hung up, staggered to his feet, dragpatches with the sound of drunken ged on his clothes.

From the bed, Robie murmured drowsily, "What is it?"

"Andy Clifford's wife is about to spawn. Go to sleep. I'll see you in the morning."

Art shrugged into his suit jacket, took his trenchcoat and emergency bag from the closet. There was no need to turn on lights. The routine was habitual. Grumbling inwardly, he walked through the dark house to the door that opened from the kitchen into the garage. Fool girl ought to be in the hospital, but she said they couldn't afford it, which was true, and that, anyway, her mother had had all her babies at home. Grimly Art wished that mother was alive tonight to deliver this one.

He set the bag on the front seat of the car, hoisted the garage door and shivered in the cold rush of wet air. As he turned back to climb into the car, something checked him. For a minute he stood blinking, troubled. Then he went back into the house. In the bedroom, he stared down at the sleeping Robie, who lay on his back, breathing shallowly through parted lips, head half turned on the pillow, lashes lying dark on his cheeks.

The lashes fluttered. "Forget something?"

"Remembered something," Art said. He bent and kissed the boy. "Goodbye, Robie," he whispered.

Then he returned to the car.

The rain poured across the windshield. The highway was new. It shone glossily in the glare of the headlights. But the road for which he left it after a few miles, the road that would take him to Clifford's farm, was not new. Its shoulders were mud. Its narrow strip of paving was many times patched. The tires thumped across the

12

drums. The night was black.

He pushed the throttle. Myra Clifford's pelvic measurements were narrow. That could mean trouble. He felt an urgency to be there now, in the bleak little bedroom of the runty, stucco farmhouse. The trip seemed to be taking longer than it should. What time was it? He tried to look at his watch. The sleeve of the trenchcoat caught on it. He shook it free. Ten till four. He looked up.

In front of him loomed a battered

pickup truck, not a light showing, nobody inside. Its front wheels were mired in the shoulder gumbo. Its sharp, shovel-shaped back end reared half across the paved strip. He tramped the brake pedal, wrenched the wheel. No good. Not at this speed. Not in this rain. The stalled pickup rushed at him, nightmarish. No, he thought, this can't be happening to me. Then he thought, Robie!

Then he no longer thought.

"You better drink." His Uncle Clyde got up, huge, unsteady, from the kitchen table, rattled clumsy hands among dirty dishes in the sink, rinsed a glass for him. "Drink hard, Robie, boy. There's no other true solace. Not in books, for example . . . ." He waved an arm to indicate the shelves that crowded even the kitchen walls of this house, weighted with a thousand dusty volumes.

When Robie was little, books had been all life to Clyde Walker, as flowers had been all life to his frail wife Clara. Their farm had been a magic place to Robie then-color, perfume, the sleepy drone of bees outdoors, indoors wisdom and warmth and humor. Clyde and Clara were like grownup children. He had spent enchanted summers here.

"No solace in books," Clyde repeated, "no salvation in wisdom. Only in booze. They knock it, but it's saved