VIII

This was the day she had hoped to avoid. She knew it would happen, she had simply hoped to put it off indefinitely. Infi-nitely.

A doctor has many difficult moments, moments she wishes would never have to occur. Regrettable moments that deal with unavoidable death or grieving relatives or angry patients. The standard, rehearsed words of comfort or confrontation can usually calm a tense situation, but even if not, the parting is generally professional and permanent.

Evelyn Fletcher, M.D., Ph.D., took a long drag on her ciga-rette, set it in the ashtray, and watched the smoke curl up past the cone of light from her desk lamp into the darkness of her office. In this situation, she was facing the end of her medical career. Words would be useless. She had endured another crisis just as severe years ago: the day she had to tell her boyfriend that she was pregnant and had decided on an abortion. Words could change nothing then, either. Ian Brunner was another premed at UCLA in the late 1950s when the world took a breather between Korea and Vietnam, between the Air Age and the Space Age. Between D-Day and Dealy Plaza.

He sported a crew cut, skinny tie, and spoke of medicine as a way to make a great living. His only regret was that he had to be around sick people all the time.

Ian and Evelyn were an odd item at the school functions. She dressed like a beatnik in black leotards, black dance shoes, and a black cashmere sweater that hung to her thighs. Her jet-black hair, pulled into a single thick ponytail, reached down to the small of her back. This did not endear her to the more staid eighteen-year-olds in premed. That she carried a copy of Gray's Anatomy instead of Sartre's Nausea set her apart from the beat crowd, too.

She liked Ian, though, with his conservative trappings that failed to disguise a rebellious streak. If their academic records had not been so superb, their notorious behavior might have gotten them sacked in their first year. Both, however, enjoyed their studies as well as their lives. That was why she never quite understood his reaction to her announcement. They had finished a chemistry class to-gether and gone for dinner to Ship's on Wilshire, a brisk walk of a few blocks in the cool winter air. She was troubled all the way, not really knowing how to broach the subject. All through the meal she had a sinking feeling that no matter what she chose, things would change between them. Finally, on their way back, she lit up two Camels, handed one to Ian, and said, "A friend of mine died today."

"Who's that?" he asked.

"A rabbit named Friedman."

She didn't have to elaborate.

He took a long drag on his cigarette. His expression was unreadable. "So what's the plan?"

"I can't have a baby," she said in an apologetic tone that surprised her. "I've got years of med school ahead. I'm seeing someone tomorrow to get"-her voice caught for a moment-"to get it fixed." They walked in silence for a long time. Finally, his voice cool and muted, he asked, "Is it mine?"

"Yes."

He flicked his cigarette into the gutter. "Are you sure?"

She stopped to stare at him. "Yes. How could you doubt me when I-" All pretensions of cool adulthood fell away from him in a blaze of anger. "I don't see how you could go ahead and just kill it. Kill it! Take a miracle like that and-"

"Ian, I-"

"Don't try to rationalize it. It's your body. Go ahead and get sliced up. Just don't pretend you're not killing our baby."

Without a glance back at her, Ian strode away into the night.

That was the last conversation they had ever shared. When Evelyn visited a Santa Monica doctor the following evening, she went alone, lonely and scared. When the deed was done, she slipped into the darkness to seek out a hotel room nearby. She spent two days there, in bed, coping with the physical and spiritual pain of her decision.

It was in that drab room with its window overlooking the bright and beautiful Pacific that Evelyn first came to realize that there had to be a way out of the horrendous morass of death and guilt that surrounded abortion.

She returned to her classes the next Monday and never slowed down. She entered medical school four years later, concentrating on reproductive endocrinology. If she found out the how and why of pregnancy, she could find a way to free women from abortion.

Studying birth and death would be her life.

"

It was twenty years later that she experienced her final, cru-cial insight. Soaking in the antique tub in her small bathroom, she read through a stack of medical journals at a swift but-for her-leisurely pace. Every fifteen minutes or so, she would drain two inches of cooling bathwater and add the same amount from the hot tap. She also added more jasmine-scented bath foam in order to maintain the heat-trapping layer of bubbles that surrounded her.

The effect of all this on her magazines elicited clucks of dis-approval from any colleagues who happened to see one of the warped, stained periodicals on her desk at the medical center. Letting a copy of the New England Journal of Medicine degen-erate to such a condition was equivalent to using the Bible as a doorstop.

Her usual riposte was that she, at least, read the bloody things.

Immersed in the issue of Microsurgery Proceedings she held inches above the surface foam, Fletcher quickly scanned through articles until one headline fairly leaped out at her face. It was not a particularly dramatic title: "Some Progress in Vas-cular Reattachment and Nerve Connection in Transplanted Rat Cerebral Tissue." The body of the article, though, outlined a delicate and egregiously complicated microsurgical laser tech-nique for attaching the minuscule blood vessels and nerve junctions of a rat brain inside the cramped environs of an-other rat's skull.

One would not expect a rat to survive such cavalier treat-ment, but the one in the article did. Not only that, it also ex-hibited a small degree of motor response and ate what the brain's previous owner had been trained to eat. The rat died a week later, succumbing to foreign tissue rejection. Such an article might not in itself have intrigued someone interested in reproductive endocrinology except that it out-lined in fairly rigorous fashion each step involved in the mi-crosurgical process. And Fletcher had just finished reading an article in Fertility Week that outlined the latest progress in nonsurgical ovum transfer in the cattle industry. Adrift in the warm, softly undulating waters of the bathtub, Evelyn laid the magazine down on the stack nearby and closed her eyes. Thoughts and images associated freely in the open frontiers of her mind. This was the time in which her wildest dreams occurred. Not in sleep, that lost, aimless time when unbidden symbols clashed pointlessly in obscure meaning. In the world between full alertness and relaxed bliss lay the realm of focused imagination.

Jasmine drifted into her nostrils. Steam dripped from the mirror and the walls. She was once again in placental warmth, her body supported, her mind free to wander.

Non-surgical ovum transfer sounded promising for human infertility. It was no answer to abortion, though, because the fertilized ovum could only be removed before it implanted in the uterine wall. A woman would have to know she's pregnant less than five days after conception in order to have the egg lavaged out. As a treatment for infertility, it had-as the au-thors suggested-great promise. To remove an embryo that had already implanted, though, involved cutting or tearing away infinitesimal connections between the embryo and the forest of capillaries in which it nests. Connections that grow stronger, thicker, and more complex with every passing day.

By the time a woman realizes that she's pregnant, the fetus has already made itself at home. Still... She knew that late-second-trimester abortions were some-times performed in such a way that the fetus survived only to die of intentional neglect outside the womb. Such stories chilled her, just as she was warmed by the apocryphal tale of the woman who changed her mind after such an event and took the living child home with her.

A fertilized egg is viable outside the womb; it can even be frozen and stored indefinitely. A fetus is generally viable out-side the womb after the twenty-fourth week or so. But for twenty-three weeks the fetus requires a uterus in which to attach itself. To remove it at any point during those twenty-three weeks is invariably fatal.

Unless one found another uterus, she mused. She sat up in the tub. That had always been her stumbling block. Abortuses were by their nature unwanted. Who would care for them if they survived?

Yet another bloated state bureaucracy? She was well aware of the sickening abuses within the government-financed orphanages and mental hospitals. But if another woman wanted it, if non-surgical ovum transfer could solve infertility, then surgical embryo transfer could solve abortion and infertility at the same time!

The two branches of medicine that seemed so vastly and inalterably opposed fused together in her mind. She closed her eyes and slid to chin depth in the warm waters. The scent of jasmine filled her as a bold new future formed out of dark-ness. Her career choice now made total sense to her. She would no longer need to justify aborting some pregnancies while ini-tiating others as merely "giving women a full choice." She would become the conduit between the two. One woman's choice to end a pregnancy would become another woman's opportunity to begin one.

It all seemed so sensible, efficient, and-she savored the word-moral that she felt an ancient guilt floating free from her as if it were being washed away by the water in which she reposed. This was the way. She had met her destiny face to face.

"

"Totally out of the question!"

Dr. Jacob Lawrence stared at her with undisguised contempt. He was fifteen years older than Fletcher and sometimes be-haved as if he had been born a century before. As a member of the ethics committee at Bayside, though, his support was cru-cial to any future research she proposed. The man with the thinning white hair gazed at Fletcher with rheumy eyes over his horn-rims. "You can't seriously ask the board even to review a request for such a project, let alone approve it."

"I'm not asking for an actual project," she said. "Just a study of the potential ethical questions. Obviously, there has to be a groundwork in animal research before we could even contem-"

"I don't care about the research. Things such as this should not even be open to discussion." He looked at her again, frown-ing. "You think something like this is even possible?" Fletcher spoke quickly, eagerly. "The fetus does all the work in a pregnancy. It generates the hormones, it makes the deci-sions. I'm certain that microsurgical attachment to the uter-ine wall of the recipient would be sufficient to allow the fetus to gestate in the new envir-"

"All right." Lawrence waved a hand for silence. Fletcher fin-gered the pencil in her hand; she knew better than to smoke in Lawrence's presence. Bayside's assistant administrator looked down through his spectacles at the pages before him. "I'm not going to leave this up to the ethics committee alone. I'm going to send it to an outside consultant. UCLA has an expert in infertility. I read something by him in JAMA last month. Works with pregnant women a lot. Ian Brunner."

Evelyn's fingernails plunged into her hand.

Lawrence rubbed his nose. "Ever heard of him?"

"Yes." She sat back, stunned. She knew what the outcome would be. "But wouldn't there be better qualified people at USC?"

Lawrence cleared his throat. "My dear, I am a Bruin."

And that settled that. "

It took Dr. Brunner two weeks to return a twenty-page de-nunciation, which she never saw. It took an additional two years of tabling and extensions by the ethics committee before they issued their own determination. Quoting liberally from Dr. Brunner's analysis, the committee essentially stated that surgical embryo transplantation was impossible, and even if it weren't, the ethical conundrum posed by using the fetus of one woman as seed stock for another made the entire proce-dure reprehensible from any viewpoint-ethical, moral, or legal.

"Two years wasted," Fletcher muttered over her coffee.

"What do you expect?" asked the lovely woman across from her. Adrianne Dyer possessed the kind of body that filled her tight uniform in ways that caught the eye of nearly every male patient, orderly, intern, resident, and doctor. It was not her fault, and she permitted no entanglements to mar her professional conduct. Fletcher liked the taciturn young woman and sought to trans-fer her to the Reproductive Endocrinology section. Right now they drank coffee in the cafeteria and discussed the scotched project.

"Hospitals will always be conservative," Nurse Dyer said. "They have lots of money to think about."

"Yes." Fletcher nodded. "Why risk it on saving a few lives?" Dyer shrugged, tossing her head in a way that sent a cas-cade of reddish-auburn hair whipping over her shoulder. "So work without their approval and give them a fait accompli." Fletcher grinned. "That'd sear their stethoscopes." Her good humor faded almost instantly. "I've been doing theoretical work and instrument design, but if I so much as thought about try-ing, I'd lose my privileges so fast my head wouldn't have time to spin."

"Reword it and resubmit it to a different committee." Dyer took a long draught of coffee while she watched Fletcher through deep hazel eyes. "It's worth the struggle." She fin-ished off the cup. "I'd like to help."

"Thanks. You know about me. What brought you to the point of wanting to help a mad doctor?" Dyer shrugged again. "You don't need to suffer a personal crisis to determine what's right and wrong. What you said makes sense. If you have a certain perspective."

Fletcher thought quietly for a long while. Dyer said nothing more, allowing the silence to continue. That afternoon, Fletcher forced through the nurse's trans-fer to RE. For the next six years they worked together, hypoth-esized, tinkered, researched, and conspired together. Though they rarely met outside the hospital, they spent countless days in Fletcher's office in after-hours' discussions. They imagined every possible ramification of surgical embryo transfer. It was Adrianne who coined the term transoption. Evelyn considered the word transortion for "transfer birth" as an alternative to abortion, "bad birth."

"Doesn't roll off the tongue well," Dyer said. "You shouldn't make it sound anything like abortion, anyway. Raises too many images." She thought for a moment. "Make it sound more like adoption. Doesn't something like transoption sound cheerier?"

Dr. Fletcher admitted that it did. "The transfer option. Transoption." She felt as if they had created something en-tirely new, exciting, and shatteringly important just by utter-ing a word. They were trailblazers on a new path for medi-cine, a new, wider road for human rights. The future lay daz-zlingly bright ahead. "

Now all that might collapse into lawsuits, prison, or worse.

Evelyn struggled to find a way to tell Valerie Dalton that she had a daughter. She ran through possible conversational sce-narios in the theater of her mind. None of them turned out well. Why, she finally wondered, after lying all this time, should I suddenly tell the truth?

She thought out the details, then telephoned.

"Hello?" said the voice on the other end.

"Hello, this is Dr. Evelyn Fletcher at-"

"Oh, hi! You have reached Ron and Valerie's place," said the recording. "We're not in right now, or maybe we are and are listening to see if we want to talk to you."

"Christ," muttered Fletcher.

"But if you wait for the tone and leave your name, phone number, the day and time you called, a brief message, and three character references, we'll consult our attorneys and astrologers and get back to you. But don't get your hopes up. Thank you for sharing."

Fletcher used the time to light up a Defiant, take a few puffs, and frown. If she disliked anything, it was flippant-and lengthy-telephone answering messages.

The phone beeped. "This is Dr. Evelyn Fletcher of Bayside University Medical Center. I'd like to speak with Valerie Dalt-"

There was a clattering noise on the line, followed by a woman's voice. "Hello?"

"Valerie Dalton?"

"Yes."

"Dr. Fletcher. You were in to see me last March."

"Yes, Doctor. I remember. How could I forget?" Her voice was hesitant, curious at a doctor's call at such a late hour.

"I know I'm calling a little late, but we have a minor crisis here that I hope you can help us with."

"What do you mean?"

Evelyn took a deep drag, letting the smoke escape with her words. "We've gone over the records of our blood tests, and yours turned up as having the right combination of factors that could help us save a very sick baby here. What we'd like is for you to come in tomorrow morning for a more thorough screen-ing with an eye toward a transfusion."

"Oh, I don't really have the time to come-"

"Miss Dalton, I don't normally call complete strangers ask-ing for blood. This really is a matter of life or death."

Evelyn only heard telephone static for long seconds.

"What about the baby's mother and father?" Valerie asked.

"The father's unavailable, and the mother's blood type is incompatible. And there are no siblings or other close rela-tives. We exhausted those avenues before we searched the computer files for a close HLA match."

"I really don't know," Valerie said. "I've never given blood before. With all this talk about AIDS and all, I-"

"You can't get anything from giving blood." Fletcher paused, her mind racing through logical arguments until she hit upon one. "Valerie-have you had any feelings of guilt about termi-nating your pregnancy?"

After a moment of quiet, the voice on the other end said, "Yes."

"You might be able to assuage some of those feelings by giv-ing the gift of life to another child." Silence crisscrossed the wires for long moments. Evelyn knew that if she said nothing more, Valerie would have to make the next move to break the awkward hiatus.

After a pause that almost seemed itself to be a battle, Valerie's soft voice said, "All right. What should I do?"

"

Mark Landry gazed at the blonde entering the lab and thought, What a babe! Wearing a maroon cashmere sweater dress and matching high heels, she looked to be in her mid-twenties. That was all right. He liked older women. His fin-gers tapped at the counter.

Valerie approached the skinny laboratory technologist-he was the only one in the lab whose life at the moment appeared to be untainted by physical labor. She handed him a slip of paper.

"Here for a blood test and a pint, eh? Sit up here, Ms. Dalton. This won't take long." She sat on the cot. There were three other people in the room, all hooked up to blood bags. She found it remarkably difficult to look at the people or the apparatus. She kept her eyes focused on the young man.

He was a lanky, freckled surf blond possessing an eager, admiring wolf gaze. She was flattered, but since she was in a situation that involved pain and bleeding, she wished for the entire episode to conclude swiftly.

He recorded her blood pressure, taking longer than normal to fit the cuff on her smooth, tanned arm. He gazed at her eyes-grey in the fluorescent light of the lab-while attempt-ing to make conversation.

"My name's Mark." He glanced at the paperwork. "Uh, is this for donation or autologous storage?"

"Autologous storage?"

"You know-setting blood aside before an operation so you only get your own. Safer, these days."

"No, it's for a baby here. It's-"

"Oh, right," he said, removing the pressure cuff and substi-tuting a stretch of elastic. "Directed donation for the Chandler girl. Her mother was in the center's fertility program. Just born three days ago and already in trouble." He donned a double pair of clear plastic gloves. "I'm going to take a drop of blood from your ear lobe."

"Is she sick because of the fertility program?" She stared at the needle Landry removed from a sealed package, then at the syringe he produced. She took a deep breath, focusing again on the man's angular, boyish face.

Landry dabbed antiseptic on her right ear lobe, then stuck her with a disposable needle in a brisk, practiced motion. Draw-ing off a crimson droplet into a slender tube, he held the blood over a cylinder filled with blue liquid. The droplet fell, hit the surface, and sank to join a pile of blackish globules at the bot-tom.

"Congratulations. You're not anemic." He slid a sample vial up the hollow back of the syringe.

"Anyway she got a little ear infection, and they gave her antibiotics. Most kids have no prob-lem, but every once in a while you get one that's sensitive and gets bone-marrow suppression. Transfusions can help. Bone-marrow transplants-Okay, make a fist."

"What?"

"Make a fist and squeeze a few times. I need to find a vein. Anyway-" His thumb felt around the crook of her right arm. "Bone-marrow transplants will probably do the trick. Here we go." Valerie flinched at the sharp jab of the needle. She felt a flutter in her stomach. Landry pushed the sample vial against the back of the needle until it penetrated the rubber stopper.

"Whoa-careful. Let me get it in there." He poked around gently until the dark red liquid pulsed suddenly into the tube. Taping the needle to her arm, he let the vial fill up, removed it, and quickly attached the long, thin plastic tube from the blood bag.

Valerie gazed at the bag. From the squarish periphery of the large central bag extended several smaller bags connected by tubes. It looked like a squashed octopus. "What are all those things hanging there?"

Landry smiled. "This is what we use for baby transfusions. We fill up the big bag. Then, whenever we need the small amount a baby requires, we can squeeze some into a satellite bag, pinch it off, and use it. That way we don't have to enter the main bag. The blood stays usable longer that way." During all this, he took the opportunity to scan the sheet she had given him.

"I see you visited Dr. Fletcher a few months back."

Valerie frowned. "Yes."

"Were you also involved in the fertility program?"

Valerie stiffened, almost popping the needle out of place. "You mean Dr. Fletcher's involved in fertility programs, too?"

A sinking feeling of embarrassment overcame the young technologist. His brown eyes glanced down at her arm. "I'm sorry. I didn't know that you'd been... I mean, some people think it's strange for her to be working both sides of the street..." That's not right. "I mean, I can understand her trying to maximize women's choices, no matter what they..." He taped the tubes to her arm, squeezed the blood bag a few times to distribute the anticoagulant, and let it hang below the cot.

"There," he said with relief, grasping the sample vial in his suddenly sweaty hand. "Just lie down, relax, and squeeze this every few seconds." He handed her a rubber cylinder. "I'll be back in a few minutes."

He made for the water cooler at the far end of the room and took a stiff drink of Sparkletts. A candy striper noticed his flus-tered expression and wandered over to him.

"What's up, Mark?"

"Nothing," he said quietly. "I just have all the bedside man-ner of a meat packer." He handed the blood sample to the technologist behind the counter, then quickly returned to Valerie's side.

Valerie squeezed and released, squeezed and released. It was the queasiest feeling to know that each contraction sent an extra squirt of blood into the bag. The plastic tube lay draped across her arm. It felt warm and sickening, like a snake that had slithered out of the desert sun to rest on her flesh. A wave of unease bordering on nausea washed over her when she dared to glance at where the tube of dark red blood disap-peared under white adhesive tape at the inside of her elbow.

Some people did this every six weeks. Her boss, Mr. Sewell, was a member of the Rare Blood Club and kept arranging bloodmobile visits for the office. She never donated. Now she knew why. Squeeze. Release. Squeeze. Release.

She reminded herself that this was for a little baby whose life was in far greater peril than hers. She thought about how strange it was that blood-something spilled so easily from cuts, in fights, in wars-could, if gathered carefully, be so valu-able to another.

Squeeze. Release. It really wasn't all that difficult.

After what seemed to be hours of uncomfortable silence, Landry said, "There we go, that's enough." He pressed the bag a couple of times, causing the tube along her arm to creep warmly across her flesh. It made her shudder.

"Do I keep squeezing?" she asked.

He shook his head, busying himself with removing the needle, putting a piece of cotton over the puncture, and fold-ing her arm back. "Don't sit up. Just hold it like this and press," he said. He took the bag over to the sealing unit, and stamped the blood-filled tubing at regular intervals to create almost a dozen sample blisters. He labeled the bag with stickers that read Directed Donation Baby Girl Renata Chandler, adhering a similar tear-away portion of the bar-coded sticker to Valerie's file. That done, he brought a cup of orange juice and two choco-late chip cookies to her.

"Here's the payoff."

Valerie accepted them with a grateful smile.

"Just relax," he told her. "I have to deliver the lab results to Dr. Fletcher." He gazed at her with a troubled expression, then rose and walked away.

Valerie wondered if something was wrong.

"

Landry found Dr. Fletcher in the infant intensive care unit. It looked like any other ICU except that the tubes and wires from all the equipment streamed into a clear bassinet not much larger than a bread box.

Evelyn stood beside the instruments, watching the beat of Renata's heart.

"When did you transfer to pediatrics, Doc?"

Fletcher looked up at the intruder. "Mark, did you get the printout?"

"She's still O positive," he said deadpan. "HLA and serolo-gies will take until six o'clock and Debbie said you'll be lucky to get them that fast." He handed her a manila folder. She opened it up to scan the contents. He took the opportunity to check out the baby.

Renata lay inside the germ-free chamber, hooked to an IV. Aside from her waxy pallor, she looked perfectly healthy. Un-der the warm glow of the heat lamp, her sparse hair shone blond with the softest of golden-bronze highlights. She lay on her back, quietly staring up at a bunny and duckie mobile hang-ing from inside the top of the box.

Fletcher seemed to study the results with cursory attention. "This will do very well," she said.

"Question," said Landry. "How did you know to bring her in when her tests before and after the abortion didn't include the HLA typing?"

Fletcher closed the folder and looked down at Landry from her half-inch advantage. "Dalton's O

positive and so is the baby. I had her frozen sample retested, but the HLA results were ambiguous. Since Renata has a rare HLA, I grasped at straws. If we're lucky, Mark, my `woman doctor's intuition' will pan out, and this baby'll have a better chance." She clapped him on the shoulder. "And isn't that what medicine's all about?"

"Aren't marrow donors supposed to be close relatives? Mr. and Mrs. Chandler both seem fit." What a snoop. "Do you have access to their medical histo-ries?" Landry shook his head.

"Then you couldn't be aware of the mismatched ABO and Lewis factors and Mr. Chandler's history of hepatitis B, could you?"

Landry shook his head again.

"Would it be safe to assume that a closely matched stranger's marrow might, under such circumstances, be preferable to the parents'?"

"Well, yes, but why did you go straight to this woman in-stead of going through the marrow registry program?"

"I told you," Fletcher said. "Her HLA is rare."

"But-"

"Look, scut puppy." She was tired, worried, and irritated. "You stick the patients, and I'll do the doctoring. Okay?"

Landry said nothing. Turning, he walked out of the infant ICU, leaving Dr. Fletcher behind in her anger.

He made straight for the file room and its computer.

"Is this thing logged on?" he asked.

The busy record keeper nodded without lifting his gaze from a stack of forms. Landry started tapping away, pleased to know that he was accessing the files with someone else's security code. Though everyone did it, he felt he had extra reasons to be secretive. The screen offered up the files on Karen and Renata Chan-dler. He scrolled through them quickly, noting within instants that their Rh factors were identical. As Dr. Fletcher indicated, though, their ABOs were indeed mismatched. The mother had AB blood, the baby had type O. A transfusion or marrow trans-plant from mother to daughter would be fatal. Renata's own blood would hemolyze-clump up and kill her.

No mention existed of the father in either file, so the hepati-tis B comment couldn't... Landry looked back at the blood groups. Something was wrong. Mother AB, daughter O. That can't be, he thought. Can it? If the mother was AB, the daughter would have to be A, B, or AB. She could never be O. Ever.

When the realization struck him, he laughed. Of course! She was in the fertility program. She got someone else's egg. Landry shook his head. What a jerk. Valerie Dalton must have been the egg donor. That's why Fletcher brought her in. Nothing super unusual in that.

Except, he realized, that Valerie Dalton was unaware of Fletcher's involvement in the fertility program. She was only familiar with the Fletcher that performed abortions.

A sickening sensation churned inside Landry's stomach.

Calling up Dalton's file, he noted with relief that the date of her abortion was March third. Scrolling back to Karen's file, he saw that her fertility operation took place January seven-teenth. Maybe I'm wrong. I have to be wrong. Or maybe...

He printed out copies of the screen pages, then darted over to Reproductive Endocrinology, fifty feet down the hallway.

The receptionist listened to his request. "Well, hon," she said in her raspy voice. "I don't know what good seeing the old appointment books will do. We don't keep patients' addresses there."

"No," Landry said, thinking as swiftly as possible. "But you do keep phone numbers. Just let me look at the month of March. I can find the patient's name if I can correlate the time of the operation to the time of the transfusion."

"I don't know-"

"Look, Mrs. Welsch, if the transfusion you'd received half a year ago had turned out to have HIV in it, you'd want someone to track you down and tell you, wouldn't you?"

"Why, so I can worry myself to death?" She pushed away on her swivel high chair to the shelves behind the counter. A half rotation brought her face to spine with the appointment book back files. She removed a thick blue canvas-covered binder.

"Here's the first half of the year, hon. Bring it back when you're done." He thanked her and carried the binder off to the break room. Too crowded. He found an examination room that wasn't in use and closed the door. Placing the binder on the couch, he opened it to January seventeenth. Karen Chandler had a one o'clock appointment. No Valerie Dalton. Then he checked March third. No Karen Chandler, but a six-thirty appointment for Valerie Dalton. He sighed and stared at the page. It was a stupid theory, any-He stared at an entry next to Dalton's. Reaching overhead, he pulled down the lamp and switched it on. The intense white glare brought out every detail of the page. The entry next to Dalton's had been written over an erasure.

Landry angled the lamp to bring out surface details. It looked as if the name Chandler had been there once. He reached into his breast-pocket pen protector. Taking the edge of a pencil to the entry, he lightly rubbed all over until only the grooves made by the original entry showed as white traces against a grey background.

He gazed at the tracing, barely able to make out a captial K, a small e and n, and the last name Chandler. He frowned for a moment, almost not wanting to believe. Then he went back to January seventeenth. Karen Chandler's appointment had been written in over an erasure of another woman's name.

Appointment changes were common, Landry reminded him-self. That's why entries are written in pencil. The sick feeling, though, would not go away. "

Valerie noted the young man's troubled expression as he returned to check her progress. She sat up with his help and had another glass of orange juice.

"If you had it to do over again," he suddenly asked, "would you have gone through with your abortion?"

Valerie turned to stare at him in shock. "I don't think that's any of your concern. How dare you ask-"

"What if some way existed," he said quickly, his words tum-bling out in a rapid, anxious whisper,

"for you to have ended your pregnancy without harming the fetus? What if your baby were ali-" The door to the blood room swung open. Dr. Fletcher strode in and scanned the room to see Landry crouched next to Valerie Dalton. He shut up the instant he saw her. Rising up unsteadily, he resumed his work.

Valerie said nothing to the technologist. Her confused eyes watched Fletcher's approach.

"Have them get the blood over to infant ICU," she told Landry, then turned to gaze down upon Valerie. "I want you to know how much we appreciate your doing this to help a little stranger. I hope that we can count on you for subsequent do-nations."

With the doctor's aid, Valerie slid her legs off the cot and sat up straighter, her left hand still applying pressure to the crook of her right arm. "How often will I have to do this?" Fletcher sat next to her on the padded table. "There's no way of knowing. Transfusions are adequate in providing sup-portive care. Sometimes it's all that's needed to help the bone-marrow to recover and start producing blood cells again. There's a surer way, though."

"What's that?" Valerie stared at the floor, unable to look at the doctor.

"A bone-marrow transplant will give the baby what she needs directly. Recovery is almost immediate and generally perma-nent in most such procedures."

"What do you mean by a transplant?" Valerie asked. She noticed that the floor below had two dark brown spots on the green linoleum. Her blood? Or some stranger's before her?

"It's not the same as an organ transplant. We don't do any surgery. It's almost like a blood transfusion except that we put the needle into your hip or sternum where we can aspirate some bone-marrow. Then we inject it in the baby just like a blood transfusion. The cell colonies swim around in her blood-stream and instinctively head right for her bones. There they set up shop and start manufacturing new cells. And then she can lead a full and healthy life." The doctor put a friendly arm around her patient. "And-if your tissue types match-you could be the one who saves her."

"Does it hurt?"

"I'd be lying if I said it didn't. But dying hurts a lot more. And not just baby Renata. Her parents have been trying to have a baby for years and she's their first. Remember what I said about... well, you know. What I said last night."

Valerie looked up into Dr. Fletcher's sympathetic eyes. "I'd like to see her." Fletcher's eyes became guarded, her entire expression stiff-ening imperceptibly. "That isn't really possible. She's in Inten-sive Care."

Landry, gathering up his equipment slowly in order to eaves-drop, said, "She can look through the observation window." He watched the doctor for her reaction, trying to maintain an innocent, helpful expression.

She shot him a troubled glance, then coolly agreed.

"

Their steps rang in Valerie's ears like hammers chiseling at glass. She and the doctor walked slowly down the corridors of the medical center, Landry behind them with the blood, pass-ing scores of patients of all ages: the aged, tired ones in Geri-atrics; the bright, struggling ones in Pediatrics; the invisible crying voices in the postpartum section; and, finally, a section of near silence.

"Infant ICU," Landry said. He watched Valerie for her reac-tion as she stepped warily toward a large plate-glass window.

Inside the ICU stood a man and a woman bent over an in-strument-laden crib, their backs to the window. The woman's straight dark hair reached down below her shoulders to flip under in the last inch or two. She wore a violet satin robe with matching terry slippers that were expensive enough not to look unfashionable. She shook a rattle over the bubble top of the crib.

The blond-headed man next to her was swaddled in hospi-tal garb beneath which lay grey pants with cargo pockets and a soft green polo shirt. He leaned over the isolation crib, a bright yellow rubber duck in his hand. He squeezed it a couple of times, then let his hand fall to his side. The gesture of weakening hope caused Valerie's throat to tighten. She swallowed, then stepped to the far end of the win-dow for a view of the baby.

Through the window and Plexiglas she saw a tiny waxen figure. It wasn't pink the way a baby should be. It didn't move and kick the way a baby should. She had seen enough babies in the park just the other week to know what a healthy one did with its time.

"Stay here," Fletcher said to Valerie and Landry, taking the blood bag from the technologist. The woman at cribside looked up when Fletcher entered. She said something to Evelyn as the doctor set up the IV. Then she chanced to glance at the window. Her gaze riveted Valerie's. Valerie lowered her eyes. The look felt as if it had been one of recognition. It wasn't the look one would give a stranger who was helping to save a daughter's life.

Dr. Fletcher, through the glove box, lifted Renata up in the chamber for a moment to change her diaper. Even from the distance of several feet, Valerie saw the blond hair and blue-grey eyes. She felt something tighten in her stomach, something else go cold and black in her head. The room tilted dangerously sideways. Reaching out for something to grasp, she touched Landry's wiry arms. They steadied her, guided her away from the room, away from the child.

He helped her to the cafeteria, where he bought her a large orange juice and a slice of chocolate cake. Pointing out that she needed to replenish her blood-sugar levels, he encour-aged the stunned woman to eat. After she had finished in me-chanical silence, he asked, "Was that your daughter?"

"It's impossible," she said, her voice dull and flat. "I had an abortion."

"You had your abortion the same date and hour that Mrs. Chandler had her fertility operation." Landry leaned forward across the table, whispering with conspiratorial intensity. "Your room was right next to hers. Dr. Fletcher performed both op-erations. She gave Mrs. Chandler your baby."

"It's impossible," she repeated with weary insistence. "I had an abortion." Landry kept at her. "They transferred the embryo from you to Karen Chandler. You didn't want to be pregnant. Mrs. Chan-dler did. Dr. Fletcher has been performing non-surgical ovum transfer for years. That's where you impregnate a donor woman with a husband's sperm, flush out the fertilized ovum before it's had a chance to attach to her uterus, and place it in the wife's uterus where it implants itself. So the wife's preg-nant with a baby that is her husband's but not hers."

"They do that?" Valerie only spoke out of some dimly sensed social reflex that insisted she keep up her end of the conver-sation. She stared down at the bottom of the orange juice glass.

"They've been doing it for years. But I can see that Dr. Fletcher has gone way, way beyond ovum transfer. Into the postimplantation stage, long after the five-day preimplanta-tion period allowed by non-surg-"

He reached out to seize Valerie's arm. Her pale head tilted toward the table. Fumbling in his pocket for smelling salts, he eventually found a popper and broke it under her nose. Other concerned staffers charged toward her, each reach-ing out with an ampule of ammonia salts or amyl nitrate.

"It's all right," Landry said. "First-time blood donor." At that, everyone nodded and returned to their tables, some laughing with relief. Nothing worse than for a visitor to code on them in the middle of lunch.

Her eyes jerked open, her body recoiling at the sharp scent of the salts. The swimming blackish swirl was wrenched from her with unsettling swiftness. Mark put the acrid capsule in the stamped aluminum ashtray between them.

"There," he said. "All better." He gazed at her for a few mo-ments, deciding on what he should do. Finally, he asked, "Would you excuse me for a minute?"

Valerie nodded. Landry headed for the hospital phone. Valerie resumed her meditation on the bottom of the glass. An avalanche of thought and emotion coursed through her. It has to be true, she thought. Nothing else makes sense. Noth-ing else explains everything. She gave no thought to the how of it all. She knew nothing of surgery or medical science. If someone had told her before that such an operation were impossible, she would have prob-ably agreed without thinking about it. Now, told that it was quite possible, she just as readily believed it with as little thought. Medicine was magic to her, an arcane, occult art that merely existed, causelessly, in a world where so many aspects of technology seemed simply to be there when most needed. Or when least wanted. The how did not matter. What mattered most to Valerie was the why. Why do that? Why take my baby? The baby is mine. She doesn't look anything like her parents. She must be mine. The thoughts cascaded over and over. Why take my baby when there are donor mothers all over? When there are other ways? Why do something so complicated, so risky, when there must have been safer ways? Open ways, legal ways.

She was certain that what Dr. Fletcher did must be illegal. Why else would she hide it? A cold anger gestated within her soul.

"Valerie?"

She looked up. Dr. Fletcher towered over her. She stared, speechless, as the woman sat across from her in the same seat in which the medical technologist had moments ago exposed the doctor's crime.

"I'd like to talk to you," Fletcher said, "about the possibility of a bone-marrow transplant, if that would be all right."

Valerie said nothing for a moment, then asked, "What hap-pens to fetuses after they're aborted?" The question caught Fletcher off guard. It took her a mo-ment to compose her thoughts. "That's not a pleasant topic even for doctors to discuss."

"Try me."

"Well," she said, striving for as neutral and sympathetic a tone as possible, "some hospitals just dispose of the fetuses along with the other bits and pieces they normally remove during operations. Some pathology departments catalogue and preserve the interesting ones. Some incinerate them, some bury them. Some use parts of the fetus, such as the liver, pan-creas, and brain tissue, in research and treatment of other patients. There are ethical review boards that-"

"What happened to my baby?"

Fletcher gazed intently at Valerie. The young woman stared resolutely at the tabletop.

"It was cremated."

Valerie's voice nearly exploded. "That's a goddamned lie."

People at the other tables turned to stare with the eager cu-riosity of co-workers watching an assault on one of their less loved number.

Evelyn knew that what she said in the next second and how she said it would either create the worst enemy she could ever have or soften the shock enough for her to understand.

"Yes, Valerie," she said softly. "Renata was once yours." Valerie slammed her fist against the table. A shuddering sob escaped from her. Gazing around at the gawking onlookers, Evelyn tried to quiet her. "Please, Valerie. Come to my office and I'll explain everything. It's not what you thi-"

"I came in for an abortion," she shouted, "and you stole my baby!" Everyone in the room fell silent and turned to watch in alarm. "Some sort of monstrous experiment! How could you think you'd get away with it?"

Evelyn reached out to Valerie. The door to the cafeteria opened. In the doorway stood a tall man with silver-grey hair. His ruddy face set in an angry glower, he spoke with loud au-thority.

"Doctor Fletcher."

Fletcher spun about to face Jacob Lawrence, the hospital administrator. Behind him stood Mark Landry.

"Would you mind," Lawrence said, "coming up to my of-fice?" For a moment, sick panic showed in Fletcher's face, followed by a hardening resolve. She stiffly turned to Valerie.

"Thank you, Ms. Dalton. You may go home now. You've done quite enough for today." She followed a silent Lawrence through the doors, leaving Valerie alone in a circle of curious nurses, residents, and miscellaneous employees and visitors.

"What was that all about?" asked one nurse, staring coolly at Valerie.

"I knew that old biddy was up to something," said another.

"What do you mean, stole your baby?"

Valerie shook her head and started to push her way through the knot of inquisitors. Still dizzy from being low on blood, she could think of nothing but escape. Half running, she broke out of the cafeteria into the main corridor. Not knowing where to turn, she headed toward the light streaming in through the windows, found an exit leading to sunshine, and made her way to the parking lot. In a daze, she walked along aisles of cars until she found her disturbingly cheerful yellow Porsche. She climbed in, slammed and locked the door. Safety. She took a dozen long, slow breaths that were more sobs than anything else. A feel-ing of terror enveloped her. She started the car and drove away at a reckless velocity. "

Valerie locked the front door and collapsed in the bedroom. It was too much to take in at once. Her baby was alive. She belonged to someone else. And she was dying.

Valerie had faced the guilt of an abortion last winter, only to face a new life-or-death choice again. That her actions had led to the death of an unborn child had been a terrible burden. Now, when she should have been overjoyed that the child was alive, she felt a horrifying fear that the mortal choice would have to be made all over again.

The terror, she realized with a shudder, was for herself, not for the baby. She buried her face in the depths of the down pillow and began to cry. For herself. And for what she knew that meant about her. The tears soaked the pillowcase with each trembling sobs. She kicked her shoes off and pulled the comforter over her. Drawing her knees up to her chest, she wept while the same thought throbbed in her feverishly: Jennifer's alive.

If it had been a girl, she would have called it Jennifer. If it had been a boy, Bryan. Years ago, she had chosen those names for when she finally decided to have children. Since Ron wasn't the marrying sort, Jennifer Dalton and Bryan Dalton both sounded like good names. She had never understood why some mothers wanted their children to "have a name." That is, a last name other than the mother's. Dalton was a perfectly good name. Jennifer Dalton.

Jennifer Dalton was Renata Chandler. Or was she really? Valerie's frantic mind latched on to the problem in morbid fas-cination. Who was this child, really? Whose right was it to name her? Did it have any bearing on who she really was?

Did it have any effect on Valerie's decision whether or not to help save her life?

A new wave of sobbing brought more tears. She pulled back for a moment to gaze at the mascara and makeup smeared onto the pillowcase.

This isn't doing anything, she eventually determined. She sat up in bed and tried to think things through the way Ron would if he were in court.

One, I was tricked into a medical experiment by Dr. Fletcher.

Two, the baby I thought I'd aborted is alive with someone else.

Three, I'm the only one that can save her life or they wouldn't have risked contacting me. Four, she's Ron's and my baby. Nothing can change that. Not a name, not a secret experiment with stolen embryos.

Oh, my God, she thought with stunned suddenness. How many others are there?