My spirit no longer wants to walk on worn soles.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
As soon as Pooch became aware that the baby's cries had begun to sound like her own howls at the moon, she stopped instantly. How dreadful that the poor little thing has no one to imitate but herself; and who knows to what depths she might sink and already has.
Now she ties the sleeping baby to the branch and herself also, with bits of her paint-rag skirt, and settles down to rest as best she can, back against the tree trunk. She can't get out of her mind what she almost did, and she wonders if she is now descending the evolutionary scale rather than ascending. She begins to examine herself in the moonlight to see if she can tell. First her hands. How graceful they are and what wonderful things to have, these manipulating hands as graceful as wings! Perhaps even more so. She peers at them closely, wondering if hers are turning back into paws. They still have a slightly dappled look, particularly the left. Even in the moonlight Pooch can see that, but can't tell if it is less or more.
Now she strokes her face. (How sensitive those wonderful fingertips!) She finds there are still three or four stiff whiskers on her cheeks but one falls off as she touches it, and she thinks that's a good sign. Back where her cheeks meet her neck she feels a slight fringe of deeper down than on her face and then a little more at the back of her neck, but is it less or more than before? She feels her hips, nicely rounded. Much more so, it seems to her, than before. She pulls up her shirt and sees her several lower nipples almost faded out altogether and the top two larger and nicely rounded. She looks lower. Pubic hair clearly three colors, the white and then the darker spots that she knows in daylight would be black flecks and tan. Nice long legs. Shapely. Pale in the moonlight. Nothing dappled there, but then there never had been.
Ah, but is it not the mind that is the real grace of Homo sapiens? All the things to think about! All the things to read and appreciate! All the arts! All the things of the spirit! Well, no, she did have things of the spirit even before. She was as kind and loyal and honest as she could ever be, she's sure of that. But now she can express it in art. Maybe if she could compose a haiku right now, it would be proof that she's still as human as ever or, as she hopes, even more so. Of course to be Homo sapiens—knowledgeable man—is beyond her still, but it's certainly something to aim for, though she will need a lot more study and work to achieve that status. But the haiku. She will compose something about being humble and yet with hands, though how can one really be humble and have hands? After much thought, she finally comes to:
—
With thumb and forefinger
I pluck an anemone! Oh,
I pick up a small stone!
—
Is that several syllables too many? If so, change anemone to daffodil or even to rose. But she's too tired to count it again. Working on the poem has soothed her. She falls asleep yearning for somebody to call, my darling. Almost anybody will do. She actually says those words in her sleep twice, even though she hasn't spoken at all for several days. She is dreaming of sexy big black dogs with devilish markings on their faces but with kindly eyes. Thank goodness she forgets the dreams in the morning.
Meanwhile the doctor has come back to his house, picked up his mail, and found that one of the prizes he had hoped to win has gone to someone else before he could gather himself together to submit something. This is the coveted Motherhood prize and it involves a good deal of money even for second and third prize which, needless to say, the doctor also didn't win. The irony is that first prize went to a contraption not unlike the doctor's own shock cage. It's called the Responsive Early-Life Playpen and includes the cupcakes and chit dispenser, though not the shock plates on the floor. The prize winner has even included a recipe for carrot-nut cupcakes that contain all the important vitamins and minerals plus bran and protein so that the child need eat little else. Also the cage has two big, kindly, watchful eyes painted in the top right-hand corner. This is a real brainstorm, considering the recent discoveries on the importance of eye contact even to tiny newborn babies. This playpen can be adjusted for ages zero through three by simply inserting different electronic disks and different foodstuffs. Later on one can add a knob on the inside of the doorway plus a Jolly-Jump-Up that laughs at jokes and that will lead, by subtle reinforcement, to ever higher forms of humor, all the way up to irony. The pen also comes with a Mother's-Arms device from which to get lots of hugging. This is considered so important that it is stipulated that this addition not be optional, but that all pens must come equipped with it. The government considers the pen unacceptable without it.
The doctor could have adapted his own device to a mothering function. He might even have done a better job than the winner, for he'd have added both physical and mental exercises: a trapeze, toys that teach volume and weight, and problems in (at the very least) Aristotelian logic, with little blocks shaped like—and—and—etc., so that the child could form its own little syllogisms. The importance of having a child of his own has only just now occurred to him. If only he and Rosemary could have had one. Perhaps it's not too late to adopt. That baby 107 had was really quite interesting, though unpredictable. Why had he not studied it more minutely while he had it at hand?
Just after this blow, the doctor receives a disturbing phone call from the police asking him if he is aware that his wife had been seen that very afternoon standing on stage at some sort of feminist meeting, albeit looking frightened and humble. On the whole, the police tell him, it was quite a subversive, rowdy crowd, and he might be interested in looking into it.
He goes to the kitchen to check up on what Rosemary is doing now and sees her just finishing up the dishes, but he catches a glimpse—or thinks he does—of another, smaller Rosemary ducking up the back stairs, and suddenly he remembers that on the way into the house he had seen a third Rosemary down on her knees in the garden. That Rosemary, hardly fifteen minutes ago, had been wearing an old green smock and baggy green work slacks, whereas the other two Rosemarys were wearing black housedresses with tiny yellow roses. He decides to go up and take a little nap. He's had such a hard two days—perhaps he's lost too much sleep.
But on the way upstairs he gets a glimpse out the hall window of yet another Rosemary. This fourth one is quite tatterdemalion and is limping up the front steps with a baby in her arms. Can it be the baby? The very one he wants?
He realizes now that there's nothing wrong with him, though something very wrong is going on right here in his own house.
There is a coat closet by the front door and the doctor squeezes himself in with the galoshes and coats and leaves the door open about an inch, holding it so it won't close or open any farther. Now he can see out both sides: quite a bit toward the stairway and a little bit, through the hinged side of the door, toward the front vestibule. The bedraggled Rosemary—he had never seen her in such a state as this, so dirty and torn—opens the front door slowly and cautiously and peers inside. Just then the baby gives a big hiccup. The Rosemary jumps back out and shuts the door. There's a long wait. The doctor had just about decided to come out of his hiding place and run outside to see where she had got to when the door swings open again and the Rosemary creeps in, looking first into the living room on the left and then up the stairs. It's clear that this Rosemary has never been here before, or certainly not in this part of the house. The Rosemary hesitates, goes a few steps beyond the stairs, and then turns around and starts up them.
When she turns at the landing, the doctor comes out of his hiding place and slowly creeps up after her. From the landing he can see her scratched and dirty sandaled feet, very un-Rosemarylike. He watches them as she goes from room to room peeking in. Before she gets to the attic door, it opens and the doctor can see two other Rosemary feet in Rosemary brown oxfords come down the steps. The first Rosemary's sandals had retreated in haste, but now they come forward to meet the oxfords. There are whispered exclamations, then a little shriek of delight and another hiccup from the baby and then another. The hiccups don't stop. Quickly the brown oxfords follow the sandals up the steep attic stairs. By the time the doctor reaches the door, it is locked.
There never used to be a lock on this door. Also it feels more solid than it ever was before, as though heavy wood or even metal had been added to reinforce the other side. The doctor pushes as hard as he can, but nothing to be done about it without tools and/or a noisy running start. This is probably not the right time for that. There's a good deal of thinking he must do before taking any irrevocable steps or blowing their cover. For instance, which is the real Rosemary—or is there a real Rosemary anymore? Have they done away with her, or are they keeping her prisoner so as to infiltrate his home, no doubt to find out more about his experiments and to study his data and methods to use for their own purposes. Perhaps they tortured his Rosemary into letting them use the attic. Well, the best plan may be to wait until all those Rosemarys that are still out around the house get back in the attic and then he will barricade the door and trap them all up there.
It is clear that Pooch has decided to put on her Rosemary mask, straighten herself up as best she can, and return to the only place she knows to find help and where, she's quite sure, all the other Rosemarys must have come from. At least she knows one Rosemary is there. Also she does not like thinking of herself as a killer however it might have been justified to save the baby, and she wants to return to the scene of the crime to see if the doctor is really dead or just wounded and if there's anything she can do to help. She feels that, at the very least, she must apologize and somehow find a way to tell Rosemary that she never meant to cause her any pain.