The Juvenile Man smiled without humor. "My wife and I had a child last year, Mr. Rush. Or perhaps I should say that a child was born to us. I am glad that child was born dead--I think my wife is even glad. Perhaps we should try again--I understand that you and your kind have left us an even chance on a normal birth." He paused for a moment. "I shall file a petition with the circuit court asking that the Juvenile Office be appointed guardians of your children, Mr. Rush. I hope you do not choose to resist that petition--feeling would run pretty high against an ex-physicist who tried to prove he _deserved_ children." He turned away stiffly and went out the front door. In a little while Rush heard the car door slam decisively. The doctor was replacing things in the black bag. "I'm sorry, John. He said he was going to come out here anyway so I invited him to come with me." John nodded. "My wife?" "There is no change." "And no chance." "There never has been one. The brain tumor is too large and too inaccessible for treatment or surgery. It will be soon now. I am surprised that she has lasted this long. I am prolonging a sure process." He turned away. "That's all I can do." "Thank you for coming, doctor--I appreciate that." Rush smiled bitterly, unable to stop himself. "But aren't you afraid that your other patients will find out?" The doctor stopped, his face paling slightly. "I took an oath when I graduated from medical school. Sometimes I want to break that oath, but I have not so far." He paused. "Try as I may I cannot blame them for hating you. You know why." Rush wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. "Don't you realize that the government that punished the men I worked with for their 'criminal negligence' is the same government that commissioned them to do that work--that officials were warned and rewarned of the things that small increases in radiation might do and that such things might not show up immediately--and yet they ordered us ahead?" He stopped for a moment and put his head down, touching his work-roughened hands to his eyes. "They put us in prison for refusing to do a job or investigated us until no one could or would trust us in civilian jobs--then when it was done they put us in prison or worse because the very things we warned them of came true." "Perhaps that is true," the doctor said stiffly, "but the choice of refusing was still possible."