Lester wedged himself determinedly into the fast-closing knot around the crib. He shoved his face through an opening between two white-clad shoulders and looked up at the doctor across from him.
"How is he doing that?" he asked.
The infant in the crib looked up at him wearily. "Another one," he commented. "That makes seven. Seven come eleven and not a brain in the lot. What do I have to do to get a private room in this butcher shop? Clear out, you underlings, and send me the manager!"
"You're going to get a private room!" the doctor across from Lester said shortly. "You're going to get one if I have to build it myself." He scooped the infant up in his arms.
"Well," the baby said, falling back importantly into the crook of the doctor's arm, "that's more like it."
Again straggling after the doctors, Lester followed them from the nursery, through the outer room, down the hallway and into a room marked Private. There the baby was placed on an adult-sized bed, where it sat up majestically against the pillow and watched with a jaundiced eye the unmasking of those assembled.
"The human race," he commented, "is certainly not an attractive one. You jokers make up as ugly a crew as ever blotted the horizons of hell. Not to mention that nurse you sent me. What a horror that one was!"
"She quit the hospital, you'll be delighted to know," the doctor said, bristling.
"And thereby provided the medical profession its greatest single advance in years," the infant retorted blandly.