangible snakes crawling up Len's spine. + +"What now?" he asked sharply. + +"He says to keep our voices down. He's thinking." + +Len's fingers clenched convulsively, and a button flew off his shirt. +Shaking, he pulled his arms out of the sleeves and dropped the shirt +on the floor. "Look. I just want to get this straight. When he talks +to you, you don't hear him shouting all the way up past your liver and +lights. What--" + +"You know perfectly well he reads my mind." + +"That isn't the same as--" Len took a deep breath. "Let's not get off +on that. What I want to know is, what is it like? Do you seem to hear +a real voice, or do you just know what he's telling you, without +knowing how you know?" + +Moira put the comb down in order to think better. "It isn't like +hearing a voice. You'd never confuse one with the other. It's +more--the nearest I can come to it, it's like remembering a voice. +Except that you don't know what's coming." + +Len picked his tie off the floor and abstractedly began knotting it on +his bare chest. "And he sees what you see, he knows what you're +thinking, he can hear when people talk to you?" + +"Of course." + +"This is tremendous!" Len began to blunder around the bed-room, not +looking where he was going. "They thought Macaulay was a genius. This +kid isn't even born. I _heard_ him. He was cussing Berry out like +Monty Woolley." + +"He had me reading _The Man Who Came to Dinner_ two days ago." + +Len made his way around a small bedside table by trial and error. +"That's another thing. How much could you say about his--his +personality? I mean does he seem to know what he's doing, or is he +just striking out wildly in all directions?" He paused. "Are you sure +he's really conscious at all?" + + * * * * * + +Moira began, "That's a silly--" and stopped. "Define consciousness," +she said doubtfully. + +"All right, what I really mean--_why_ am I wearing this necktie?" He +ripped it off and threw it over a lampshade. "What I mean--" + +"Are you sure you're really conscious?" + +"Okay. You make joke, I laugh, ha-ha. What I'm trying to ask is, have +you seen any evidence of creative thought, organized thought, or is he +just--integrating, along the lines of--of instinctive responses? Do +you--" + +"I know what you mean. Shut up a minute.... I don't know." + +"I mean is he awake, or asleep and dreaming about us, like the Red +King?" + +"I don't _know_!" + +"And if that's it, what'll happen when he wakes up?" + +Moira took off her robe, folded it neatly, and maneuvered herself +between the sheets. "Come to bed." + +Len got one sock off before another thought struck him. "He reads your +mind. Can he read other people's?" He looked appalled. "Can he read +mine?" + +"He doesn't. Whether it's because he can't, I don't know. I think he +just doesn't care." + +Len pulled the other sock halfway down and left it there. In a stiffer +tone, he said, "One of the things he doesn't care about is whether I +have a job." + +"No. He thought it was funny. I wanted to sink through the floor, but +I had all I could do to keep from laughing when she fell down.... Len, +what are we going to do?" + +He swiveled around and looked at her. + +"Look," he said, "I didn't mean to sound that gloomy. We'll do +something. We'll fix it. Really." + +"I hope so." + +Careful of his elbows and knees, Len climbed into the bed beside her. +"Okay now?" + +"Mm.... Ugh." Moira tried to sit up suddenly, and almost made it. She +wound up propped on one elbow, and said indignantly, "Oh, no!" + +Len stared at her in the dimness. "What--?" + +She grunted again. "Len, get up. All _right_. Len, _hurry_!" + +Len fought his way convulsively past a treacherous sheet and staggered +up, goose-pimpled and tense. "What's wrong?" + +"You'll have to sleep on the couch. The sheets are in the bottom--" + +"On that couch? Are you crazy?" + +"I can't help it," she said in a small faint voice. "Please don't +let's argue. You'll just have to." + +"_Why?_" + +"We can't sleep in the same bed," she wailed. "He says +it's--oh!--unhygienic!" + + * * * * * + +Len's contract was not renewed. He got a job waiting on tables in a +resort hotel, an occupation which pays more money than teaching future +citizens the rudiments of three basic sciences, but for which Len had +no aptitude. He lasted three days at it; he was then idle for a week +and a half until his four years of college physics earned him +employment as a clerk in an electrical shop. His employer was a +cheerfully aggressive man who assured Len that there were great +opportunities in radio and television, and firmly believed that +atom-bomb tests were causing all the bad weather. + +Moira, in her eighth month, walked to the county library every day and +trundled a load of books home in the perambulator. Little Leo, it +appeared, was working his way simultaneously through biology, +astrophysics, phrenology, chemical engineering, architecture, +Christian Science, psychosomatic medicine, marine law; business +management, Yoga, crystallography, metaphysics and modern literature. + +His domination of Moira's life remained absolute, and his experiments +with her regimen continued. One week, she ate nothing but nuts and +fruit, washed down with distilled water; the next, she was on a diet +of porterhouse steak, dandelion greens and Hadacol. + +With the coming of full summer, fortunately, few of the high school +staff were in evidence. Len met Dr. Berry once on the street. Berry +started, twitched, and walked off rapidly in an entirely new +direction. + +[Illustration] + +The diabolical event was due on or about July 29th. Len crossed off +each day on their wall calendar with an emphatic black grease pencil. +It would, he supposed, be an uncomfortable thing at best to be the +parent of a super-prodigy. Leo would no doubt be dictator of the world +by the time he was fifteen, unless he would be assassinated first, but +almost anything would be a fair price for getting Leo out of his +maternal fortress. + +Then there was the day when Len came home to find Moira weeping over +the typewriter, with a half-inch stack of manuscript beside her. + +"It isn't anything. I'm just tired. He started this after lunch. +Look." + +Len turned the face-down sheaf the right way up. + + Droning. Abrasing + the demiurge. + Hier begrimms the tale: + Eyes undotted, grewling + and looking, turns off + a larm, seizes cloes. + Stewed Bierly a wretch + Pence, therefore tchews we. Pons! + Let the pants take air of themsulves. + + * * * * * + +The first three sheets were all like that. The fourth was a perfectly +good Petrarchian sonnet reviling the current administration and the +political party of which Len was a registration-day member. + +The fifth was hand-lettered in the Cyrillic alphabet and illustrated +with geometric diagrams. Len put it down and stared shakily at Moira. + +"No, go on," she said, "read the rest." + +The sixth and seventh were obscene limericks; and the eighth, ninth +and so on to the end of the stack were what looked like the first +chapters of a rattling good historical adventure novel. + +Its chief characters were Cyrus the Great, his jaunty-bosomed daughter +Lygea, of whom Len had never previously heard, and a one-armed +Graeco-Mede adventurer named Xanthes. There were also courtesans, +spies, apparitions, scullery slaves, oracles, cutthroats, lepers, +priests and men-at-arms in magnificent profusion. + +"He's decided," said Moira, "what he wants to be when he's born." + +Leo refused to bothered with mundane details. When there were eighty +pages of the manuscript, it was Moira who invented a title and by-line +for it--_The Virgin of Persepolis_ by Leon Lenn--and mailed it off to +a literary agent in New York. His response, a week later, was +cautiously enthusiastic. He asked for an outline of the remainder of +the novel. + +Moira replied that this was impossible, trying to sound as unworldly +and impenetrably artistic as she could. She enclosed the thirty-odd +pages Leo had turned out through her in the meantime. + +Nothing was heard from the agent for two weeks. At the end of this +time, Moira received an astonishing document, exquisitely printed and +bound in imitation leather, thirty-two pages including the index, +containing three times as many clauses as a lease. + +This turned out to be a book contract. With it came the agent's check +for nine hundred dollars. + + * * * * * + +Len tilted his mop-handle against the wall and straightened carefully, +conscious of every individual gritty muscle in his back. How did women +do housework every day, seven days a week, fifty-two goddam weeks a +year? + +It was a little cooler now that the Sun was down, and he was working +stripped to shorts and bath slippers; but he might as well have been +wearing an overcoat in a Turkish bath. + +The faint whisper of Moira's monstrous new electrical typewriter +stopped, leaving a fainter hum. Len went into the living room and +sagged on the arm of a chair. Moira, gleaming sweatily in a flowered +housecoat, was lighting a cigarette. + +"How's it going?" he asked, hoping for an answer. He hadn't always +received one. + +She switched off the machine wearily. "Page two-eighty-nine. Xanthes +killed Anaxander." + +"Thought he would. How about Ganesh and Zeuxias?" + +"I don't know." She frowned. "I can't figure it out. You know who it +was that raped Marianne in the garden?" + +"No, who?" + +"Ganesh." + +"You're kidding!" + +"Nope." She pointed to the stack of typescript. "See for yourself." + +Len didn't move. "But Ganesh was in Lydia, buying back the sapphire. +He didn't return till--" + +"I know, I know. But he _wasn't_. That was Zeuxias in a putty nose +with his beard dyed. It's all perfectly logical, the way Leo explains +it. Zeuxias overheard Ganesh talking to the three Mongols--you +remember, Ganesh thought there was somebody behind the curtain, only +that was when they heard Lygea scream, and while their backs were +turned--" + +"All right. But for God's sake, this fouls everything up. If Ganesh +never went to Lydia, then he _couldn't_ have had anything to do +distempering Cyrus's armor. And Zeuxias couldn't, either, because--" + +"It's exasperating. I know he's going to pull another rabbit out of +the hat and clear everything up, but I don't see how." + +Len brooded. "It beats me. It had to be either Ganesh or Zeuxias. Or +Philomenes, though that doesn't seem possible. Look, damn it, if +Zeuxias knew about the sapphire all the time, that rules out +Philomenes once and for all. Unless--no. I forgot about that business +in the temple. Umm. Do you think Leo really knows what he's doing?" + +"I'm certain. Lately I've been able to tell what he's thinking even +when he isn't talking to me. I mean just generally, like when he's +puzzling over something, or when he's feeling mean. It's going to be +something brilliant and he knows what it is, but he won't tell me. +We'll just have to wait." + +"I guess so." Len stood up, grunting. "You want me to see if there's +anything in the pot?" + +"Please." + +Len wandered into the kitchen, turned the flame on under the silex, +stared briefly at the dishes waiting in the sink, and wandered out +again. Since the onslaught of The Novel, Leo had relinquished his +interest in Moira's diet, and she had been living on coffee. Small +blessings.... + + * * * * * + +Moira was leaning back with her eyes closed, looking very tired. +"How's the money?" she asked without moving. + +"Lousy. We're down to twenty-one bucks." + +She raised her head and opened her eyes wide. "We couldn't be! Len, +how could anybody go through nine hundred dollars that fast?" + +"Typewriter. And the dictaphone that Leo thought he wanted, till about +half an hour after it was paid for. We spent less than fifty on +ourselves, I think. Rent. Groceries. It goes, when there isn't any +coming in." + +She sighed. "I thought it would last longer." + +"So did I. If he doesn't finish this thing in a few days, I'll have to +go look for work again." + +"Oh. That isn't so good. How am I going to take care of the house and +do Leo's writing for him?" + +"I know, but--" + +"All right. If it works out, fine. If it doesn't--he must be near the +end by now." She stubbed out her cigarette abruptly and sat up, hands +over the keyboard. "He's getting ready again. See about that coffee, +will you? I'm half dead." + +Len poured two cups and carried them in. Moira was still sitting +poised in front of the typewriter, with a curious half-formed +expression on her face. + +Abruptly the carriage whipped over, muttered to itself briefly and +thumped the paper up twice. Then it stopped. Moira's eyes got bigger +and rounder. + +"What's the matter?" said Len. He looked over her shoulder. + +The last line on the page read: + +TO BE CONTINUED IN OUR NEXT + +Moira's hands curled into small helpless fists. After a moment, she +turned off the machine. + +"What?" said Len incredulously. "To be continued--what kind of talk is +that?" + +"He says he's bored with the novel," Moira replied dully. "He says he +knows the ending, so it's artistically complete; it doesn't matter +whether anybody else thinks so or not." She paused. "But he says that +isn't the real reason." + +"Well?" + +"He's got two reasons. One is that he doesn't want to finish the book +till he's certain he'll have complete control of the money it earns." + +"Yes," said Len, swallowing a lump of anger, "that makes a certain +amount of sense. It's his book. If he wants guarantees...." + +"You haven't heard the other one." + +"All right, let's have it." + +"He wants to teach us--so we'll never forget--who the boss is in this +family." + + * * * * * + +"Len, I'm awfully tired," Moira complained piteously, late that night. + +"Let's just go over it once more. There has to be some way. He still +isn't talking to you?" + +"I haven't felt anything from him for the last twenty minutes. I think +he's asleep." + +"All right, let's suppose he _isn't_ going to listen to reason--" + +"I think we'd better." + +Len made an incoherent noise. "Well, okay. I still don't see why we +can't write the last chapter ourselves. It'd only be a few pages." + +"Go ahead and try." + +"Not me. You've done a little writing. Damned good, too. And if you're +so sure all the clues are there--Look, if you say you can't do it, all +right, we'll hire somebody. A professional writer. It happens all the +time. Thorne Smith's last novel--" + +"It wasn't Thorne Smith's and it wasn't a novel," she said +dogmatically. + +"But it sold. What one writer starts, another can finish." + +"Nobody ever finished _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_." + +"Oh, hell." + +"Len, it's impossible. It is! Let me finish--if you're thinking we +could have somebody rewrite the last part Leo did--" + +"Yeah, I just thought of that." + +"--even that wouldn't do any good. You'd have to go all the way back, +almost to page one. It would be another story when you got through. +Let's go to bed." + +"Moy, do you remember when we used to worry about the law of +opposites?" + +"Mm?" + +"The law of _opposites_. When we used to be afraid the kid would turn +out to be a pick-and-shovel man with a pointy head." + +"Uh. Mm." + +He turned. Moira was standing with one hand on her belly and the other +behind her back. She looked as if she were about to start practicing a +low bow and doubted she could make it. + +"What's the matter now?" he asked. + +"Pain in the small of my back." + +"Bad one?" + +"No...." + +"Belly hurt, too?" + +She frowned. "Don't be foolish. I'm feeling for the contraction. There +it comes." + +"The--but you just said the small of your back." + +"Where do you think labor pains usually start?" + + * * * * * + +The pains were coming at twenty-minute intervals and the taxi had not +arrived. Moira was packed and ready. Len was trying to set her a good +example by remaining calm. He strolled over to the wall calendar, +gazed at it in an offhand manner, and turned away. + +"Len, I know it's only the fifteenth of July," she said impatiently. + +"Huh? I didn't say anything about that." + +"You said it seven times. Sit down. You're making me nervous." + +Len perched on the corner of the table, folded his arms, and +immediately got up to look out the window. On the way back, he circled +the table in an aimless way, picked up a bottle of ink and shook it to +see if the cap was on tight, stumbled over a wastebasket, carefully +up-ended it, and sat down with an air of _Ici je suis, ici je reste_. + +"Nothing to worry about," he said firmly. "Women have kids all the +time." + +"True." + +"What for?" he demanded violently. + +Moira grinned at him, then winced slightly and looked at the clock. +"Eighteen minutes this time. They're getting closer." + +When she relaxed, Len put a cigarette in his mouth and lighted it in +only two tries. "How's Leo taking it?" + +"Isn't saying. He feels--" she concentrated--"apprehensive. He tells +me he's feeling strange and he doesn't like it. I don't think he's +entirely awake. Funny--" + +"I'm glad this is happening now," Len announced. + +"So am I, but--" + +"Look," said Len, moving energetically to the arm of her chair. "We've +always had it pretty good, haven't we? Not that it hasn't been tough +at times, but--you know." + +"I know." + +"Well, that's the way it'll be again, once this is over. I don't care +how much of a superbrain he is, once he's born--you know what I mean? +The only reason he's had the edge on us all this time is he could get +at us and we couldn't get at him. If he's got the mind of an adult, he +can learn to act like one. It's that simple." + +Moira hesitated. "You can't take him out to the woodshed. He's going +to be a helpless baby, physically, like anybody else's. He has to be +taken care of." + +"All right, there are plenty of other ways. If he behaves, he gets +read to. Things like that." + +"That's right, but there's one other thing I thought of. You remember +when you said suppose he's asleep and dreaming, and what happens if he +wakes up?" + +"Yeah." + +"That reminded me of something else, or maybe it's the same thing. Did +you know that a fetus in the womb only gets about half the amount of +oxygen in his blood that he'll have when he starts to breathe?" + +Len looked thoughtful. "I forgot. Well, that's just one more thing Leo +does that babies aren't supposed to do." + +"Use as much energy as he does, you mean. What I'm getting at is, it +can't be because he's getting more than the normal amount of oxygen, +can it? I mean he's the prodigy, not me. He must be using it more +efficiently. And if that's it, what will happen when he gets twice as +much?" + + * * * * * + +They had prepared and disinfected her, along with other indignities, +and now she could see herself in the reflector of the big +delivery-table light--the image clear and bright, like everything +else, but very haloed and swimmy, and looking like a bad statue of +Sita. She had no idea how long she had been here--that was the dope, +probably--but she was getting pretty tired. + +"Bear down," said the staff doctor kindly, and before she could +answer, the pain came up like violins and she had to gulp at the +tingly coldness of laughing gas. + +When the mask lifted, she said, "I _am_ bearing down," but the doctor +had gone back to work and wasn't listening. + +Anyhow, she had Leo. _How are you feeling?_ + +His answer was muddled--because of the anesthetic?--but she didn't +really need it. Her perception of him was clear: darkness and +pressure, impatience, a slow Satanic anger ... and something else. +Uncertainty? Dread? + +"Two or three more ought to do it. Bear down." + +Fear. Unmistakable now. And a desperate determination-- + +"Doctor, he doesn't want to be born!" + +"Seems that way sometimes, doesn't it? Now bear down good and hard." + +_Tell him stop blurrrr too dangerrrr stop I feel worrrr stop I +tellrrrr stop_ + +"What, Leo? What?" + +"Bear down," the doctor said abstractedly. + +Faintly, like a voice under water, gasping before it drowns: _Hurry I +hate you tell him sealed incubator tenth oxygen nine-tenths inert +gases hurry hurry hurry_ + +"An incubator!" she panted. "He'll need an incubator ... to live ... +won't he?" + +"Not this baby. A fine, normal, healthy one." + +_He's idiot lying stupid fool need incubator tenth oxygen tenth tenth +hurry before it's_ + +The pressure abruptly ceased. + +Leo was born. + +The doctor was holding him up by the heels, red, wrinkled, puny. But +the voice was still there, very small, very far away: _Too late same +as death_ + +Then a hint of the old cold arrogance: _Now you'll never know who +killed Cyrus._ + +The doctor slapped him smartly on the minuscule behind. The wizened, +malevolent face writhed open, but it was only the angry squall of an +ordinary infant that came out. + +Leo was gone, like a light turned off beneath the measureless ocean. + +Moira raised her head weakly. + +"Give him one for me," she said. + + --DAMON KNIGHT + + * * * * * + + + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's Special Delivery, by Damon Francis Knight + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPECIAL DELIVERY *** + +***** This file should be named 32011.txt or 32011.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/2/0/1/32011/ + +Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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