Cascade Point

Something in his voice caught my attention. "You sound less optimistic than you did yesterday," I said. "You thinking of calling it off?"

He was silent a long moment. "No, not really. It's just that the whole thing is getting more complicated than I'd envisioned it."

I shrugged. "True—but don't forget that it's your experiment. If you don't want to do things Jordan's way, all you have to do is say so."

"I know. But he's unfortunately got a good point: that if we don't at least take a stab at doing things rigorously, all we're going to do is throw more gasoline at the emotional bonfire." He paused. "Tell me, do you have any relatives or close friends who are pregnant?"

I blinked at the abrupt change of subject. "Yes—four to nine, depending on how close a friend you need."

"Let me have a fast rundown, will you?"

I drove one-handed for a while as I gave him a brief personality sketch of each of the nine women. Afterward he sat silently for several minutes, digesting it all. "What do you think Kathy would say if I asked to be present at her delivery?" he said at last.

"I don't know," I said. "But I know the right person to ask."

We called Kathy as soon as we got back to Dan's office. Though clearly surprised by the request, she agreed to act as Dan's guinea pig, provided her husband didn't object. I got the most recent estimate of her due date—another month—and extracted a promise of secrecy before hanging up. "You going to tell Jordan and Halladay about this?" I asked Dan.

He shook his head. "No, I don't think so. A slip of the tongue could have the entire Fresno chapter of the Family Alliance descending on Kathy's birthing room, and I have no intention of putting the Ausberrys through that."

"Besides which, if you find you can't even read the mind of a baby that's only hours from birth, you don't want anyone to know?" I hazarded.

His slightly pained smile was my only answer.

But the Family Alliance was subtler than we'd expected, and neither of us was prepared for the page-twenty story in the Chronicle the next morning.

"I don't believe this," I fumed, stomping around Dan's office with a copy of the paper gripped tightly in my hand. "How can they print something like this without at least contacting you first?"

"The Lifeline Experiment,' " Dan quoted, reading at his desk. "Gack. Why do newspeople always have to come up with cutesy titles for everything? Contact me? Of course they should have. Obviously, some fine upstanding citizen or group of same convinced them that the story didn't need checking."

"Someone like our Family Alliance friends?" "Undoubtedly. You'll notice they don't include any of the details we discussed yesterday, which implies Halladay has dried up as an information source for them. I guess that's something."

"How can you sit there and take it so calmly?" I snapped, slapping my newspaper down on the desktop for emphasis. "Look: there it is for the whole damn world to see."

He looked up at me. "Simmer down, Iris—the first client's due in ten minutes and the last thing he'll want is to have his head taken off by my secretary. I'm mad, too, but there's nothing we can do now except make sure the experiment comes off as pla

I was only listening with half an ear. "But why? What did they expect to gain by leaking the story? It's not even particularly slanted."

"Sure it is," Dan contradicted me. "Sixth paragraph, fourth and fifth sentences."

"In addition to his private psychiatric practice, Staley does volunteer counseling once a week at the Rappaport Mental Health Clinic of San Mateo County, which he helped found. He also works frequently with the public defenders office and has worked with the Greenpeace Save-the-Whales Project.' " I rattled off. "So?"

"So someone realized that this was going to be a very difficult experiment to do. So difficult, in fact, that we conceivably might have to give it up—and that someone wanted to make sure I was established in the public mind as a liberal right from the start. A liberal and, by implication, proabortion."

"I still don't see—oh. Sure. If the experiment turns out to be unworkable they'll claim you learned something in the initial stages that clashed with your liberal views on the issue, won't they, and that you backed out because of it."

"Bull's-eye. Or so I'm guessing."

I sat down, my anger replaced by a sudden chill. "Who exactly are we up against here—the Family Alliance or the CIA covert operations group?"

"We're up against people who've been up to their necks in politics for at least a decade," he told me, laying his own paper on top of mine. "Along the way they've probably picked up all the standard political tricks one can employ against an opponent—which is almost fu

"One would think they haven't much faith in their beliefs, wouldn't one?" I suggested.

"I think that's a self-contradictory sentence, but you've got the right idea," Dan said, smiling. "And you might remember that any group that size is a mixed bag. Some of the members would probably be madder than you are if they knew what was being tried here." He tapped the newspaper.

Just then there was a knock on the outer office door. "Mr. Raymond's early," I commented, heading out to unlock it.

"No problem," Dan called after me. "You can send him right in."

But it wasn't Raymond, or any of Dan's other clients. It was, instead, a committee of four people.

"We'd like to see Dr. Staley for a moment, if he isn't too busy," their spokeswoman, a young woman with a recognizable face, said briskly. Without waiting for a reply she started forward.

Out in Hayward I'd been taken by surprise, but here in my own office I had better control of things. I remained standing in the doorway, and the woman had to pull up sharply to keep from ru

It was abundantly clear from her expression that she hadn't expected to be put off like that, but she recovered quickly. "Perhaps Dr. Staley will be able to squeeze us in between appointments later this morning," she said. "Would you tell him Jackie McClain and other representatives of the National Institute for Freedom and Equality are here? We'll wait until he's free."

I couldn't legitimately deny them waiting-room space, so I let them in, hoping that what I knew would be a long wait would discourage them. Three of them did eventually get up and leave, the last one about one o'clock, with whispered apologies to their leader. But McClain stayed all the way until Dan's last client left at five-thirty, a persistence I had to admire. I consulted briefly with Dan and he agreed to see her.

"I'm sorry you had to wait so long, Ms. McClain," he said as we all sat down in his office. "But, as Iris said, this was a particularly long day."

"She's a very efficient secretary," McClain said ambiguously. "I'll get right to the point, Dr. Staley: this so-called Lifeline Experiment. We'd like to know exactly what it is you intend to prove."

Dan frowned. "I'm not out to prove anything, really. I'm simply trying to find where in its development a fetus becomes a human being."

"In what sense? Medical, moral, legal—there are several ways to define human, and they don't necessarily correspond."

"I'm not sure I understand the question," Dan said, frowning a bit.

"Suppose you discover that, in your opinion, human life begins during the third month of pregnancy," McClain said. "The Supreme Court earlier this year stated that abortions through the sixth month are legal, which implies that a fetus is not legally human through that point."