Marissa faced around front again, angrily folding her arms across her chest and sinking into her own thoughts. Robert’s business mentality was so contrary to her own, she wondered how they had ever become attracted to each other in the first place.

“Contrary to you,” Robert said as they neared the house, “fifty thousand seems like a lot of money to me. And we have nothing to show for it save for some ill feelings and a disintegrating marriage. Seems a heavy price to pay, at both ends. I’m getting to hate that Women’s Clinic. I’ve never felt comfortable there. And being attacked by a distraught patient didn’t help. And did you see that guard?”

“What guard?” Marissa asked.

“The guard who came in with the doctors when the lady was carrying on. The Asian guy in the uniform. Did you notice he was armed?”

“No, I didn’t notice he was armed!” Robert had an infuriating way of changing the subject with insignificant details. Here they were struggling with their relationship and their future, and he was thinking about a guard.

“He had a .357 Colt Python,” Robert said. “Who does he think he is, some kind of Asian Dirty Harry?”

Switching on the light, Dr. Wingate entered his beloved lab. It was after eleven P.M. and the clinic was deserted. Across the street in the overnight ward and in the emergency room there was staff, but not in the main clinic building.

Taking off his coat, Dr. Wingate slipped on a clean white lab coat, then washed his hands carefully. He could have waited for morning, but after getting the eight superb mature eggs from Marissa that day, he was eager to check on their progress.

That afternoon, after having dealt with the unfortunate Rebecca Ziegler affair as best he could, he’d returned to the lab to find that the nurse-technician had done a fine job preparing the sperm. By two P.M. all eight eggs had been placed in a meticulously prepared insemination medium contained in separate organ culture dishes. To each dish Dr. Wingate had carefully added roughly 150,000 capitated, mobile sperm. The eggs and the sperm had then been co-incubated in 5% CO2 with 98% humidity at 37 degrees Centigrade.

Turning on the light for his dissecting microscope, Dr. Wingate opened the incubator and removed the first dish. Placing it under the scope, he looked in.

There, in the middle of the microscopic field, was the beautiful egg, still surrounded by its corona cells. Looking more closely as he deftly handled a micropipette, Dr. Wingate experienced the thrill of creation as he observed two pronuclei within the ooplasm of the egg. The egg had fertilized and looked entirely normal.

Repeating the procedure with the other dishes, Dr. Wingate was extremely pleased to see that all the eggs had fertilized normally. There had been no polyspermic fertilization, in which more than one sperm penetrates the egg.