The woman shrank back, lips tight. The room filled with crackling silence. One of the babies began to cry. It had two heads.

Slowly and heavily, Buckman turned to Drummond, who sat immobile against the wall. “You see?” he asked dully “You see how it is? Maybe it is the curse o’ God. Maybe the world is ending. I dunno. I just know there’s few enough babies, an’ most o’ them deformed. Will it go on? Will all our kids be monsters? Should we…kill these an’ hope we get some human babies? What is it? What to do?”

Drummond rose. He felt a weight as of centuries on shoulders, the weariness, blank and absolute, of having seen that smoldering panic and heard that desperate appeal too often, too often.

“Don’t kill them,” he said. “That’s the worst kind of murder, and anyway it’d do no good at all. It comes from the bombs, and you can’t stop it. You’ll go right on having such children so you might as well get used to it.”

* * *

By atomic-powered stratojet it wasn’t far from Minnesota to Oregon, and Drummond landed in Taylor about noon the next day. This time there was no hurry to get his machine under cover, and up on the mountain was a raw scar of earth where a new airfield was slowly being built. Men were getting over their terror of the sky. They had another fear to face now, and it was one from which there was no hiding.

Drummond walked slowly down the icy main street to the central office. It was numbingly cold, a still, relentless intensity of frost eating through clothes and flesh and bone. It wasn’t much better inside. Heating systems were still poor improvisations.

“You’re back!” Robinson met him in the antechamber suddenly galvanized with eagerness. He had grown thin and nervous, looking ten years older, but impatience blazed from him. “How is it? How is it?”

Drummond held up a bulky notebook. “All here,” he said grimly. “All the facts we’ll need. Not formally correlated yet, But the picture is simple enough.”

Robinson laid an arm on his shoulder and steered him into the office. He felt the general’s hand shaking, but he’d sat down and had a drink before business came up again.

“You’ve done a good job,” said the leader warmly. “When the country’s organized again, I’ll see you get a medal for this. Your men in the other planes aren’t in yet.”

“No, they’ll be gathering data for a long time. The job won’t be finished for years. I’ve only got a general outline here, but it’s enough. It’s enough.” Drummond’s eyes were haunted again.

Robinson felt cold at meeting that too-steady gaze. He whispered shakily: “Is it—bad?”

“The worst. Physically, the country’s recovering. But biologically, we’ve reached a crossroads and taken the wrong fork.”

“What do you mean? What do you mean?”

Drummond let him have it then, straight and hard as a bayonet thrust. “The birth rate’s a little over half the prewar,” he said, “and about seventy-five per cent of all births are mutant, of which possibly two-thirds are viable and presumably fertile. Of course, that doesn’t include late-maturing characteristics, or those undetectable by naked-eye observation, or the mutated recessive genes that must be carried by a lot of otherwise normal zygotes. And it’s everywhere. There are no safe places.”