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clustered on fatsia leaves showered his neck and ran down his back. Ordinarily his temper was quick, but he didn’t even click his tongue in irritation. Whatever happened to him now seemed part of an inevitable design which he must accept without protest.
    Bird emerged from the bushes with his shoes covered with mud; the Director appeared to regret a little having been so abrupt. Encircling Bird with one short, pudgy arm, he led him toward the ambulance and said emphatically, as though he were disclosing a marvelous secret: “It
was
a boy! I
knew
I’d seen a penis!”
    The one-eyed doctor and an anesthetist were sitting in the ambulance with the basket and an oxygen cylinder between them. The anesthetist’s back hid the contents of the basket. But the faint hissing noise of oxygen bubbling through water in a flask communicated like a signal from a secret transmitter. Bird lowered himself onto the bench opposite theirs—insecurely perched—there was a canvas stretcher on top of the bench. Shifting his rear uncomfortably, he glanced through the ambulance window and—shuddered. From every window on the second floor and even from the balcony, just out of bed most likely, their freshly washed faces gleaming whitely in the morning sun, pregnant women were peering down at Bird. All of them wore flimsy nylon nightgowns, either red or shades of blue, and those on the balcony in particular, with the nightgowns billowing about their ankles, were like a host of angels dancing on the air. Bird read anxiety in their faces, and expectation, even glee; he lowered his eyes. The siren began to wail, and the ambulance lurched forward. Bird planted his feet on the floor to keep from slipping off the bench and thought: That siren! Until now, a siren had always been a moving object: it approached from a distance, hurtled by, moved away. Now a siren was attached to Bird like a disease he carried in his body: this siren would never recede.
    “Everything’s fine,” said the doctor with the glass eye, turning around to Bird. There was authority in his attitude, mild but evident, and its heat threatened to melt Bird like a piece of candy.
    “Thank you,” he mumbled. His passivity erased the shadow of hesitation from the doctor’s good eye. He took a firm grip on his authority, and thrust it out in front of him: “This is a rare case, all right; it’s a first for me, too.” The doctor nodded to himself, then nimbly crossed the lurching ambulance and sat down at Bird’s side. He didn’t seem to notice how uncomfortable the stretcher made the bench.
    “Are you a brain specialist?” Bird asked.
    “Oh no, I’m an obstetrician.” The doctor didn’t have to make the correction: his authority was already beyond injury by a misapprehension so minor. “There are no brain men at our hospital. But the symptoms are perfectly clear: it’s a brain hernia, all right. Of course, we would know more if we had tapped some spinal fluid from that lump protruding from the skull. The trouble with that is you might just prick the brain itself and then you’d be in trouble. That’s why we’re taking the baby to the other hospital without touching him. As I said, I’m in obstetrics, but I consider myself fortunate to have run across a case of brain hernia—I hope to be present at the autopsy. You will consent to an autopsy, won’t you? It may distress you to talk about autopsies at this point, but, well, look at it this way! Progress in medicine is cumulative, isn’t it. I mean, the autopsy we perform on your child may give us just what we need to save the next baby with a brain hernia. Besides, if I may be frank, I think the baby would be better off dead, and so would you and your wife. Some people have a funny way of being optimistic about this kind of case, but it seems to me the quicker the infant dies, the better for all concerned. I don’t know, maybe it’s the difference in generations. I was born in 1935. How about you?”
    “Somewhere