"Friesner, Esther - 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?"

"Why do you want to know?" Jennie demanded petulantly. She was still nursing a grudge over the fact that she had wasted all those weeks going to LaMaze classes, hearing a bunch of bimbos in Birkenstocks rhapsodize over becoming one with the pain, only to wind up spread-eagled on this damn table, slit open like a tax refund, and stuck full of more diagnostic equipment than a Porsche getting a tune-up. Thanks to an excellent anesthesiologist she was becoming one with a whole lot of chemicals instead of her authentic womanhood. Now she'd have to take up ceramics instead. And to think her baby sister dropped those ugly brats of hers one-two-three, after maybe fifteen minutes of labor, like some refugee from a Pearl Buck novel!

"Maybe you'd better show him the rest," the assisting obstetrician murmured.

"What rest?" Justin was on point again.

"Over here, sir," said a nurse at the foot of the table.

"No, dammit!" the chief ob-gyn cried, having as loud a hissy fit as a surgical mask would allow. "He is not allowed on this side of the drapes!"

"I demand to see what you're talking about!" Justin discovered that it was impossible for him to throw up and holler at the same time and resolved to use this knowledge. "This is my son we're talking about here, and if something's the matter -- "

"What's the matter?" Jennifer yelled. "Is something the matter?"

"Nothing's the matter, dear," the nurse taking the head-end of the table cooed by rote. "You just relax."

"-- I am going to sue!"

And there was silence in the O.R. for the space of a moment as the dreaded s-word worked its arcane sorcery.

"Oh, what the hell," the obstetrician said, shrugging green-gowned shoulders. "Let him see."

"Over here, sir," the nurse said, motioning for Justin to join her.

He did so slowly, cautiously, hoping that what he was about to see would not be too bloody. There was just so much you could ask of a man who's only had one cup of coffee. The nurse was still beckoning him. She stood before a table well removed from the Main Event. On it were arranged several stainless steel pans similar to the one which had received the trilobite. Justin looked into the first of these. Something with tentacles looked back.

"Squid," said the nurse. "Though damned if I know why it's stuck in that shell." Something oozed its way out from under the squid. "Snail," the nurse remarked. "There's some worms in there too, somewhere, and there was an ememonee -- nannynemonee -- an anemomonee -- an anem-o-ne," she articulated in triumph.