>>13224201“What I’m here for–” said the sheriff, and he let his unhappiness show, “is something I customarily do standing up.”
Dwayne and Grace were sincerely puzzled. They didn’t have the least idea what was coming next. Here is what it was: the sheriff handed each of them a subpoena, and he said, “It’s my sad duty to inform you that your daughter, Wanda June, has accused you of ruining her when she was a child.”
Dwayne and Grace were thunderstruck. They knew that Wanda June was twenty-one now and entitled to sue, but they certainly hadn’t expected her to do so. She was in New York City and when they congratulated her about her birthday on the telephone, in fact, one of the things Grace had said was, “Well, you can sue us now, honeybunch, if you want to”. Grace was so sure she and Dwayne had been good parents that she could laugh when she went on, “If you want to, you can send your rotten old parents off to jail.” Wanda June was an only child, incidentally. She had come close to having some siblings, but Grace had had them aborted. Grace had taken three table lamps and a bathroom scale instead.
“What does she say we did wrong?” Grace asked the sheriff.
“There’s a seperate list of charges inside each of your subpoenas, ” he said. And he couldn’t look his wretched old friends in the eye, so he looked at the television instead. A scientist there was explaining why Andromeda had been selected as a target. There were at least eighty-seven chrono-synclastic infundibulae, time warps, between Earth and the Andromeda Galaxy. If the Arthur C. Clarke passed through any one of them, the ship and its load would be multiplied a trillion times, and would appear everywhere throughout space and time.
“If there’s any fecundity anywhere in the Universe, ” the scientist promised, “our seed will find it and bloom.”
