Jerry?'
'That was great!' Ron said, switching off the machine. 'They totally downplayed Johnson's side. We've got it in the bag from a PR standpoint.'
Valerie gazed at the teapot atop the blue gas flames, think-ing of Renata's isolation tank, where she was safe from report-ers, lawyers, judges, and juries. Yet they surrounded her from afar, deciding her fate. She had done what no other child be-fore her had ever done-survived an abortion to find shelter inside another woman. Now the publicity would mean that she could never again find shelter no matter which mother won her.
The pain in Valerie's chest once again began to gnaw at her. From without and within. ' Evelyn sat on the stage set, trying to collect her thoughts while a young man fiddled with her bodice in an attempt to hide a small condenser microphone. He gave up after a mo-ment and clipped it to the maroon piping of her grey lapel, trailing the wire beneath the jacket and across the floor. She sighed with relief at his departure.
Terry had arranged this interview on The Gerry Rivers Show, one of the hottest new talk shows in syndication. He had spent half the night convincing her to go. It wasn't that she doubted the need for publicity; she doubted Gerry Rivers' willingness to give her the right kind.
'You're a fine speaker,' Johnson told her. 'You'll captivate them all.' She wasn't so sure.
Rivers was a young man, mid-twenties at most, who had made his name as a deep-digging investigative newspaper reporter. It had won him this talk show, which he had prom-ised would be just as incisive. Fletcher doubted it, having watched him for the first time the day before. He had built the entire hour around the beauty secrets of celebrity call girls.
The floor director waggled his digits for attention as the set fell silent. Dark-haired and sturdily handsome, Gerry Rivers stood in the studio audience to await the countdown. He was not as tall as Evelyn had expected, which seemed strange to her when she considered how small her TV set was. The floor director folded all but his index finger, which he pointed at Rivers. A weak, filtered version of the show's theme song came over a monitor, and Rivers switched on a winning smile.
'Gerry Rivers here with the controversial surgeon Evelyn Fletcher, woman of the hour, and the question of the hour: Transoption-kidnapping or salvation? What do you think of this whole thing?' He stuck his microphone in the face of a woman in the audience.
She looked up at him as if she had been waiting to be called. 'I think it's really wrong,' she said in a soft voice. 'I don't think doctors should go around experimenting on babies.'
'Dr. Fletcher?' Rivers looked toward her. A red light sud-denly glowed on the camera covering her portion of the set.
She frowned. Though she welcomed a format that required her to think on her feet, she objected to such obvious setups. 'Doctors already perform experiments on aborted fetuses,' she said. 'Experiments that require the fetuses to be freshly dead. Why is that permitted to occur thousands of times a year while I am being persecuted for a single experiment that allowed one fetus to live?' Rivers laughed and held up his hand. 'Whoa, Doctor. I can't interview you if you ask the questions.' He looked down at a man in the audience. 'How about you? Any questions?'
'Yes,' the balding man said. 'I'd like to know how Dr. Fletcher developed transoption.'
'Good question.' Rivers looked over to her. 'Dr. Fletcher?' That's more like it, she thought. 'I first became interested in alternatives to abortion about twenty years ago, when I saw what psychological devastation such a life-or-death decision imposed on women. When the processes of laser microsur-gery and fiberoptics became widely available, I realized that a fetus could probably be removed intact from one woman and implanted into another with only a moderate amount of diffi-culty. Even though I hadn't done any animal experiments, I was certain that a method could-'
'I'm sorry to interrupt,' Rivers said as the audience camera zoomed in on him. 'We've got to cut away for a moment and take a break. We'll be right back.'
'Clear for commercial,' a tinny voice called over the studio speakers. Rivers flashed Evelyn the OK sign. 'Doing great!' he said, barely looking at her as he bent over to speak to one earnest woman.
'Ten seconds,' the lo-fi voice announced. 'Nine...eight...' At three seconds, the speaker fell silent, and the floor director took over with his own fingers, then pointed at Rivers.
'Welcome back. We're talking to Dr. Evelyn Fletcher, cur-rently on trial in the Baby Renata case. We're-'
'I'm not on trial as such,' she interjected. 'The plaintiff is seeking an injunction against me for-'
'You could lose your license to practice medicine, couldn't you?'
'Yes,' she said irritably. 'But that's a BMQA hearing, not a trial.'
'BMQA,' he said, turning to the audience, 'is the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance, am I right?'
