There was a moment of shocked silence.

"Yeah," Mike said. "That's it."

"Jesus Christ Almighty!" Eddie spoke up indignantly. "What in the world does that have to do with the price of beans in Peru? What gave you the idea that everyone in the world has to have kids? That's nuts!"

"Do you and your wife have children?" Mike asked.

"If you've been keeping track of us all the way you said, then you know goddam well we don't. But I still say it doesn't mean a damn thing."

"Have you tried to have children?"

"We don't use birth control, if that's what you mean." Eddie spoke with an oddly moving dignity, but his cheeks were flushed. "It just so happens that my wife is a little... Oh hell. She's a lot overweight. We went to see a doctor and she told us my wife might never have kids if she didn't lose some weight. Does that make us criminals?"

"Take it easy, Eds," Richie soothed, and leaned toward him.

"Don't call me Eds and don't you dare pinch my cheek!" he cried, rounding on Richie. "You know I hate that! I always hated it!"

Richie recoiled, blinking.

"Beverly?" Mike asked. "What about you and Tom?"

"No children," she said. "Also no birth control. Tom wants kids... and so do I, of course," she added hastily, glancing around at them quickly. Bill thought her eyes seemed overbright, almost the eyes of an actress giving a good performance. "It just hasn't happened yet."

"Have you had those tests?" Ben asked her.

"Oh yes, of course," she said, and uttered a light laugh that was almost a titter. And in one of those leaps of comprehension that sometimes come to people who are gifted with both curiosity and insight, Bill suddenly understood a great deal about Beverly and her husband Tom, alias the Greatest Man in the World. Beverly had gone to have fertility tests. His guess was that the Greatest Man in the World had refused to entertain even for a moment the notion that there might be something wrong with the sperm being manufactured in the Sacred Sacs.

"What about you and your wife, Big Bill?" Rich asked. "Been trying?" They all looked at him curiously... because his wife was someone they knew. Audra was by no means the best-known or the best-loved actress in the world, but she was certainly part of the celebrity coinage that had somehow replaced talent as a medium of exchange in the latter half of the twentieth century; there had been a picture of her in People magazine when she cut her hair short, and during a particularly boring stretch in New York (the play she had been planning to do Off Broadway fell through) she had done a week-long stint on Holly wood Squares, over her agent's strenuous objections. She was a stranger whose lovely face was known to them. He thought Beverly looked particularly curious.

"We've been trying off and on for the last six years," Bill said. "For the last eight months or so it's been off, because of the movie we were doing-Attic Room, it's called."

"You know, we run a little entertainment syndic every day from five-fifteen in the afternoon until five-thirty," Richie said. "seein" Stars, it's called. They had a feature on that damned movie just last week-Husband and Wife Working Happily Together kind of thing. They said both of your names and I never made the connection. Funny, isn't it?"

"Very," Bill said. "Anyway, Audra said it would be just our luck if she caught pregnant while we were in preproduction and she had to do ten weeks of strenuous acting and being morning-sick at the same time. But we want kids, yes. And we've tried quite hard." "Had fertility tests?" Ben asked.

"Uh-huh. Four years ago, in New York. The doctors discovered a very small benign tumor in Audra's womb, and they said it was a lucky thing because, although it wouldn't have prevented her from getting pregnant, it might have caused a tubal pregnancy. She and I are both fertile, though."

Eddie repeated stubbornly, "It doesn't prove a goddam thing."

"Suggestive, though," Ben murmured.

"No little accidents on your front, Ben?" Bill asked. He was shocked and amused to find that his mouth had very nearly called Ben Haystack instead.

"I've never been married, I've always been careful, and there have been no paternity suits," Ben said. "Beyond that I don't think there's any real way of telling."

"You want to hear a funny story?" Richie asked. He was smiling, but there was no smile in his eyes.

"Sure," Bill said. "You were always good at the funny stuff, Richie."

"Your face and me own buttocks, boyo," Richie said in the Irish Cop's Voice. It was a great Irish Cop's Voice. You've improved out of all measure, Richie, Bill thought. As a kid, you couldn't do an Irish Cop no matter how you busted your brains. Except once... or twice... when

(the deadlights)

was that?

"Your face and me own buttocks; just keep rememb "rin that com-pay-ri-son, me foine bucko."

Ben Hanscom suddenly held his nose and cried in a high quavering boyish voice: "Beep-beep, Richie! Beep-beep! Beep-beep!"

After a moment, laughing, Eddie held his own nose and joined in. Beverly did the same.

"Awright! Awright!" Richie cried, laughing himself. "Awright, I give up! Chrissake!"

"Oh man," Eddie said. He collapsed back in his chair, laughing so hard he was almost crying. "We gotcha that time, Trashmouth. Way to go, Ben."

Ben was smiling but he looked a little bewildered.

"Beep-beep," Bev said, and giggled. "I forgot all about that. We always used to beep you, Richie."

"You guys never appreciated true talent, that's all," Richie said comfortably. As in the old days, you could knock him off-balance, but he was like one of those inflatable Joe Palooka dolls with sand in the base-he floated upright again almost at once. "That was one of your little contributions to the Losers" Club, wasn't it, Haystack?"

"Yeah, I guess it was."

"What a man!" Richie said in a trembling, awestruck voice and then began to salaam over the table, nearly sticking his nose in his tea-cup each time he went down. "What a man! Oh chillun, what a man!"

"Beep-beep, Richie," Ben said solemnly, and then exploded laughter in a hearty baritone utterly unlike his wavering childhood voice. "You're the same old roadrunner."

You guys want to hear this story or not?" Richie asked. "I mean, no big deal one way or the other. Beep away if you want to. I can take abuse. I mean, you're looking at a man who once did an interview with Ozzy Osbourne."

"Tell it," Bill said. He glanced over at Mike and saw that Mike looked happier-or more at rest-since the luncheon had begun. Was it because he saw the almost unconscious knitting-together that was happening, the sort of easy falling-back into old roles that almost never happened when old chums got together? Bill thought so. And he thought, If there are certain preconditions for the belief in magic that makes it possible to use the magic, then maybe those preconditions will inevitably arrange themselves. It was not a very comforting thought. It made him feel like a man strapped to the nosecone of a guided missile.

Beep-beep indeed.

"Well," Richie was saying, "I could make this long and sad or I could give you the Blondie and Dagwood comic-strip version, but I'll settle for something in the middle. The year after I moved out to California I met a girl, and we fell pretty hard for each other. Started living together. She was on the pill at first, but it made her feel sick almost all the time. She talked about getting an IUD, but I wasn't too crazy about that-the first stories about how they might not be completely safe were just starting to come out in the papers.

"We had talked a lot about kids, and had pretty well decided we didn't want them even if we decided to legalize the relationship. Irresponsible to bring kids into such a shitty, dangerous, overpopulated world... and blah-blah-blah, babble-babble-babble, let's go out and put a bomb in the men's room of the Bank of America and then come on back to the crashpad and smoke some dope and talk about the difference between Maoism and Trotskyism, if you see what I mean.

"Or maybe I'm being too hard on both of us. Shit, we were young and reasonably idealistic. The upshot was that I got my wires cut, as the Beverly Hills crowd puts it with their unfailing vulgar chic. The operation went with no problem and I had no adverse aftereffects. There can be, you know. I had a friend whose balls swelled up to roughly the size of the tires on a 1959 Cadillac. I was gonna give him a pair of suspenders and a couple of barrels for his birthday-sort of a designer truss-but they went down before then."

"All put with your customary tact and dignity," Bill remarked, and Beverly began to laugh again.

Richie offered a large, sincere smile. "Thank you, Bill, for those words of support. The word "fuck" was used two hundred and six times in your last book. I counted."

"Beep-beep, Trashmouth," Bill said solemnly, and they all laughed. Bill found it nearly impossible to believe they had been talking about dead children less than ten minutes ago.

"Press onward, Richie," Ben said. "The hour groweth late."

"Sandy and I lived together for two and a half years," Richie went on. "Came really close to getting married twice. As things turned out, I guess we saved ourselves a lot of heartache and all that community-property bullshit by keeping it simple. She got an offer to join a corporate law-firm in Washington around the same time I got an offer to come to KLAD as a weekend jock-not much, but a foot in the door. She told me it was her big chance and I had to be the most insensitive male chauvinist oinker in the United States to be dragging my feet, and furthermore she'd had it with California anyway. I told her I also had a chance. So we thrashed it out, and we trashed each other out, and at the end of all the thrashing and trashing Sandy went.

"About a year after that I decided to try and get the vasectomy reversed. No real reason for it, and I knew from the stuff I'd read that the chances were pretty spotty, but I thought what the hell."

"You were seeing someone steadily then?" Bill asked.

"No-that's the funny part of it," Richie said, frowning. "I just woke up one day with this... I dunno, this hobbyhorse about getting it reversed."

"You must have been nuts," Eddie said. "General anesthetic instead of a local? Surgery? Maybe a week in the hospital afterward?"

"Yeah, the doctor told me all of that stuff," Richie replied. "And I told him I wanted to go ahead anyway. I don't know why. The doc asked me if I understood the aftermath of the operation was sure to be painful while the result was only going to be a coin-toss at best. I said I did. He said okay, and I asked him when-my attitude being the sooner the better, you know. So he says hold your horses, son, hold your horses, the first step is to get a sperm sample just to make sure the reversal operation is necessary. I said, "Come on, I had the exam after the vasectomy. It worked." He told me that sometimes the vasa reconnected spontaneously. "Yo mamma!" I says. "Nobody ever told me that." He said the chances were very small-infinitesimal, really-but because the operation was so serious, we ought to check it out. So I popped into the men's room with a Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue and jerked off into a Dixie cup-"

"Beep-beep, Richie," Beverly said.

"Yeah, you're right," Richie said. "The part about the Frederick's catalogue is a lie-you never find anything that good in a doctor's office. Anyway, the doc called me three days later and asked me which I wanted first, the good news or the bad news.

"Gimme the good news first," I said.

"The good news is the operation won't be necessary," he said. "The bad news is that anybody you've been to bed with over the last two or three years could hit you with a paternity suit pretty much at will."

"Are you saying what I think you're saying?" I asked him.

"I'm telling you that you aren't shooting blanks and haven't been for quite awhile now," he said. "Millions of little wigglies in your sperm sample. Your days of going gaily in bareback with no questions asked have temporarily come to an end, Richard.

"I thanked him and hung up. Then I called Sandy in Washington.

"Rich!" she says to me," and Richie's voice suddenly became the voice of this girl Sandy whom none of them had ever met. It was not an imitation or even a likeness, exactly; it was more like an auditory painting. " "It's great to hear from you! I got married!"

"Yeah, that's great," I said. "You should have let me know. I would have sent you a blender."

"She goes, "Same old Richie, always full of gags."

"So I said "Sure, same old Richie, always full of gags. By the way, Sandy, you didn't happen to have a kid or anything after you left LA, did you? Or maybe an unscheduled d and c, or something?"

"That gag isn't so funny, Rich," she said, and I had a brainwave that she was getting ready to hang up on me, so I told her what happened. She started laughing, only this time it was real hard-she was laughing the way I always used to laugh with you guys, like somebody had told her the world's biggest bellybuster. So when she finally starts slowing down I ask her what in God's name is funny. "It's just so wonderful," she said. "This time the joke's on you. After all these years the joke is finally on Records Tozier. How many bastards have you sired since I came east, Rich?"

"I take it that means you still haven't experienced the joys of motherhood?" I ask her.

"I'm due in July," she says. "Were there any more questions?"

"Yeah," I go. "When did you change your mind about the immorality of bringing children into such a shitty world?"

"When I finally met a man who wasn't a shit," she answers, and hangs up."

Bill began to laugh. He laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. "Yeah," Richie said. "I think she cut it off quick so she'd really get the last word, but she could have hung on the line all day. I know when I've been aced. I went back to the doctor a week later and asked him if he could be a little clearer on the odds against that sort of spontaneous regeneration. He said he'd talked with some of his colleagues about the matter. It turned out that in the three-year period 1980-82, the California branch of the AMA logged twenty-three reports of spontaneous regeneration. Six of those turned out to be simply botched operations. Six others were either hoaxes or cons-guys looking to take a bite out of some doctor's bank account. So... eleven real ones in three years."