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started coming in from all around the country. Soon, within a couple of weeks, the news reported nearly fifty cases of babies—both boys and girls—being born with no fingerprints … no footprints ... no souls!
    Six weeks after the first one was born in Oklahoma City, we had one right here in Portland. Believe me, all the grist from the rumor mill and the sensationalism in the media didn’t prepare me for that baby.
    It was... cold .
    Now, back-stepping a bit here, I don’t intend to analyze what brought Tom and me together. Chemistry? Pressure at work? Fate? Sure. And the problems he was having with Becky, his wife, certainly didn’t help. So it might have been all of these ... some of them ... or something else.
    Who cares?
    I do know what broke us up, though. It was when Tom found out that, after three years of trying, Becky was pregnant. Once that happened, he dropped me like a bad habit, let me tell you.
    It hurt.
    Oh, yeah.
    You might say I was crushed, but—hey! Be realistic , I kept telling myself. You don’t have an affair with a married man and honestly expect him to dump it all—lay his marriage, his life, and his career on the line for ... for what, truthfully, had been just a couple of nights of fun.
    There’s this thing I’ve noticed about life, you see. You have to pay for your fun.
    Always!
    Like I said earlier, parents-to-be have all sorts of worries. Most of them, I know from experience, are absolutely groundless. But with everything that had been happening lately, and news reports of more instances coming up daily ... well, Tom got pretty upset.
    No, that’s putting it mildly.
    He was in a state of near constant dread that his baby would be born with no fingerprints.
    The media didn’t help. It rarely does. They’d picked up the stories from around the world and were running them for all they were worth. Radio and TV talk shows, and newspapers at the grocery checkout counters were the worst. Aren’t they always? They started in with explanations ranging from terrorist plots (after nine-eleven, people could believe anything) to pre-invasion tactics of the interstellar aliens to astrology and reincarnation.
    It was the reincarnation angle that got to Tom, and after listening to him, I have to admit that it kind of got me worried, too. We had stopped having sex altogether by then, but we were still friends. Many a slow night in the staff room, we’d talk ... and talk ...
    Tom admitted that he was convinced the reincarnation angle was the right one. That’s what I meant as the start about the “scales tipping.” The basic idea is that, with all the improvements in medicine and with life expectancy being extended well into people’s eighties and nineties, the Universe was running out of souls to be born. Babies, so the theory went, were still being born within the normal course of biology, but there simply weren’t enough souls left over to fill all these new bodies.
    “NO BODY IN THE BODY,” as one banner headline put it.
    Fingerprints were like the souls’ identification card number, the cosmic bar code, if you will. There was no way to stop the babies from being born, so the cosmos or whatever just kept churning them out, but it had to leave out the spiritual contents.
    Does any of this make sense?
    Well, to me—as a nurse trained in the sciences—of course it didn’t. But if you read and believe those sleazy newspapers, it might make sense. No worse, anyway, than “Amazonian Frog Boys” or the B-52 that was supposedly found in a crater on the moon. What truly amazed me was that Tom, an educated medical man—a doctor, for Christ’s sake!—would embrace such a cockamamie idea.
    And I’ll be damned if, after spending several nights talking with him, he almost had me convinced, too. He certainly said enough to make me worry.
    Tom wrapped himself around the idea like Ahab embracing Moby Dick just before he goes under. He clung to that idea and took it so much to heart that …