e pilot marked URGENT started
flashing and the blurs on the screen sharpened into a young man and
woman seated across from each other in the apartment where the party
had been. Half-finished drinks and ash trays full of stubs lay about.
Husband and wife were both slightly drunk and being very frank with
each other.

"I don't know how we got off on _this_," remarked the man. "Whenever
George gets a couple of drinks in him he starts popping off about
politics and the fate of the world. He doesn't know a damn thing about
either."

"Well, at least he's optimistic," the young woman said, kicking off
her shoes.

"You can say that again! Fifty years from now, according to George,
we'll all be living in plastic houses with three helicopters in each
garage. There won't be any unemployment, we'll have a four-day week,
atomic energy'll be doing all the heavy work, mankind'll have realized
the futility of war, everything'll be just hunky-dory. Nuts! Guys like
George make me sick."

"But good Lord, honey, if everyone felt like you there wouldn't _be_
any world. Maybe things won't be perfect but life's got to go on."

"Go on to what?" muttered the husband, polishing off his watery
highball. "--To a great big beautiful cloud of atomic fallout, that's
what. Don't laugh either, because everything points that way and you
know it. Sputniks and ICBMs zooming around, both sides stockpiling
like crazy, half the world scrapping as it is. It's just a question of
who tosses the first match and then blooie! Hell, Julie, it's not that
I don't _want_ another kid. It's just that I don't think it's fair to
create human life and turn it loose in this--this holocaust."

The young woman got up and sat on the arm of his chair and stroked
his hair. "Oh Bill, honey, it's _wrong_ to think like that. Don't you
see how wrong it is?" Suddenly she wrinkled her nose at him and
whispered some words in his ear. They were in the special
baby-language which had sprung up around the first child.

Then she said tipsily: "A baby is such a tiny thing."

"Yeah," said her husband, "you feed them and take care of them and
watch them grow and it's swell. Just like the fatted calf. Then you
flip open the evening paper and wonder whether they'll have the good
luck to die in their beds at a ripe old age. I tell you I'm honestly
frightened of where we're going...."

* * * * *

There were tense little crow's feet about Mrs. Mimms' eye