"Esther M. Friesner - Sea-Section" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friesner Esther M)

ESTHER M. FRIESNER

SEA-SECTION

JUSTIN HOLDSTOCK FINALLY decided the hell with Doctor's Orders when he heard one
of the attending obstetricians ask, "What is that in there? A lobster?"

Head up like a hound about to go on point, Justin did the unthinkable: He
looked. Not just looked, but looked over the carefully erected barricade of
sterile drapes that divided his wife Jennifer into the Amazing Talking Head on
one side and No Man's Land on the other. S.O.P. for Caesarian sections, yes, a
textile admonition to be respected (if not feared) by all law-abiding
fathers-to-be who didn't want to find themselves either losing lunch or
garnering an unscheduled nap on the O.R. floor. Marriage counselors were forever
urging couples to open up to one another, but not like this.

But Bluebeard's wife had also been told not to look, Pandora had been forbidden
to peek, and by the Great Horned Steinem, Justin Holdstock was no sexist.
Besides, when a member in good standing of the medical profession is supposed to
be birthing your firstborn and starts making crustacean-related comments, then
the time for blind obedience is past.

He looked. "That's not a lobster," he said, remarkably calm for a man who has
just gotten a look at what makes his darling wiley tick (and tock, and swoosh,
and lub-dub, and the whole symphony of internal plumbing). "That is a
trilobite."

"A what?" the obstetrician asked. The one holding the still-squirming segmented
body, that is.

"A trilobite," Justin repeated. "An extinct Paleozoic ancestor of modern
crustacea. And," he added, "I fail to see why you are fooling around with such
things when you're supposed to be birthing little Jeremiah." For the Holdstocks
had gone to the technocave of the ultrasonic Sybil and there received assurance
that all the auguries (and the fetoid wingle-dangle) pointed at this baby being
a boy.

"Mister Holdstock," said the obstetrician, standing tall and aiming the
trilobite at the plaintiff's heart. "I do not make a practice of smuggling
lobsters into the O.R. Not to Caesarean sections, anyway, although sometimes
when I have to perform a holistic hysterectomy I--" He made an exasperated noise
and dropped the critter into a waiting stainless steel pan where it clanked
around in a mournful manner. "The point is, I did not bring that thing in here;
I found it in there." And his gore-bedewed rubber glove indicated the
still-agape aperture of la bonne femme Holdstock.

"What?" Now Justin did show the first signs of an impending swoon. He wheeled
violently from the doctor's dramatic j'accuse pose, planted both hands on the
side of the operating table beside his wife's head and said, "Jennifer, what did
you have for dinner last night?"