She came out of the room that was now Doug's room a few minutes later. "I was just standing there watching him. He's sleeping like a little angel."

"Good. I put on a pot of coffee. After two and a half, three hours on the freeway, I need it."

"I won't turn down a cup myself."

The rich, dark smell filled the kitchen. Vicki got cups from the dish drainer. "I'll pour."

"Thanks."

She handed him his, and was pouring her own when Doug began to cry. She wasn't expecting it. The smooth brown stream wavered. "Ouch," she said. She popped a finger in her mouth. When she took it out, she was laughing. "We'll just have to get used to that, won't we?"

HINDSIGHT

Most of this story is set in the town where I grew up, at a time when I was about four years old. To help my memory along, I was lucky enough to have my father's 1953 road atlas, which showed me how much of the Los Angeles freeway system that we take for granted today didn't exist a little more than a generation ago.

What sticks in my mind most about writing "Hindsight" is the night I finished it. I wrote the last few paragraphs at my in-laws' house about 12:30 a.m. just after Christmas 1983. Laura was deathly ill from stomach flu and couldn't do anything much about it because she'd found out she was pregnant a couple of weeks before. We were all supposed to leave at three in the morning to visit her relatives in San Francisco and give them the news. I went alone and was a zombie all the way up Interstate 5. Laura flew in a day or two later, mostly recovered. It was a sleepy, busy, happy time.

Katherine tapped on the study door. "Mail's here."

"Be out soon," Pete Lundquist called, not looking up from his typewriter. He flicked the carriage return lever. The paper advanced a double space. A small part of his mind noticed that the ribbon needed changing; it was nearer gray than black. All his conscious attention, though, was focused on the novelette he was working on.

Another couple of paragraphs got him to the end of a section and, by luck, to the end of a page at the same time. A good enough place to stop for a while, he decided. He rolled the story out of the big Underwood office machine, peeled off the carbons one by one and put them in their stacks, and set the original on top of the typewriter to come back to later.

He stretched till his bones creaked. He was tall enough that his fingertips missed the ceiling only by a few inches: a thin stick of a man, with angular, not quite handsome features, very blue eyes, and a shock of blond hair that no amount of Wildroot or Vitalis could flatten for long. In a couple of weeks he would turn thirty, something he tried not to remember.

"How's it going?" Katherine asked when he finally emerged. That was not just interest in the story for its own sake. When a free-lancer had trouble writing, steak turned to hamburger and hamburger to macaroni and cheese.

She relaxed, a little, as he said, "Not bad. I should be done in a couple of days, and get it out." He looked at her fondly. Physically they were total opposites; she was dark and inclined to plumpness, and he could rest his chin on the top of her head. But she had a good deal of the discipline that kept him steadily at the typewriter. With checks coming in on no schedule and for wildly varying amounts, she needed it.

"What's the good news today?" he asked.

"Not much." She displayed two envelopes and a magazine in a brown paper wrapper. "A gas bill, a check from Interplanetary?"

"The one should just about cover the other," he said sourly. Interplanetary paid late and not much and probably wasn't long for this world, but they had bought a short story he couldn't unload on any better market, so he had no real right to complain.

"?and the new Astonishing," Katherine finished.

"Aha!" he said. "Now I have the excuse I need for a break." She made a face at him; that just meant he would be busy later. She went into the kitchen to start dinner.

He lit a Chesterfield and sank into a shabby but comfortable overstuffed armchair with a sigh of contentment. It was a couple of minutes before four. He turned on the radio to catch the hourly news. The dial lit; he waited for the tubes to warm up and the sound to start.

He stripped off the Astonishing's wrapper, turned to the table of contents. He didn't have anything in this month's issue, though he had been in the last one and would show up again in a couple of months. He saw with pleasure that there was a long novelette by Mark Gordian. He wondered what this one would be like. Gordian had mastered a number of different styles.

First things first, he thought. No one who read Astonishing put off the editorial. James McGregor could be?often tried to be?infuriating, but he was never dull.

As Pete read, he listened to the news with half an ear. Queen Elizabeth's coronation dominated it. The Korean truce talks at Panmunjom dragged on and on. A new political party had been formed in the Philippines, and was promising great things. "And in sports," the announcer went on, "both the Seals and the Oaks fell further behind the Pacific Coast League?leading Hollywood Stars last night as?"

He was just turning to the Gordian story when the side door slammed. Not for the first time, he wondered how two small boys managed to sound like a platoon. "What's going on there?" he said, trying without much luck to sound stern.

"Daddy's out!" Wayne shouted joyfully. The six-year-old sounded as if Pete had just been released from jail. He came charging into the living room and flung himself at his father's lap. His brother Carl, who was seven, was right behind. Pete barely saved the Astonishing from getting squashed.

"And what have you two been up to?" he asked.

"Playing with Stevie next door," Carl answered. "His cousin Philip is visiting him from Denver. He's nine. He can throw a curveball."

"That's nice," Pete said. "Go wash your hands. With soap." He got nervous whenever his boys made a new friend?who knew whether the kid might be bringing infantile paralysis with him? The polio season was just starting, but it was already worse than last year's, and there had been almost 60,000 cases in 1952.

Pete did not get back to the Astonishing until he was done drying the dinner dishes and putting them away. He threw on a cardigan sweater; northern California late spring evenings were nothing like the ones he had grown up with in Wisconsin. But neither were the winters, thank God.

He flipped to the Gordian story. It was called "Reactions," which might mean anything. With Gordian, you never could tell?take the serial with the innocuous name "Watergate," for instance. Critics?serious critics?talked about the book version in the same breath with 1984. To Pete, though, it was science fiction at its best, straightforward extrapolation of how difficult government skulduggery would inevitably become when copy machines and recorders were everyday items.

It also made Joe McCarthy hopping mad, something else Pete approved of.

It was hard to see how the same author could also write "Houston, We Have a Problem," a gripping tale of an early moon flight gone wrong, and Tet Offensive, a future war gone wronger. Barring the exotic hardware, that one looked disquietingly possible too, if you noticed the page-four stories about the fun the French were having trying to hold on to Indochina.

But Gordian?damn him!?didn't confine himself to the near future. "Neutron Star" had had all the astronomers who read science fiction buzzing a couple of years ago (and there were a lot of them). So did "Supernova," though Pete found the casual way computing machines were handled in that one even more exciting. It was a yarn he wished he'd written himself.