It was approximately at this point in the proceedings that certain celestial complications began to set in. As Lester and Ginny sped toward the hospital, their heads filled with the approaching disaster of parenthood, they were totally unaware of a distant moiling and broiling in the night-darkened heavens above them. Humanly earthbound as they were, their thinking was characteristically horizontal. It would never in a million years have occurred to them that their real trouble lay, not ahead of them, but above them.
High in those dim and timeless reaches of space without measure where the fate of mortal man is weighed and judged according to the individual, a storm of unique and dismaying design was at the moment of its inception. Like many another event of eventual magnitude it began with deceptive insignificance. It was merely that Mac, that kindly and somewhat addled angel, in tallying the lists on the tabulation sheets, had come on the knowledge that the very next baby, the one due for the four A.M. shipment, would be the million quadrillionth baby born on Earth since the beginning of the human race. It was a fact from which Mac seemed to derive a certain surprised pleasure. Brushing aside an intervening cloud vapor, he turned to Haywood Veere, his heavenly coworker, and grinned importantly.
"Right on the nose, Haywood!" he announced loudly. "The million quadrillionth baby. What do you think of that?" He twitched his wings happily. "Makes you feel kind of important, don't it?"
Haywood remained studiously bent over his dispatch sheets. "I fail to see why," he said with characteristic dryness. "We can hardly look on the event as any sort of personal accomplishment. It took all of humanity all this while to bring it about."
"But I'm the one that marked it down," Mac said. "And it's you who's makin' out the papers on him. Probably nobody knows about it except us."
"It's probably just as well," Haywood murmured.
"But it's kind of like an anniversary," Mac insisted. "Don't you see?" A grin of reminiscence came over his homely face. "Besides, I done my part, I guess, when I was a mortal. I had a couple of kids—even if they did both wind up in the pokey."
At this Haywood glanced up from the cloud bank upon which were spread the papers. He turned around slowly, holding his wings back with one hand so that they would not get smudged with ink. He regarded Mac reflectively.
"I suppose that's true," he said. "If you want to look at it that way we can all take a bit of the credit. Even I can."