The tears came in a rush and Mitch hid his face. She rose beside him and held him and apologized, feeling his shaking. He mumbled a confused and jerking series of words about how women simply did not understand, never could understand.

Kaye soothed him and lay down beside him and for a while the breeze blew the rain flap gently over their silence.

“It’s nothing wrong,” she said. She wiped his face and looked down on him, frightened at what she had provoked. “It’s the only right thing there is, maybe.”

“I’m sorry,” Kaye said stiffly as they loaded the car. A cool current of morning air slopped up from the flat farmland below the campsite. The leaves on the oak trees whispered. The tractors stood motionless on their perfect and empty furrows.

“No reason to be sorry,”Mitch said, shaking out the tent. He folded it and rolled it into its long fabric sheath, then, with Kaye’s help, unsocketed the tent poles and clapped them together into a fasces connected top to bottom by their stretching cords.

They had not made love during the night, and Mitch had slept very little.

“Any dreams?” Kaye asked as they sipped hot coffee from the pot on the camp stove. Mitch shook his head. “You?”

“I didn’t sleep more than a couple of hours,” Kaye said. “I dreamed of working at EcoBacter. All these people were coming in and out. You were there.” Kaye did not want to tell Mitch that in the dream she did not recognize him.

“Not very exciting,” Mitch said.

As they traveled, they saw little out of the ordinary, out of place. They drove west on the two-lane road through small towns, coal towns, old towns, tired towns, towns repainted and repaired, gussied up, with their grand old homes in the rich old neighborhoods made into bed-and-breakfasts for well-to-do young people from Philadelphia and Washington and even New York.

Mitch switched on the radio and they heard about candlelight vigils in the Capitol, ceremonies honoring the dead senators, funerals for others killed in the riot. There were stories on the vaccine effort, how scientists now believed the torch had been passed to James Mondavi or perhaps a team at Princeton. Jackson seemed on the descent, and despite all that had happened, Kaye felt sorry for him.

They ate at the High Street Grill in Morgantown, a new restaurant designed to look old and established, with Colonial decor and thick wood tables coated with clear plastic resin. The sign out front declared the restaurant to be “Just a bit older than the Millennium, and a hell of a lot less significant.”

Kaye watched Mitch closely as she picked at her club sandwich.

Mitch avoided her gaze and looked around at the customers, all stolidly involved in fueling their bodies. Older couples sat in silence; a lone man dropped his wool cap on the table next to a foam cup of coffee; three teenage girls in a booth picked at sundaes with long steel spoons. The staff was young and friendly and none of the women wore masks.

“Makes me believe I’m just an ordinary guy,” Mitch said quietly, looking down at the bowl of chili before him. “I never thought I’d make a good father.”

“Why?” Kaye asked, equally quiet, as if they were sharing a secret.

“I’ve always focused on my work, on wandering around and going places where there was interesting stuff. I’m pretty self-centered. I never thought any intelligent woman would want me to be a father, or a husband, for that matter. Some made it perfectly clear that wasn’t why they were with me.”

“Yeah,” Kaye said, completely tuned in on him, as if every word might contain an answer essential to solving something that puzzled her.

The waitress asked if they needed more tea or dessert. They declined.

“This is so ordinary,” Mitch said, lifting his spoon and swinging it through a small arc to measure the restaurant. “I feel like a big bug in the middle of a Norman Rockwell living room.”

Kaye laughed. “There,” she said.

“What do you mean, ‘there’?”

“That was you, saying that. And I just felt my insides quiver.”

“It’s the food,” Mitch said.

“It’s you.”

“I need to be a husband before I can be a father.”

“It certainly isn’t the food. I’m shaking, Mitch.” She held out her hand and he let go of the spoon to grasp it. Her fingers were cold and her teeth were chattering though the interior was warm.

“I think we should get married,” Mitch said.

“That’s a lovely idea,” Kaye said.

Mitch held out his hand. “Will you marry me?”

Kaye held her breath for a moment. “Oh, God, yes,” she said with a short puff of resolve.

“We’re crazy and we don’t know what we’re in for.”

“We don’t,” Kaye agreed.

“We’re on the edge of trying to make someone new, different from us,” Mitch said. “Don’t you find that terrifying?”

“Utterly,” Kaye said.

“And if we’re wrong, it’s just going to be disaster after disaster. Pain. Grief.”

“We are not wrong,” Kaye said. “Be my man.”

“I am your man.”

“Do you love me?”

“I love you in ways I’ve never felt before.”

“So fast. That’s incredible.”

Mitch nodded emphatically. “But I love you too much not to be a little critical.”

“I’m listening.”

“I’m troubled by you calling yourself a laboratory. That sounds cold and maybe a little out of it, Kaye.”

“I hope you see through the words. See what I hope to say and do.”

“I might,” Mitch said. “Just barely. The air feels very thin where we are, right now.”

“Like being on a mountain,” Kaye said.

“I don’t like mountains much,” Mitch said.

“Oh, I do,” Kaye said, thinking of the slopes and white peaks of Mount Kazbeg. “They give you freedom.”

“Yeah,” Mitch said. “You jump off, and you get ten thousand feet of pure freedom.”

As Mitch was paying their bill, Kaye walked toward the rest rooms. On impulse, she pulled her phone card and a piece of paper from her wallet and lifted the receiver on a pay phone.

She was calling Mrs. Luella Hamilton at her home in Richmond, Virginia. She had persuaded the number out of the hospital switchboard at the clinic.

A deep, smooth male voice answered.

“Excuse me, is Mrs. Hamilton in?”

“We’re having an early supper,” the man said. “Who wants her?”

“Kaye Lang. Dr. Lang.”

The man mumbled something, then called out “Luella!” and a few seconds passed. More voices. Luella Hamilton picked up the phone, her breath briefly pounding on the mouthpiece, then familiar and calm. “Albert says this is Kaye Lang, that right?”

“It’s me, Mrs. Hamilton.”

“Well, I’m at home now, Kaye, and don’t need no checking up on.”

“I wanted to let you know I’m no longer with the Task-force, Mrs. Hamilton.”

“Please call me Lu. Whyever not, Kaye?”

“A parting of the ways. I’m heading west and I was worried about you.”

“There’s nothing to be worried about. Albert and the kids are all right and I’m just fine.”

“I was just concerned. I’ve been thinking about you a lot.”

“Well, Dr. Lipton gave me these pills that kill babies before they’re very big, inside. You know about the pills.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t tell anybody, and we thought about it, but Albert and me, we’re going ahead. He says he believes some of what the scientists say, but not all, and besides, he says I’m too ugly to be messing around behind his back.” She let out a rich, disbelieving laugh. “He don’t know us women and our opportunities, does he, Kaye?” Then, in an undertone, to someone beside her, “Stop that. I’m talking here.”

“No,” Kaye said.

“We’re going to have this baby,” Mrs. Hamilton said, coming down heavy on have. “Tell Dr. Lipton and the folks at the clinic. Whatever he or she is, he or she is ours, and we’re going to give him or her a fighting chance.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Lu.”