noncommittal gaze.
'As a champion of freedom of choice,' he continued, 'I knew you'd be the person to speak out on this issue from a feminist viewpoint.'
'Oh,' Burke said with a smile, 'I plan to. You see, I've al-ready volunteered to be an expert witness for the plaintiff.'
Johnson's jaw dropped. Trying to recover, he stammered in disbelief. The words caught somewhere down inside him and refused to escape in any intelligible form.
'If you're that composed in court,' Burke said, lowering her hands, 'perhaps your client should leave the country tonight.'
'How can you be on the plaintiff's side?' he demanded. His voice cracked at the end in an almost boyish squeak. 'How can you be opposed to a technique that gives women a new option in birth control?'
Her smile faded to a glare of undisguised contempt. 'A new option? What good has any sex technology done for women? Did contraceptives liberate women? No. They merely allowed men to demand more sex of women without the burden and responsibility of fatherhood.' She leaned forward, one elbow on the desk. 'Women didn't invent contraceptives, you know. Men did. For camels. They applied those methods to women with the same lack of regard for their health and well-being.'
'Well,' Johnson said warily, 'I don't know about that, but transoption seems to be a way for a woman to rid herself of a pregnancy while freeing her from the guilt feelings associ-'
'Don't try to convince me that this latest medical meddling frees women. Not when I've seen women injured and killed by IUDs, pills, and botched abortions. You won't get me to say that it's anything more than a scheme to turn women into in-terchangeable breeding units so that one womb is no more important than any other.' She smiled stonily and leaned back in her chair. 'Do you know where embryo-transfer research began, Mr. Johnson?'
'I think you'll tell me.'
'It began with cattle breeding. And that is what this male technology seeks to reduce us to.'
'Evelyn Fletcher is a woman.'
Burke's glare deepened. 'And she's doing a man's work, the traitor. I haven't met a female doctor yet who hasn't been spayed by the act of attending medical school. I'll make sure that she receives no sympathy from the women she's betrayed.'
The lawyer stared at Burke for a long moment, his sensibili-ties rocked by the unexpected hostility.
'How-' He stopped to think. 'If you consider all medical technology to be anti-woman, why does your organization so fervently support le-galized abortion?'
Her expression retreated ever so slightly to one of cautious reserve. 'Because,' she said, 'no matter how it has been abused, abortion still allows a woman to have final, absolute control over what becomes of part of her body- something this transoption madness would destroy.'
'I see.' He didn't, really, but he knew wasted effort when he stared it in the face. Burke smiled a crooked, nearly impish smile. 'Why don't you trot over to Avery Decker?' Her tone bordered on sarcasm. 'Protecting blobs of protoplasm is his holy mission.'
'He was next on my list,' Johnson said.
'
Since Jane Burke and Pastor Avery Decker were diametri-cally opposed on the abortion issue, Johnson expected his meeting with the fundamentalist minister to be much less strained and much more productive than his run-in with the feminist. He mulled her arguments on the drive from Santa Monica over to Decker's Tustin office. Passing Disneyland's Matterhorn on Interstate 5, its artificial snow resisting the afternoon's heat, he wondered at the woman's position. Was her outlook the norm? Why did she support abortion but op-pose transoption? They both ended pregnancy in exactly the same way. Wasn't that what they were after-the right to ex-pel an unwanted fetus? Why should she care what became of it afterward?
His lawyer's mind filed the question away. If he was to meet her on the other side of the lawsuit, it might be worth bringing up. He ran through possible cross-examination scenarios in his mind, trying to anticipate her responses to certain ques-tions, forming his counterresponses. He missed the Tustin exits entirely.
Five miles of backtracking brought him to the new office building situated under the approach path to the marine heli-copter air station. A huge Sikorsky Skycrane thundered over-head, with basso pulsations that rumbled straight through Johnson's guts. The slamming of his car door faded to inaudibility amidst the roar. He watched the copter descend toward the airfield. The noise level dropped abruptly, though a throbbing, ringing sound lin-gered in his ears.
