Pat Frank - Mr. Adam

“Maybe you have forgotten,” I suggested with what I considered to be irony, “that it takes two to make a baby.”

She kissed me again. “Darling,” she said, “I am so glad you came home early tonight.”

During the next week there was a blizzard in New England, La Guardia turned down the job of military governor of Germany, and prime ministers, jobless kings, and jobless generals arrived every day by plane from Europe. They all had to be interviewed, and I had forgotten about Dr. Thompson and his mystery.

I forgot, that is, until one day I found myself staring up at Episcopal Hospital, and I recalled that Marge preferred Episcopal, and just on a hunch I went inside.

I was inquiring, I told the red-headed girl in the office, about the possibility of reserving a room in the maternity section, say about June 20. The girl dipped into a filing cabinet. She came back to the counter, shook her head, and smiled. “Too bad,” she said. “We’re booked solid for June 20. Now if it was just two days later—”

“You mean,” I said, feeling my stomach knot up inside me, “that you have plenty of space for the twenty-second?”

“For the twenty-second,” she said, “we don’t have a single reservation. As a matter of fact, we don’t have any at all beyond June 21.” The redhead frowned. “That is peculiar,” she said. “That is very peculiar. Funny I didn’t notice it before.”

“Thank you very much,” I said, and I left, and noticed as I walked out into the snow that she was telephoning, and that the frown had not gone from her face.

I went to the AP office and called five other hospitals. Then I walked into J.C. Pogey’s inner sanctum, unannounced. I certainly was shaken, and I suppose I must have been white with fright and foreboding, because when J.C. saw me he said: “For Christ’s sake what’s the matter?”

I fell into the leather chair by his desk, and tried to light a cigarette. I couldn’t make my hands behave, and J.C. held a match for me. “It may be the most frightful thing!” I said. “The most frightful thing!”

“What?”

“No babies. No babies after June 21.”

J.C. Pogey is a very old, and patient, and infinitely wise man who has been the New York manager since, it is believed, the Administration of Taft. In that time all the most startling events of history have flowed through his ancient and delicate fingers, so what must have appeared to him as the spectacle of a reporter going wacky could not be expected to move him overmuch. He said, gently, “All right, Steve, take it easy and tell me the tale.”

I started with my knee, and went through the whole chronology. When I had finished he did not speak for a time, but rubbed his bald head behind the ears with his thin thumbs—a sort of manual method he employed to induce rapid cerebration.

Finally he said: “It may be, of course, the most terrible and certainly the most important story since the Creation. We must make the most thorough check, and yet we must not reveal what we’re after, or do anything that will bring premature publication. It may be simply an extraordinary coincidence—but I’m afraid not.”

“That’s pretty pessimistic,” I said.

J.C. swung his high-backed chair until it faced the window, and he looked out upon the spires of the city, soft gold in the winter sun, and it seemed that he looked through and beyond. “If I were God,” he said, “and I were forced to pick a time to deprive the human race of the magic power of fertility and creation, I think that time would be now.”

We decided that I should check the story, as far as possible, by telephone. We didn’t want to send any more queries or cables than necessary, because when you start sending queries you get a lot of other people excited, and the story is likely to get beyond your control.

I armed myself with telephone directories for twenty big cities. I started by calling a hospital in Boston. I didn’t say it was the AP calling. I just said I was a prospective father. The Boston hospital was booked up for June 21, like those in New York, but I was somewhat relieved when they said they had a few reservations for the last week in June.

“I don’t think that is important,” J.C. warned. “I think you’ll find it is just a miscalculation by some Boston doctor. That’s bound to happen.”

I called Rochester, Philadelphia, Miami, and New Orleans, and then desperately swung west to San Francisco. The situation was identical. I called Chicago, St. Louis, and Omaha, and then tried some small towns in the South. So far as I could discover, our July birth rate was going to be zero.

“Maybe it’s only in the United States,” I suggested.

“Try Montreal and Mexico City and B.A. and Rio,” J.C. ordered.

I found I was hungry, and that it was night, and we sent out for sandwiches and coffee, and I began combing the Western Hemisphere. Things didn’t change.

“This isn’t proving anything,” I said at midnight. “Maybe there isn’t any shortage of hospital space. The only people who really know about this are the obstetricians.”

“All right,” said J.C., “call some obstetricians.” I knew, by the way he said it, that his mind was set. A night fog had rolled over the city, and a Europe-bound liner was moaning its way toward the sea. He kept staring out into the night as if he expected to see something.

I only knew one obstetrician, Maria Ostenheimer, a friend of Marge who lives around the corner on Fifth Avenue. While I dialed her number, I noticed that J.C. was scribbling on an outgoing message form.

Dr. Ostenheimer was awake, and by the noise, she was having a party. I said, “Maria, I’ve got something serious, and very confidential to ask you.”

“Marge was over here, and she left a half-hour ago,” Dr. Ostenheimer said. “She came over here alone, and she left alone, and I think you’re a pig to even suspect…”

“No! No! No! This is nothing like that,” I interrupted. “This is strictly business, and damn vital business.”

“If you’re going to have a baby,” she said, “it’ll be both a relief and a surprise, because nobody else is having babies.” Her voice was just a bit hysterical, I thought.

“That’s what I called about,” I said, “this business of no babies.”

There was a pause, and I knew she had shut the door to her rumpus room, because the party noises ceased. “What do you know about it?” she asked.

“I know that the hospitals aren’t getting reservations in the maternity wards after June 21. That’s not only here, but all over the country, all over other countries too.”

There was no sound from the other end of the phone, and I thought for a moment that Maria might have fainted. But then she said, in a hushed, tense voice: “Stephen, at first I thought it was me. At first I thought somebody was spreading vicious lies about my work, and that I was being secretly blackballed. You know I’ve got a big practice, Stephen, and then suddenly, a few months ago, no new patients came. I start in the beginning with prenatal care, you know, Stephen.”

“You only accept a limited number of patients each month, but that quota is always filled, right?”

“That’s right. Well, it’s awfully hard, going to a colleague and announcing that you’re not getting any new patients, and I kept quiet until a few days ago, and then Dr. Blandy—he’s got a big practice in Westchester—dropped in to see me, and I felt that the same thing was worrying him, and all of a sudden he told me, and I told him that the same thing had happened to me. We’ve talked to six others—I suppose together they’re the top obstetricians in Manhattan—and we’re having a meeting next week to investigate.”