Timothy Zahn - Cascade Point

"It's all right, Dr. Jordan. As I said before, no harm done." Dan turned to Halladay, and there was a glint in his eye I didn't often see. "I'll tell you what I told your friends: I'm not doing this to push anyone's opinions, and that includes any I might have. If you have to pigeonhole me anywhere, put me down as 'protruth.' I won't wear any other labels, understand?"

"Yes. I'm sorry, Doctor." She smiled wanly. "I guess I'm not immune to the emotions the whole subject generates. I'll keep my feelings to myself from now on—I promise."

"Will you prove your sincerity?" Dan leaned forward and offered his hand.

She frowned at it for a second before understanding flickered across her face. Then, visibly steeling herself, she reached out and gingerly took his hand. They held the position for nearly twenty seconds before Dan released his grip and sat back. "Thank you," he said. "I'm sure you'll be a great help to us." Turning to Jordan, he nodded. "Now then, are we ready to begin working out some of the details?"

The discussion took nearly an hour, and the experimental design arrived at was essentially the one that was actually used later that year. Several important problems still remained, however, notably the question of masking the mothers thoughts while Dan tried to touch those of the fetus. From past experience we knew that a deep, sedative-induced sleep would probably do the trick, but Jordan was understandably opposed to giving large dosages of such drugs to pregnant women. The question of whether or not Dan could recognize humanness in a fetal mind at all also remained unanswered.

During the drive back to San Francisco, I asked Dan if Halladay could be trusted.

"I think so," he said. "I didn't see any evidence of duplicity when I touched her. And she was genuinely upset to find the Family Alliance people lying in wait for us."

"What about them? Do you think they'll make trouble?"

"How could they? Denouncing the experiment before it even takes place would make them look silly—especially since a check with Halladay will show them that the design still has some pretty basic problems. Saying this far in advance that they reject the results will leave them wide open to a charge that they're afraid of the truth."

Something in his voice caught my attention. "You sound less optimistic than you did yesterday," I said. "You thinking of calling it off?"

He was silent a long moment. "No, not really. It's just that the whole thing is getting more complicated than I'd envisioned it."

I shrugged. "True—but don't forget that it's your experiment. If you don't want to do things Jordan's way, all you have to do is say so."

"I know. But he's unfortunately got a good point: that if we don't at least take a stab at doing things rigorously, all we're going to do is throw more gasoline at the emotional bonfire." He paused. "Tell me, do you have any relatives or close friends who are pregnant?"

I blinked at the abrupt change of subject. "Yes—four to nine, depending on how close a friend you need."

"Let me have a fast rundown, will you?"

I drove one-handed for a while as I gave him a brief personality sketch of each of the nine women. Afterward he sat silently for several minutes, digesting it all. "What do you think Kathy would say if I asked to be present at her delivery?" he said at last.

"I don't know," I said. "But I know the right person to ask."

We called Kathy as soon as we got back to Dan's office. Though clearly surprised by the request, she agreed to act as Dan's guinea pig, provided her husband didn't object. I got the most recent estimate of her due date—another month—and extracted a promise of secrecy before hanging up. "You going to tell Jordan and Halladay about this?" I asked Dan.

He shook his head. "No, I don't think so. A slip of the tongue could have the entire Fresno chapter of the Family Alliance descending on Kathy's birthing room, and I have no intention of putting the Ausberrys through that."

"Besides which, if you find you can't even read the mind of a baby that's only hours from birth, you don't want anyone to know?" I hazarded.

His slightly pained smile was my only answer.

But the Family Alliance was subtler than we'd expected, and neither of us was prepared for the page-twenty story in the Chronicle the next morning.

"I don't believe this," I fumed, stomping around Dan's office with a copy of the paper gripped tightly in my hand. "How can they print something like this without at least contacting you first?"

"The Lifeline Experiment,' " Dan quoted, reading at his desk. "Gack. Why do newspeople always have to come up with cutesy titles for everything? Contact me? Of course they should have. Obviously, some fine upstanding citizen or group of same convinced them that the story didn't need checking."

"Someone like our Family Alliance friends?" "Undoubtedly. You'll notice they don't include any of the details we discussed yesterday, which implies Halladay has dried up as an information source for them. I guess that's something."

"How can you sit there and take it so calmly?" I snapped, slapping my newspaper down on the desktop for emphasis. "Look: there it is for the whole damn world to see."

He looked up at me. "Simmer down, Iris—the first client's due in ten minutes and the last thing he'll want is to have his head taken off by my secretary. I'm mad, too, but there's nothing we can do now except make sure the experiment comes off as planned."

I was only listening with half an ear. "But why? What did they expect to gain by leaking the story? It's not even particularly slanted."

"Sure it is," Dan contradicted me. "Sixth paragraph, fourth and fifth sentences."

"In addition to his private psychiatric practice, Staley does volunteer counseling once a week at the Rappaport Mental Health Clinic of San Mateo County, which he helped found. He also works frequently with the public defenders office and has worked with the Greenpeace Save-the-Whales Project.' " I rattled off. "So?"

"So someone realized that this was going to be a very difficult experiment to do. So difficult, in fact, that we conceivably might have to give it up—and that someone wanted to make sure I was established in the public mind as a liberal right from the start. A liberal and, by implication, proabortion."

"I still don't see—oh. Sure. If the experiment turns out to be unworkable they'll claim you learned something in the initial stages that clashed with your liberal views on the issue, won't they, and that you backed out because of it."

"Bull's-eye. Or so I'm guessing."

I sat down, my anger replaced by a sudden chill. "Who exactly are we up against here—the Family Alliance or the CIA covert operations group?"

"We're up against people who've been up to their necks in politics for at least a decade," he told me, laying his own paper on top of mine. "Along the way they've probably picked up all the standard political tricks one can employ against an opponent—which is almost funny, since the experiment has just as much chance of supporting their point of view as it has of opposing it."

"One would think they haven't much faith in their beliefs, wouldn't one?" I suggested.

"I think that's a self-contradictory sentence, but you've got the right idea," Dan said, smiling. "And you might remember that any group that size is a mixed bag. Some of the members would probably be madder than you are if they knew what was being tried here." He tapped the newspaper.

Just then there was a knock on the outer office door. "Mr. Raymond's early," I commented, heading out to unlock it.

"No problem," Dan called after me. "You can send him right in."

But it wasn't Raymond, or any of Dan's other clients. It was, instead, a committee of four people.

"We'd like to see Dr. Staley for a moment, if he isn't too busy," their spokeswoman, a young woman with a recognizable face, said briskly. Without waiting for a reply she started forward.