Special Delivery
Damon Knight
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
Special Delivery
By DAMON KNIGHT
Illustrated by ASHMAN
All Len had to hear was the old gag: "We've never lost a father yet." His child was not even born and it was thoroughly unbearable!
en and Moira Connington lived in a rented cottage with a small yard, a smaller garden, and too many fir trees. The lawn, which Len seldom had time to mow, was full of weeds, and the garden was overgrown with blackberry brambles. The house itself was clean and smelled better than most city apartments, and Moira kept geraniums in the windows.
However, it was dark on account of the firs. Approaching the door one late spring afternoon, Len tripped on an unnoticed flagstone and scattered examination papers all the way to the porch.
When he picked himself up, Moira was giggling in the doorway. "That was funny."
"The hell it was," said Len. "I banged my nose." He picked up his Chemistry B papers in a stiff silence. A red drop fell on the last one. "Damn it!"
Moira held the screen door for him, looking contrite and faintly surprised. She followed him into the bathroom. "Len, I didn't mean to laugh. Does it hurt much?"
"No," said Len, staring fiercely at his scraped nose in the mirror. It was throbbing like a gong.
"That's good. It was the funniest thing—I mean funny-peculiar," she clarified hastily.
en stared at her; the whites of her eyes were showing: "Is there anything the matter with you?" he demanded.
"I don't know," she said on a rising note. "Nothing like that ever happened to me before. I didn't think it was funny at all. I was worried about you, and I didn't know I was going to laugh—" She laughed again, a trifle nervously. "Maybe I'm cracking up."
Moira was a dark-haired young woman with a placid, friendly disposition. Len had met her in his senior year at Columbia, with—looking at it impartially, which Len seldom did—regrettable results. At present, in her seventh month, she was shaped like a rather bosomy kewpie doll.
Emotional upsets, he remembered, may occur frequently during this period. He leaned to get past her belly and kissed her forgivingly. "You're probably tired. Go sit down and I'll get you some coffee."
Except that Moira had never had any hysterics till now, or morning sickness, either—she burped instead—and anyhow, was there anything in the literature about fits of giggling?
After supper, he marked seventeen sets of papers desultorily in red pencil, then got up to look for the baby book. There were four dog-eared paperbound volumes with smiling infants' faces on the covers, but the one he wanted wasn't there. He looked behind the bookcase and on the wicker table beside it. "Moira!"
"Hm?"
"Where the devil is the other baby book?"
"I've got it."
Len went and looked over her shoulder. She was staring at a drawing of a fetus lying in a sort of upside-down Yoga position inside a cross-sectioned woman's body.
"That's what he looks like," she said. "Mama."
The diagram was of a fetus at term.
"What was that about your mother?" Len asked, puzzled.
"Don't be silly," she said abstractedly.
He waited, but she didn't look up or turn the page. After a while, he went back to his work. He watched her.
Eventually she leafed through to the back of the book, read a few pages, and put it down. She lighted a cigarette and immediately put it out again. She fetched up a belch.
"That was a good one," said Len admiringly.
Moira sighed.
Feeling tense, Len picked up his coffee cup and started toward the kitchen. He halted beside Moira's chair. On the side table was her after-dinner cup, still full of coffee ... black, scummed with oil droplets, stone-cold.
"Didn't you want your coffee?" he asked solicitously.
She looked at the cup. "I did, but—" She paused and shook her head, looking perplexed.
"Well, do you want another cup now?"
"Yes, please. No."
Len, who had begun a step, rocked back on his heels. "Which, damn it?"
Her face got all swollen. "Oh, Len, I'm so mixed up," she said, and began to tremble.
Len felt part of his irritation spilling over into protectiveness. "What you need," he said firmly, "is a drink."
e climbed a stepladder to get at the top cabinet shelf which cached their liquor when they had any. Small upstate towns and their school boards being what they were, this was one of many necessary financial precautions.
Inspecting the doleful few fingers of whisky in the bottle, Len swore under his breath. They couldn't afford a decent supply of booze or new clothes for Moira. The original idea had been for Len to teach for a year while they saved enough money so that he could go back for his master's degree. More lately, this proving unlikely, they had merely been trying to put aside enough for summer school, and even that was beginning to look like the wildest optimism.
High-school teachers without seniority weren't supposed to be married.
Or graduate physics students, for that matter.
He mixed two stiff highballs and carried them back into the living room. "Here you are. Skoal."
"Ah," she said appreciatively. "That tastes—Ugh." She set the glass down and stared at it with her mouth half open.
"What's the matter now?"
She turned her head carefully, as if she were afraid it would come off. "Len, I don't know. Mama."
"That's the second time you've said that. What is this all—"
"Said what?"
"Mama. Look, kid, if you're—"
"I didn't." She appeared a little feverish.
"Sure you did," said Len reasonably. "Once when you were looking at the baby book, and then again just now, after you said ugh to the highball. Speaking of which—"
"Mama drink milk," said Moira, speaking with exaggerated clarity.
Moira hated milk.
Len swallowed half his highball, turned and went silently into the kitchen.
When he came back with the milk, Moira looked at it as if it contained a snake. "Len, I didn't say that."
"Okay."
"I didn't. I didn't say mama and I didn't say that about the milk." Her voice quavered. "And I didn't laugh at you when you fell down."
Len tried to be patient. "It was somebody else."
"It was." She looked down at her gingham-covered bulge. "You won't believe me. Put your hand there. No, a little lower."
Under the cloth, her flesh was warm and solid against his palm. "Kicks?" he inquired.
"Not yet. Now," she said in a strained voice, "you in there—if you want your milk, kick three times."
Len opened his mouth and shut it again. Under his hand there were three explicit kicks, one after the other.
Moira closed her eyes, held her breath and drank the milk down in one long horrid gulp.
nce in a great while," Moira read, "cell cleavage will not have followed the orderly pattern that produces a normal baby. In these rare cases some parts of the body will develop excessively, while others do not develop at all. This disorderly cell growth, which is strikingly similar to the wild cell growth that we know as cancer—" Her shoulders moved convulsively in a shudder. "Bluh!"
"Why do you keep reading that stuff, if it makes you feel that way?"
"I have to," she said absently. She picked up another book from the stack. "There's a page missing."