Walt mumbled something, and one of his hands fell off the chair arm. He jerked upright.

"Okay, Walt, you get in my bed," David said, almost resentfully. "I'll go down to the lab, get things rolling there. I'll come up for you at six thirty." Walt didn't protest, but fell onto the bed without bothering to take off his shoes. David pulled them off. Walt's socks were more holes than not, but probably they kept his ankles warm. David left them on, pulled the blanket over him, and went to the lab.

At seven the hospital cafeteria was crowded when Walt stood up to make his announcement. First he had Avery Handley run down his log of diminishing shortwave contacts, with the accompanying grim stories of plague, famine, disease, spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, and sterility. It was the same story worldwide. They listened apathetically; they could not care any longer what was happening to any part of the world that was not their small part. Avery finished and sat down once more.

Walt looked small, David thought in surprise. He had always thought of him as a fairly large man, but he wasn't. He was only five feet nine, and now he was very thin and hard-looking, like a gamecock, trimmed of all excess with only the essentials needed to carry on the fight remaining. Walt studied the assembled people and deliberately said, "There's not a person in this room hungry tonight. We don't have any more plague here. The rain is washing away the radioactivity, and we have food stores that will carry us for years even if we can't plant crops in the spring. We have men capable of doing just about anything we might ever want done." He paused and looked at them again, from left to right, back again, taking his time. He had their absolute attention. "What we don't have," he said, his voice hard and flat now, "is a woman who can conceive a child, or a man who could impregnate her if she was able to bear."

There was a ripple of movement, like a collective sigh, but no one spoke. Walt said, "You know how we are getting our meat. You know the cattle are good, the chickens are good. Tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen, we will have our own babies developed the same way."

There was a moment of utter silence, of stillness, then they broke. Clarence leaped to his feet shouting at Walt. Vernon fought to get to the front of the room, but there were too many people between him and Walt. One of the women pulled on Walt's arm, almost dragging him over, screaming in his face. Walt yanked free and climbed onto a table. "Stop this! I'm going to answer any questions, but I can't hear any one of you this way."