'A breath sooner,' she said.
'Sure, Ev. Sure. I'm sorry about Bum-'
'Forget it,' she said. 'Just take care of Renata. So long.' She gently replaced the receiver in its tray. 'DuQuette's a good doctor,' she muttered. 'She'll be all right.'
'How about you?' Johnson stared at her as she flipped idly through the BMQA decision.
'It's less than thirty years of my life. I figure I've got thirty more.' She stubbed the half-smoked cigarette until it disinte-grated into a crumbled pile of burst paper and dark shreds of tobacco. 'Let's finish off this trial so I can decide on my career change.'
XVII
The next few days consisted of a numbing series of inter-views with newspaper and magazine reporters, television talk-show hosts, and radio call-in shows. Fletcher discussed transoption with a growing fervor nurtured by her sudden fall from medical respectability.
'I'm free,' she told one interviewer in her living room, 'to discuss transoption without fear of losing my medical creden-tials. They're gone. I can step on all the toes I want.' The reporter-a science correspondent for a midwestern newspaper-behaved differently from most of the people who had interviewed Fletcher. The majority were either openly hostile, surreptitiously hostile, or confused about just what she was trying to prove. The rest performed their jobs with a straightforward, emotionless technique that caused her to wonder whether they held any personal beliefs whatsoever.
This one, though-Lester Joseph Neilson from the Iowa New Dealer-was a small, tough-looking man in his forties. He ap-peared to have been built more for welterweight wrestling than for pounding a word processor. He watched her with iron-grey eyes under greying close-cropped hair, chewing on the end of his pencil between scrawls on a dog-eared notepad.
'You dealt with death continuously,' he asked her with a voice like gravel in a gearbox. 'Why should one more abor-tion have bothered you?'
He probed too deeply, she thought, reached too closely to truths she could not yet reveal. 'I realized that abortion had to come to an end,' she said. 'That somebody had to be the first to find another way. No one else had taken the risk to use the new surgical advances available, so I did. It could have been anyone.'
'Anyone with a conscience,' Neilson muttered, making notes. 'Do you feel morally superior to the doctors who didn't?'
'The first person to jump into a fire would be petty to chide others for not going ahead of her.'
'And if they don't follow?'
'Only the hindsight allowed by history will determine whether they behaved with cowardly sloth or wise restraint.'
Neilson flipped through his notes. 'Good stuff, Dr. Fletcher.'
'There's no need for the `Doctor' part anymore.'
He smiled. 'Let's keep it there just in case.' He mused si-lently for a moment, then asked, 'What if the medical estab-lishment finds it wise to restrain themselves permanently? What if research into transoption is banned outright?'
She smiled as she took a sip of coffee from her pale blue cup. 'This isn't the only country in the world. And only natural laws last forever. Somewhere, sometime, someone else will pick up the scalpel and decide to save a life rather than end one.'
'How do you feel,' he asked gingerly, 'about all the babies you aborted up till Renata?' The cup paused halfway to her lips. Her mind raced furi-ously; then, calmly, she said, 'Catholics once believed that the souls of unbaptised babies dwelt in limbo, awaiting Judgment Day. That's how they exist... in my mind. In limbo, waiting for the atonement of sins. The sins of others.' Neilson tapped the pencil against his teeth. 'Pretty mystical stuff. Let's talk about your personal Judgment Day. Your oppo-nents have a medical expert going on the stand tomorrow. What do you feel about such testimony?'
Setting the coffee cup down, she said, 'Without making any comments on the course of the trial, I can only say that I will be very interested in this person's opinions. I'll value his or her insight. A doctor's viewpoint has yet to be heard.'
'
Evelyn stared in shock at the man called to testify.
