Minnie stared back at him, but she wasn't seeing his face. "Don't you understand, honey? This isn't just something happening to _us_. We're not special. It's happening to everybody, all over the country, all over the world. You seen it in the 'casts, haven't you? Most states, they adopted the laws. And in a couple more years it'll be the only way anyone will ever have kids. Ten, twenty years from now, the kids will be growing up. Ours won't be different then, because from now on all the kids will be just like he is. The same size." "I thought you was afraid of the shots," Frank said. Minnie was still staring. "I was, honey. Only, I dunno. I keep thinking about Grandma." "What's the old lady got to do with it?" "Well, I remember when I was a little girl, like. How my Grandma always used to tell me about _her_ Grandma, when _she_ was a little girl. "She was saying about how in the old days, before there even was an Angelisco--when her Grandma came out here in a covered wagon. Just think, honey, she was younger than I am, and she come thousands and thousands of miles in a wagon! With real horses, like! Wasn't any houses, no people or nothing. Except Indians that shot at them. And they climbed up the mountains and they crossed over the deserts and went hungry and thirsty and had fights with those Indians all the way. But they never stopped until they got here. Because they was the pioneers." "Pioneers?" "That's what Grandma said _her_ Grandma called herself. A pioneer. She was real proud of it, too. Because it means having the courage to cut loose from all the old things and try something new when you need to. Start a whole new world, a whole new kind of life." She sighed. "I always wanted to be a pioneer, like, but I never thought I'd get the chance." "What are you talking about? What's all this got to do with us, or having a kid?" "Don't you see? Taking these shots, having a baby this new way--it's sort of being a pioneer, too. Gonna help bring a new kind of people into a new kind of world. And if that's not being a pioneer, like, it's the closest I can come to it. It sounds right to me now." Minnie smiled and nodded. "I guess I made up my mind just now. I'm taking the shots." "Hell you are!" Frank told her. "We'll talk about it some more in the morning." But Minnie continued to smile. And that night, as she lay in the utility bed, the squeaking of the springs became the sound of turning wheels. The plastic walls and ceiling of the eightieth-floor apartment turned to billowing canvas, and the thunder of the passing jets transformed itself into the drumming hoofbeats of a million buffalo. _Let Frank talk to her again in the morning if he liked_, Minnie thought. _It wouldn't make any difference now. Because you can't stop us pioneers._ 6. Harry Collins--2012