ocative explanations for the
French doctor's concern came to mind.... Was he the repudiated father
of Sara's unborn child? Or was he a practitioner of artificial
insemination, with a rather unfortunate error to his credit?

"Your request is unusual," I said cautiously, "but not entirely
unreasonable. In order to justify it, I am sure you will be willing to
explain your interest in this case, will you not, Doctor?"

* * * * *

He frowned, "I suppose I must. But you will believe little of it. My
own staff agreed with my diagnosis, but they violently rejected my
theory. Wait until they hear _your_ diagnosis, doctor!" He unzipped
his briefcase. "She probably protests that she has a malignant tumor,
not a baby," he remarked as he laid thick sheafs of paper on my desk.

"You are so very right," I said.

"Madamoiselle is magnificent," he observed, running slender, wrinkled
hands through his sparse gray hair. "But her obstinacy will not avail
against evolution. No more than we doctors' monumental ignorance."

"Evolution? Explain, please."

"Here is the case history." He drummed on it with his short-clipped
nails. "In it, you will find that Caffey came to us three months ago
with her body cavity in the grasp of a small octopus of a soft form
carcinoma. The pain reached from pelvis to chest."

"Incredible!" I exclaimed.

Sansome spread his hand on the record sheets. "Facts are never
incredible," he reminded me gently. "What follows, however, will tax
your credulity, and I beg of you to allow me to impose an outrageous
concept whose only virtue appears to be its demonstrated validity."

"Proceed."

"In forty years of slicing away tumerous growths, I had become morbid
at the dreadful incidence of recurrence and the obscene mortality
rate. In spite of all our techniques, these cancers have increased
with the persistence of Nature herself.

"In a fit of prolonged depression brought on by a foolishly strenuous
research of histories, my mind stumbled into a stupid preoccupation
with a few isolated cases of exogenic pregnancy. One which fascinated
me was the young 17-year-old boy from whose lung a surgeon removed a
live three-month foetus. Somehow the obvious explanation refused to
satisfy me. It was, of course, concluded that the foetus was an
undeveloped twin to the boy himself.

"This _could_ be so; but on what facts was this assumption based?
None. Only the absence of any other theory j