"I do? It's O.K.?"

"Six pounds ten ounces. Your wife was conscious throughout and held the baby for a minute after delivery."

"Really? She held it? Was it – did she have a hard time?"

"No—o. It was normal. In the beginning she seemed tense, but it was a normal delivery."

"That's wonderful. Thank you. Good grief, thank you."

Crowe stands there smiling uneasily. Coming up from the pit of creation, he stammers in the open air. In these last hours he has been closer to Janice than Harry ever was, has been grubbing with his hands in her roots, riding her body in its earthquake, yet he has brought back nothing to confide: no curse, no blessing. Harry dreads that the doctor's eyes will release with thunder the mystery they have absorbed; but Crowe's gaze contains no wrath. Not even a reprimand. He seems to see Harry as just another in the parade of more or less dutiful husbands whose brainlessly sown seed he spends his life trying to harvest.

Harry asks, "Can I see her?"

"Who?"

Who? That "her" is a forked word now startles him. The world is thickening. "My, my wife."

"Of course, surely." Crowe seems in his mild way puzzled that Harry asks for permission. He must know the facts, yet seems unaware of the gap of guilt between Harry and humanity. "I thought you might mean the baby. I'd rather you waited until visiting hours tomorrow for that; there's not a nurse to show her right now. But your wife is conscious, as I say. We've given her some Equanil. That's just a tranquillizer. Meprobamate. Tell me" – he moves closer gently, pink skin and clean cloth – "is it all right if her mother sees her for a moment? She's been on our necks all night." He's asking him, him, the runner, the fornicator, the monster. He must be blind. Or maybe just being a father makes everyone forgive you, because after all it's the only sure thing we're here for.

"Sure. She can go in."

"Before or after you?"

Harry hesitates, and remembers the way Mrs. Springer came and visited him on his empty planet. "She can go in before."

"Thank you. Good. Then she can go home. We'll get her out in a minute. It'll be about ten minutes all told. Your wife is being prepared by the nurses."

"Swell." He sits down to show how docile he is and rises again. "Say, thanks by the way. Thank you very much. I don't see how you doctors do it."

Crowe shrugs. "She was a good girl."

"When we had the other kid I was scared silly. It took ages."

"Where did she have it?"

"At the other hospital. Homeopathic."

"Nn—huh." And the doctor, who had gone into the pit and brought back no thunder, emits a spark of spite at the thought of the rival hospital and, wagging his scrubbed head sharply, walks away.

Eccles comes into the room grinning like a schoolboy and Rabbit can't keep his attention on his silly face. He suggests thanksgiving and Rabbit bows his head blankly into his friend's silence. Each heartbeat seems to flatten against a wide white wall. When he looks up, objects seem infinitely solid and somehow tip, seem so full they are about to leap. His real happiness is a ladder from whose top rung he keeps trying to jump still higher, because he knows he should.

Crowe's phrase about nurses "preparing" Janice has a weird May Queen sound. When they lead him to her room he expects to find her with ribbons in her hair and paper flowers twined in the bedposts. But it's just old Janice, lying between two smooth sheets on a high metal bed. She turns her face and says, "Well look who it isn't."

"Hey," he says, and goes over to kiss her, intending it so gently. He bends as you would bend to a glass flower. Her mouth swims in the sweet stink of ether. To his surprise her arms come out from the sheets and she puts them around his head and presses his face down into her soft happy swimming mouth. "Hey take it easy," he says.

"I have no legs," she says, "it's the funniest feeling." Her hair is drawn tight against her skull in a sanitary knot and she has no makeup on. Her small skull is dark against the pillow.

"No legs?" He looks down and there they are under the sheets, stretched out flat in a motionless V.

"They gave me a spinal or whatever at the end and I didn't feel anything. I was lying there hearing them say push and the next thing here's this teeny flubbly baby with this big moon face looking cross at me. I told Mother it looks like you and she didn't want to hear it."

"She gave me hell out there."

"I wish they hadn't let her in. I didn't want to see her. I wanted to see you."

"Did you, God. Why, baby? After I've been so crummy."

"No you haven't. They told me you were here and all the while I was thinking then it was your baby and it was like I was having you. I'm so full of ether it's just like I'm floating; without any legs. I could just talk and talk." She puts her hands on her stomach and closes her eyes and smiles. "I'm really quite drunk. See, I'm flat."

"Now you can wear your bathing suit," he says, smiling and entering the drift of her ether—talk, feeling himself as if he has no legs and is floating on his back on a great sea of cleanness, light as a bubble amid the starched sheets and germless surfaces before dawn. Fear and regret are dissolved, and gratitude is blown so large it has no cutting edge. "The doctor said you were a good girl."

"Well isn't that silly; I wasn't. I was horrible. I cried and screamed and told him to keep his hands to himself. Though the thing I minded worst was when this horrible old nun shaved me with a dry razor."

"Poor Janice."

"No it was wonderful. I tried to count her toes but I was so dizzy I couldn't so I counted her eyes. Two. Did we want a girl? Say we did."

"I did." He discovers this is true, though the words discover the desire.

"Now I'll have somebody to side with me against you and Nelson."

"How is Nelson?"

"Oh. Every day, `Daddy home day?' until I could belt him, the poor saint. Don't make me talk about it, it's too depressing."

"Oh, damn," he says, and his own tears, that it seemed didn't exist, sting the bridge of his nose. "I can't believe it was me. I don't know why I left."

"Vnnn." She sinks deeper into the pillow as a lush grin spreads her cheeks apart. "I had a little baby."

"It's terrific."

"You're lovely. You look so tall." She says this with her eyes shut, and when she opens them, they brim with an inebriated idea; he has never seen them sparkle so. She whispers, "Harry. The girl in the other bed in here went home today so why don't you sneak around when you go and come in the window and we can lie awake all night and tell each other stories? Just like you've come back from the Army or somewhere. Did you make love to lots of other women?"

"Hey, I think you ought to go to sleep now."

"It's all right, now you'll make better love to me." She giggles and tries to move in the bed. "No I didn't mean that, you're a good lover you've given me a baby."

"It seems to me you're pretty sexy for somebody in your shape."

"That's how you feel," she says. "I'd invite you into bed with me but the bed's so narrow. Ooh."

"What?"

"I just got this terrible thirst for orangeade."

"Aren't you funny?"

"You're funny. Oh that baby looked so cross."

A nun fills the doorway with her wings. "Mr. Angstrom. Time."

"Come kiss," Janice says. She touches his face as he bends to inhale her ether again; her mouth is a warm cloud that suddenly splits and her teeth pinch his lower lip. "Don't leave," she says.

"Just for now. I'll be back tomorrow."

"Love you."

"Listen. I love you."

Waiting for him in the anteroom, Eccles asks, "How was she?"

"Terrific."

"Are you going to go back now, to uh, where you were?"

"No," Rabbit answers, horrified, "for Heaven's sake. I can't."