The Voices of Heaven by Frederik Pohl

of our lives, Rannulf Enderman.
    "Hi," he said brightly to Alma. Then, when he saw my face in the background, a little less enthusiastically, "Hi to you, too, Barry. I just called up to say good-bye."
    Alma looked concerned. "You're not leaving right away, are you?"
    "No, but pretty soon. I just finished my course for my work on the ship. It was freezing techniques. I'm going to help tend the stiffs, freezing and thawing out."
    I had known that he'd quit his job on the launch station when he volunteered for Pava; I hadn't known exactly what he'd been doing instead. I was, as a matter of fact, not sorry to hear he'd been busy; I'd had some concerns, now and then, about his having too much free time to hang around Alma. So I said, making friendly conversation, "That didn't take long, did it?"
    He shrugged. "What's to learn? You put them in the freezer, then you wake them up. The cycling is automatic, anyway; all the technician has to do is stand by and make sure the machine does what it does." He went on about the course, about how the automatic systems perfused the freezees with buffers and filled them with the chemicals that slowed down ice nucleation, and I nodded encouragingly.
    Alma gave me a quizzical look. "That's nice, Rannulf," she said, interrupting his discussion of how cells that lacked nucleation survived low temperatures, "but I'm going to want to kiss you good-bye. Let's have a drink together—say in a couple of hours? Fine. Let me give you a call when I'm free, all right?"
    That was that. She hadn't said when we were free.
    The call from the birthing center came a minute or two later. Renate's new offspring was a boy, it was healthy, and it was available for inspection any time. "Hey, wonderful," she said to the nurse. Then, to me, "I bet Renate's happy. What about walking me over there, Barry? We can stop and get a sandwich on the way."
    "How do you know I don't want to see the baby, too?"
    "Do you?"
    I didn't answer that, but I thought about it for a while. And when we were eating our sandwiches I cleared my throat and took the plunge. "I really like babies, you know," I said.
    "That's nice."
    "I guess you do, too."
    "Well, how can you help it? They're soft and smelly and helpless, and they need you. If what you're asking me is whether I want to have some of my own, yes. I definitely do. Sometime."
    That was the most explicit statement Alma had ever made on the subject. I chewed for a moment, thinking. Then I said, hypothetically, "What if you married, say, someone who couldn't be a father straight-out because he carried some genetic defects?"
    "Why," she said, taking the question in stride, "I'd go to the clinic and I'd talk things over with them. There are plenty of things that can be done about that. For one, there's in vitro fertilization, so they comb out the bad recessives—"
    I swallowed. Alma was playing back to me just about exactly what the doctor told me, almost word for word.
    She had been doing some research. Not about genetic defects in general. About me.
    I didn't go with her to see the new baby after all, and I didn't try to get myself invited along for the farewell with Rannulf. I was making up my mind, and I wanted to do it on my own time, to be sure.
    Isn't it funny how often taking the time to make sure a decision is right can turn out to mean you don't really have to make that decision at all?
     
    By the time I'd finished catching a little sleep—not as much as they had given me time off to do, but enough to get me through the job—it was time for me to go back to Corsair for the final loading of its operating fuel supplies. Tscharka watched me at it for a while, but there wasn't much to watch. Actually that was an easier job than dealing with the pods in the cargo hold, because there were only sixteen pods for the ship's drive. Still, it made me a little nervous simply because there was so unusually much antimatter in one place. A hundred and sixteen pods of antimatter is no small