"Inventing them, or cleaning up after them, Captain?" Cordelia asked.

"Both, Milady." He stood at a sort of aggressive parade rest.

Her own man had the look about his eyes of someone who had drawn the short straw, although his lips smiled. "My Lord Regent has asked me to inform you of the schedule of treatments, and so on. I'm afraid," he cleared his throat, "that it would be best if we scheduled the abortion promptly. It is already unusually late in your pregnancy for it, and it would be as well for your recovery to relieve you of the physiological strain as soon as possible."

"Is there nothing that can be done?" she asked hopelessly, already knowing the answer from their faces.

"I'm afraid not," said her man sadly. The man from the Imperial Residence nodded confirmation.

"I ran a literature search," said the captain unexpectedly, staring out the window, "and there was that calcium experiment. True, the results they got weren't particularly heartening—"

"I thought we'd agreed not to bring that up," glared the Residence man.

"Vaagen, that's cruel," said her own man. "You're just raising false hopes. You can't make the Regent's wife into one of your hapless experimental animals for a lot of untried shots in the dark. You have your permission from the Regent for the autopsy—leave it at that."

Her world turned right-side-up again in a second, as she looked at the face of the man with ideas. She knew the type; half-right, half-cocked, half-successful, flitting from one monomania to another like a bee pollinating flowers, gathering little fruit but leaving seeds behind. She was nothing to him, personally, but the raw material for a monograph. The risks she took did not appall his imagination, she was not a person but a disease state. She smiled upon him, slowly, wildly, knowing him then for her ally in the enemy camp.

"How do you do, Dr. Vaagen? How would you like to write the paper of a lifetime?"

The Residence man barked a laugh. "She's got your number, Vaagen."

He smiled back, astonished to be so instantly understood. "You realize, I can't guarantee any results. . . ."

"Results!" interrupted her man. "My God, you'd better let her know what your idea of results is. Or show her the pictures—no, don't do that. Milady," he turned to her, "the treatment he's discussing was last tried twenty years ago. It did irreparable damage to the mothers. And the results—the very best results you could hope for would be a twisted cripple. Perhaps much worse. Indescribably worse."

"Jellyfish describes it pretty well," said Vaagen.

"You're inhuman, Vaagen!" snapped her man, with a glance her way to check the distress quotient.

"A viable jellyfish, Dr. Vaagen?" asked Cordelia, intent.

"Mm. Maybe," he replied, inhibited by his colleagues' angry glares. "But there is the difficulty of what happens to the mothers when the treatment is applied in vivo."