“Eva, stop sounding like a tract. Obviously, you’ve advanced to a higher, more Jovian plane of existence, but won’t you still need your metabolism? Or have you decided that vitamins are all-in-the-mind?”
“Now you’re being superior. Anyhow, alcohol isn’t a vitamin. And I didn’t come to talk about that. I came to tell you something I think you ought to know.”
“Which is?”
She said, “Bob, I mean to have a child here.”
A bark of laughter, part sheer hysteria and part exaspera-tion, jack-knifed Helmuth into a sitting position. A red arrow bloomed on the far wall, obediently marking the paragraph which, supposedly, he had reached in his reading, and the page vanished.
“Women!” he said, when he could get his breath back.
“Really, Evita, you make me feel much better. No environment can change a human being much, after all.”
“Why should it?” she said suspiciously. “I don’t see the joke. Shouldn’t a woman want to have a child?”
“Of course she should,” he said, settling back. The flipping pages began again. “It’s quite ordinary. All women want to have children. All women dream of the day they can turn a child out to play in an airless rock-garden, to pluck fossils and get quaintly star-burned. How cosy to tuck the little blue body back into its corner that night, promptly at the sound of the trick-change bell! Why, it’s as natural as Jupiter-light as Earthian as vacuum-frozen apple pie.”
He turned his head casually away. “As for me, though, Eva, I’d much prefer that you take your ghostly little pretext out of here.”