“That covers it,” his host told him. The story of my adult life, he thought: in a couple of sentences. It doesn’t cover the miscarriage Marian almost had with Penny or the time the handi-robot short-circuited near the play-pen and we had to take six stitches in Susie’s head. It doesn’t cover the time—

“All right, then, Stew, let’s hit the income possibilities first. Do either of you have any hope of a sizable amount of money coming in soon, a legacy, say, or some piece of property that may substantially increase in value?”

They looked at each other. “Both Stewart’s family and mine,” Marian answered slowly, “are three- or four-child bracket people. There won’t be much of an estate. And all we own, besides the house and the furniture and the jetabout, are some government bonds and a little Solar Minerals stock that won’t be worth much more than we paid for it for a long, long time.”

“That takes care of income. Let me ask you people this, then—”

“Wait a minute,” Raley burst out. “Why does it take care of income? Suppose I get a part-time job, working weekends or evenings here in New Hampshire?”

“Because the license to have a child is predicated on the income from a normal thirty-hour week,” the lawyer pointed out patiently. “If the father has to work additional time in order to reach or maintain that income, his child sees that much less of him and, in the legal phrase, ‘is denied the normal prerogatives of a normal infancy.’ Remember, the rights of the child are absolutely paramount in present-day law. There’s no way around it.”

Stewart Raley stared at the opposite wall. “We could emigrate,” he said in a low voice. “There are no birth-control regulations on Venus or any of the other colonies.”

“You’re thirty-eight, Marian is thirty-two. They like ’em young, real young, on Mars and Venus—not to mention the fact that you’re an office worker, not a technician or a mechanic or farmer. I doubt very much that you could get a permanent extraterrestrial visa. No, the income possibilities are out. That leaves Special Hardship. Is there any claim you could think of under that heading?”