"Maybe we have no right to tamper with conception," Chuck said bitterly. "God knows what we might inadvertently have helped to propagate."

"You know the percentage of spontaneous abortions for damaged or imperfect fetuses..."

"Yeah, yeah. I know. But what about damaged cells, blurred chromosomes... And for Christ's sake, Ali, how can we be sure that Pete's sperm fertilizes only Cecily's ovum? I mean, artificial insemination is not as risky as letting those little fellas find their own route up. It could be Pat's that took... and then we've got a charming case of consanguinity and real nasty new batch of genetic problems."

I couldn't say that I hadn't spent some anxious moments worrying about just that. Now I limited my remarks to reminding him that from what we had on Cecily's records of her previous abortions, the fetuses had been in normal growth, with no sign of abnormalities, at the time of abortion; that it was her peculiar uterine construction that interrupted the pregnancies, and not faulty ova. We'd done chromosome checks on all three: never a sign of blurred or damaged cells. But I couldn't argue with him about the virility of Peter's spermatozoa.

"Chuck, you need a stiff drink."

"Sorry to be a wet blanket, Ali, but I guess you do know how I feel, and what I worry about."

"I do. Now get that drink and climb into bed."

"Damned thing's always cold!"

"A condition you ought to have no trouble remedying, Casanova. What about that dulcet-toned nurse of yours?"

"Dulcet tones, yes, but oh, the face!" He was speaking with more of his usual brashness. "I'll spin up there and see the little mother myself soon... in the role of consultant, of course." That's what he said, but his laugh put a different interpretation on the words.

After I hung up, I got to wondering if the Big Time Obstetrician might be interested in Guinea Pig Kellogg. But the idea of Chuck Henderson courting a pregnant virgin overrode my sense of proportion, and I only wished that I could call him back and tease him. I didn't, but I did laugh.

After the initial exultation simmered down, things progressed normally, almost boringly, with Pat's proxy pregnancy. I began to appreciate for the first time why some of my patients bemoaned three-quarters of a year of waiting. Nine months was no longer a matter of ten appointments with one fetal heartbeat, but a damn long stretch.

Peter told me one evening that Cecily was in a constant state of anoxia; she came to me for relief from dizzy fits. It was not sympathetic-pregnancy symptoms with Pat: it was pure and simple anoxia. Mutual friends had begun to remark how radiant Cecily was: one armchair psychiatrist pontificated the opinion that she had finally accepted her childlessness. Then she took up knitting. And took up wearing bulky sweaters and fabrics and bought maternity slacks and skirts.

Pat continued her job as a mathematics teacher in the local high school. Our plan for her to have a sudden emergency leave in the spring did not have to be put into action. She carried almost unnoticeably until the end of the school year, when she was a scant six months. The prevailing fashion of blousy dresses came to our aid, so that her thickening waistline and abdominal bulge were fashionably concealed. One or two unkind friends remarked that she was putting on a little weight, to which she blithely replied that she'd lose it in the summer, before Labor Day. Even if Mrs. Baxter had seen Pat during her brief explosive visit, the pregnancy was barely discernible. But Cecily, when her mother had phoned her from the railway station, had thickened her middle with carefully folded toweling.

Louise Baxter's violent negative reaction shocked both Peter and Cecily - who had been so happy to tell her mother the good news. When Peter called me to give warning of my impending collision with the reluctant grandmother-to-be, I could hear Cecily sobbing in the background.

There is little point in recounting that explosive interview from beginning to end. Suffice it to say that Louise Baxter left me with the distinct impression that her daughter's dearest wish was an abomination to her. Her agitation was not for my supposed hoaxing but a genuine - I'll say it - psychotic fear of ultimate success.

I made a mental note to learn more about the woman from either Pat or Peter. The one time Pat had made a mildly derogatory remark about Louise, Cecily had retorted with an angry defense. I'd encountered such misplaced loyalty once before when the mother sweetly dominated her fatherless son into a psychiatric ward in a catatonic state. With Cecily's emotional balance under severe stress already, I didn't like to see her loyalties torn.

Pat's gestation was calculated to end by August 25. No baby is late, but even with the date of conception known, there are possibilities for error. The habits of the Kelloggs suited our needs to keep the birth unremarkable. They always spent their vacation months together, usually traveling, and occasionally, when Peter was working on a book, sequestering themselves in a quiet upstate village. We hoped for a punctual delivery so that Pat would be recovered and able to return to school. That would make fewer waves.

Chuck suggested a small town in the Finger Lake district which boasted not only a well-equipped hospital but a chief of staff who had been a classmate of ours: Arnold Avery.

Everything was going splendidly, except that Pat did put on more weight than I liked. I didn't suspect a thing, and I can still kick myself that, for all my experience in the field, I could blithely ignore so obvious a clue. Perhaps it was an unwitting desire to discount Chuck's gloomy misgivings. Still, the fetal position was good, the heartbeat strong, about 150. Pat's condition was excellent, and, if she was heavy, she was a fair-sized girl with a good pelvic arch, and a big baby was not unlikely.

However, what was to be known as the Transplantation Split came into existence early the morning of August 15. I'd managed to blackmail a colleague to cover my practice the last three weeks of August and was actually having a nonworking vacation in the pleasant company of the Kelloggs. So when Pat woke with abdominal contractions, she roused me to time them. They were a businesslike three minutes apart. It's not unheard of for a primipara to deliver quickly, so I hospitalized her and phoned Chuck to get the hell up there.

If he'd driven instead of hiring that damned helicopter, I'd have been all right. I tell myself, and him when he brings the matter up, as he often does, that I wasn't hogging all the glory for myself. He had a right to some.

At any rate, the helicopter set him down on the hospital grounds just as Pat went into second-stage labor, and he assisted me in the delivery room along with the regular nurse. I hadn't been able to wrangle Esther in there, but she was more valuable in the waiting room keeping the parents from exploding.

Chuck and I couldn't restrain our shout of triumph as, at 8:02 A.M., I delivered the six-pound, seven-ounce, perfectly normal, bright red daughter of Peter and Cecily Kellogg from the womb of another woman. I brushed aside the nurse who reached for the newborn and made my own breathless examination of her squalling wrinkled person. I left Chuck to deliver the afterbirth and suture the episiotomy.

"Hey, Doc," Chuck drawled with infuriating irreverence, disrupting my delighted examination, "you forgot something."

Half-angry at his aspersions about my competence, I turned to see him delivering the butt end of another girl child, as healthy as her precipitous sister. I stared transfixed as he eased the head through with deft hands and slapped breath into the mite, who weighed in at a scant five pounds, three ounces.

"You didn't tell me about this," said Chuck, all innocence.

If I'd thought more quickly, I could have told him that I felt he deserved something for all his help.

"I didn't know," I admitted instead.

"God bless you, but I love an honest woman, Ali. It's such a relief."

Then he went over the new girl as carefully as I'd done her sister.

I do feel obliged to add to this account that the heartbeats of identical twins are often synchronized. My mistake lay in assuming a single birth and in not taking a precautionary X ray, as I ordinarily did when the mother appeared to gain more weight than normal or was carrying a large fetus.

My oversight is a family joke, but the most felicitous kind for the Kelloggs. The Transplantation Split is now a familiar medical fact: some minute change in temperature (perhaps moving Pat to my house after the implantation) caused the egg to split, yielding twins. It doesn't always occur in exogenetic pregnancies, but the incidence is proportionately higher than with regular pregnancies.

We were hard put to explain our jubilation to the deliver-room nurse. We made sure that Pat had delivered the after-birth and would rouse satisfactorily from the anesthesia. Then we literally burst into the waiting room, simultaneously yelling: "It's a girl!"

"No, it's-"

"What?" demanded Esther, irritated.

I remember that Cecily looked as if she were about to faint, but Peter caught on quickly.

"Twins?"

"Ali outdid herself. It's twins!" cried Chuck. "She delivered your first daughter, a spanking six pounds, seven ounces..."

"And I gave Chuck the honor of ushering your second daughter into the world."

"A very dainty miss at five pounds, three ounces. As healthy a pair as any parents could wish."

"Pat's all right?" asked Cecily, tears streaming down her cheeks.

"Right as rain."

"When can we see the children?" asked Peter.

I know I stopped talking and stared at Peter, stunned with the sad realization that he would never see his children, and wishing that another miracle would occur for him.

Chuck covered my gaffe. "They'll be in the nursery by now. Go see the modern product of a virgin birth."

"Dr. Henderson, you ought to be ashamed of yourself," said Esther, but she wasn't really angry and was far too eager to see the twins to argue with him. Champagne is not recommended by any dietitian to break a night's fast; but we were all back at the vacation cottage, getting pleasantly polluted with toasts to Pat, the parents, Esther, ourselves, never for a minute suspecting that the hardest part was just beginning. Not even when the phone rang.

Esther, being nearest, answered it. I just happened to be looking in her direction, so I saw the abrupt change in her expression and realized that something was wrong. My first thought was for the children, then for Pat. Was she hemorrhaging... ?

Esther only listened, openmouthed and sheet-white, and then dazedly but the receiver down.

"Mrs. Baxter's in town," she said, which was sufficient to silence everyone. "A friend of hers saw Peter and Cecily in the supermarket last week and told her. I don't know how she found out about the births...."'

"We weren't exactly closemouthed about twins," Chuck said, remembering our hilarity when we brought champagne in the town at ten o'clock.

"Well, she went to the hospital, she saw Pat, she saw the twins. She's crazy, the things she said. She told the whole blooming hospital. But it isn't the truth. It isn't the truth at all."

I've never sobered faster in my life. Cecily dashed to the kitchen sink to be ill.

It was a good thing I had medical license plates, because we passed three cops on the way to the hospital at a speed that was unwise even for doctors.

Chuck went for Avery, who was already trying to explain the situation to the village-sheet's reporter who had been informed of this tidbit of malicious gossip. Esther and I dashed to the maternity wing. I could hear Pat's sobbing voice as we turned the corner. I snapped an order for a sedative to the floor supervisor, who made the mistake of not concealing her snide expression.

"Crafty, Crafty," cried Pat as she saw me enter the room. Her two roommates had poisonous expressions on their faces. She was trying to get out of the bed, clutching her tummy. I pushed her back, shoved her legs horizontal and yelled at the nurse to get the hell in there with the hypo.

"Crafty," sobbed Pat in weeping distress, "you can't imagine the horrible things she said. She didn't give me a chance to say anything. I don't think she wanted a logical explanation. She hates Peter! She hates him! She hates Cecily for being so happy with him. And she despises you for giving Cecily her children. I've never seen anyone so full of hate. She must know the children aren't mine and Peter's, but that's what she said. And she kept on saying it, and saying it" - Pat was covering her ears to shut out the sound of that vengeful slander - "and everybody heard it. It's ghastly, Crafty. Oh, Crafty, what will Cecily do?"

I swabbed her arm and gave her the sedative as she was talking - rather, babbling. I also gave orders for her to be moved to a private room. Pat's words became incoherent as the drug took effect. Even as I was pushing her bed toward the private room, I thought of how very characteristic of Pat to worry about Cecily rather than the equivocal position into which Cecily's mother had put herself and her brother. I do not recall ever before being so consumed with anger as I was at that hour in my life. Had I known where Louise Baxter could be found, I think I would have strangled her with my bare hands.

Talk of feathers in the wind, there was no way of stopping the slander. It was obviously all over the hospital and would undoubtedly precede us back into town. I was in such a state of impotent wrath that it was all I could do to keep from lashing out at the floor nurse and the orderly, to wipe the smug expressions from their faces as we shifted Pat. Pat was mumbling herself into a drugged slumber, and the floor nurse was fussing unnecessarily about the room, when Chuck came stalking through the hall.

"All that fuss because Pat's brother and his wife are helping the girl cover an indiscretion," he said with commendable poise. "What some people will think!" He shook his head over the frailties of mankind and then imperiously gestured the nurse out of the room.

When she'd left he indulged himself in a spate of curses as inventive as they were satisfying, and all relative to the slow and painful demise of one Louise Baxter.

"You've sedated her?" he asked, feeling for Pat's pulse and then stroking her disordered hair back from her face. "Let her sleep."

He turned from the bed and perched his rump against the windowsill, trying to light a cigarette with shaking hands. He finally got it lit and inhaled deeply.

"Is that what you told Avery? That Pat was indiscreet?"

"No, I told him the truth. I've a hunch it might be important later. I can't say he believed me," and Chuck let out a harsh snort of laughter, "but I've convinced him that the charge of - ha! - incestuous fornication is the accusation of a psychotic. He's quite ready to believe that, judging from the way Her Ladyship Baxter carried on. He does think, and he subscribes to making it informally the truth, that we're covering up an illegitimate birth and that Peter and Cecily are going to adopt the children. He's a good man, Avery, but I'm afraid our revolutionary and irreligious fact is beyond his comprehension."

"Illegitimacy is a lot more palatable than" - I couldn't even say it - "the other."

"Our public fiction depends on a cooperative grand-mother, and I can't see the likes other cooperating with you or me, or the Kelloggs. Christ, how I'd love to get my hands on her. I'd have her committed so fast... But Avery will handle matters here - neurotic grandmother, hates to admit her age - he's smooth as silk. He's having a long talk with that floor supervisor - one for letting Baxter in, two for not shutting her up the moment she started, and three for half believing her." He walked back to Pat, feeling her abdomen.

"No, it's hard," I said.

"I'd like to move her out of here, quickly."

"Will Avery let Esther stay on as special?" I asked.

"You just bet he will," said Esther from the door, grim- lipped. She was in her whites, starched and ready for action. I was inordinately relieved. "What else do you expect from provincial hospitals?" She checked Pat, smoothed the bed-clothes unnecessarily, and began checking the room's equipment, as if she hoped to find fault with it. "They don't have rooming in or I'd bring the babies right here. But she's all right with me. You'd better get back to the cottage. Oh, and Dr. Craft, I administered a strong sedative to Cecily before I came out. You look as if you need one, too, Allison," she added and then settled herself on the chair by the sleeping Pat.

As we passed Avery's office on the way out, we heard him administering quite a lecture to some unfortunate person.

Wizard's angry barking alerted us before we turned off the main road into the lane that led to the cottage. Two of the group hovering by the path evidently had urgent business somewhere else.

"My God! People! I hate 'em," muttered Chuck, staring belligerently back at the four hangers-on as we parked the car.

"Don't go in there," one of the men told Chuck. "That dog's dangerous!"

"Is he?" asked Chuck with innocent mildness, and we walked right past the snarling dog. "Howd'ya like that?" someone muttered.

Peter was in the shadows of the small screened porch.

"Esther gave Cecily something. She'd made herself ill with weeping," he said. "Is Pat all right?"

"Esther's with her. Avery's handling the hospital staff." Chuck wearily combed his hair back from his forehead. "He doesn't believe in exogenesis, but the notion that you and Cecily are going to adopt your sister's indiscretion is acceptable."

"What?"

Perhaps it was a trick of the sun, but I thought I saw a glint of anger in Peter's dead eyes.

"How long do Pat and the babies have to stay here?"

"We'll leave as soon as Pat can stand the trip," I said, sagging against the wall.

Chuck sort of maneuvered me into the nearest chair, but it faced the pathway and the curious faces parading by. I tried to tell myself it was reaction to the whole nasty scene, but I was depressed by the notion that if Louise Baxter had spread her filth this fast in a small vacation village, she'd sure as hell go on to pollute the more rewarding atmosphere of our university town. Though what she stood to gain by such slander, I couldn't understand.

Before we all got very drunk. Chuck sat me down at the dining-room table, and we wrote up our notes on the delivery. I could see that they were going to be very important documents, but the clinical reportage sure as hell took the glamour out of the achievement, just as surely as Louise Baxter had tarnished the greatest gift of love.

The third day after her delivery, we took Pat and the babies home downstate in an ambulance. As I was still nominally on my vacation and I certainly didn't want Pat alone in her apartment in her psychological condition, I insisted that she stay in my house. So Chuck, who was following the ambulance in my station wagon, turned off to go to Pat's apartment to pick up a list of unmatemity clothing for her. Peter, Cecily, Wizard, and the babies dropped out of the cavalcade for their place.

Esther and I had suitably settled Pat when first Chuck, brakes squealing viciously, then Cecily and company pulled up in my driveway.

I had thought in the hospital three days earlier that Chuck had a superb vocabulary of invective, but he had evidently kept a supply in reserve, which he now employed as he helped Peter out of the car with the babies.

"What happened?" I asked, rather inanely, because it took little guessing.

"That blankety-blank female is not going to have an incestuous woman living in her respectable house. And to think that she had once admired her. And to think that all along that adulterous woman had been poisoning the minds of helpless youngsters and - Do I really need to read further from that script?" asked Chuck, now at the top of his strong baritone voice. He woke young Anne Kellogg.

"Mrs. Baxter's got to town?"

"Quod erat demonstrandum! Only I'd say that the bitch has gone to town!" Incongruously, Chuck was deftly soothing the frightened baby before he passed her on to Esther.

Peter's usually calm face was etched with grief as he helped Cecily up the steps. Wizard, head down, tail limp, followed them to the steps, then turned and settled himself on the paving, watching the front gate.

"We are no longer welcomed by the management of the apartment house," was all Peter said.

"Good Lord," said Esther, "did she use a bullhorn?"

Then the phone rang. Jiggling Anne, Esther answered it. She listened for a moment, then with grave pleasure firmly replaced the handset.

"I think it would be better to have the phone disconnected or the number changed immediately. Dr. Craft. Shall I put in the request?"

I nodded numbly.

Wizard uttered a warning bark, and Chuck peered out the window.

"Who're they?" he asked me, and I glanced out at three militant figures about to enter the yard.