Damon Knight

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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!
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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Greer or anybody?"
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."
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. ”

“ 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?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.
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. "Bluh!" ”

“ 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." ”