For the next months there was no shortage of nurses, male or female, no shortage of help doing any of the chores that so few had done before. Everyone wanted to become a doctor or a biologist, Walt grumbled. He was sleeping more now, and the fatigue lines on his face were smoothing out. Often he would nudge David and tow him along, away from the nursery, propel him toward his own room in the hospital, and see to it that he remained there for a night's sleep. One night as they walked side by side back to their rooms, Walt said, "Now you understand what I meant when I said this was all that mattered, don't you?"

David understood. Every time he looked down at the tiny, pink new Celia he understood more fully.

Chapter 7

It had been a mistake, David thought, watching the boys from the window in Walt's office. Living memories, that's what they represented. There was Clarence, already looking too pudgy—he'd be fat in another three or four years. And a young Walt, frowning in concentration over a problem that he wouldn't put on paper until he had a solution to add. Robert, too pretty almost, but determinedly manly, always trying harder than the others to endure, to jump higher, run faster, hit harder. And D-4, himself… He turned away and pondered the future of the boys, all of an age; uncles, fathers, grandfathers, all the same age. He was starting a headache again.

"They're inhuman, aren't they?" he said bitterly to Walt. "They come and go and we know nothing about them. What do they think? Why do they hang so close to each other?"

"Remember that old cliché, generation gap? It's here, I reckon." Walt was looking very old. He was tired, and seldom tried to hide it any longer. He looked up at David and said quietly, "Maybe they're afraid of us."

David nodded. He had thought of that. "I know why Hilda did it," he said. "I didn't at the time, but now I know." Hilda had strangled the small girl who looked more like her every day.

"Me too." Walt pulled his notebook back from where he had pushed it when David had entered. "It's a bit spooky to walk into a crowd that's all you, in various stages of growth. They do cling to their own kind." He started to write then, and David left him.

Spooky, he thought, and veered from the laboratory, where he had been heading originally. Let the damn embryos do their thing without him. He knew he didn't want to enter because D1 or D-1 would be there working. The D-4 strain would be the one, though, to prove or disprove the experiment. If Four didn't make it, then chances were that Five wouldn't either, and then what? A mistake. Whoops, wrong, sir. Sorry about that.