“I do. Very much.” He looked down at his hands. “See, Carlotta wants to have the baby at home. A child should come into the world in a place where everybody present cares about it, you know? We called a lot of doctors, but they all said no, they wouldn’t deliver at home, and gave this big rigamarole about the glories of sanitary this-and-that. It’s funny. As soon as you ask on the phone whether they deliver babies at home they get very cagey. They won’t say one way or another. They want you to come down to the office and talk about it. You really have to get tough to make them come out and say no. After the first few times, when they started getting sneaky like that, we’d just hang up. But I’d really like to see my son being born. I think that’s the kind of event that puts you so closely in touch with the nature of things that you could never be quite the same afterward. Anyway, if she goes into the hospital, I’d never get to see it. And I got to thinking that I can read as well as anybody and all the necessary knowledge is stashed in one book or another. So I decided I could deliver the baby myself. I’ve been going down to the medical school library. I wait till somebody with a pass comes along and then I follow him in very closely and nod and smile at the girl at the desk. They have this big room full of books on nothing but obstetrics. Hundreds and thousands. And no repeats! Every book is different. It’s an amazing thing, peeping into a forty-pound book full of pictures of human insides!”

Sam quivered with excitement. I nodded.

Rennel slipped his fingers into his crotch and lifted his hips slightly to clear a not-quite-silent fart. With the other hand, he adjusted the unlit pipe between his teeth. “What you said about a physical event bringing you in touch with reality and changing you…” He paused. “It can’t actually change your mode of thought, but it can give you a lot of new information to work with. For example, a racing driver—”

“It can change you, totally and irrevocably.”

The prophetic voice rolled from Lichtenstein, who stared into the flames. Rennel fell back, silenced. Sam and I leaned forward expectantly.

“Two years ago, I was a physics major,” Lichtenstein continued, softly. “I wanted to build spaceships. That summer I got a job on a construction crew building a road.”

He paused. The air was heavy and still. He started again, holding our attention.