"That I don't know. A little while. He needs some time to himself to take care of some personal business."
"Fair enough," William said, and said good-bye.
He glanced out the window at the World Trade Center. This may be the best way, he reasoned. After all, the portable system stationed before him had been invented by Jones. And even if his plan to acquire Wallaby had worked, wouldn't he have been plagued with worry over Jones's next step?
Perhaps this time, he pondered as he gazed out the window, he would get the strategic ally he had been after all along. Peter Jones.
* * *
Peter stared absently at the clock mounted high on the yellow cinderblock wall. Following the second hand's ride around the dial, he mused at how as a boy he used to watch the clock in school, the thin red line sliding silently past the bold black numerals, inching painfully closer with each agonizing second toward the end of the school day. Would this baby ever have the opportunity to watch the second hand sweep the dial in a schoolroom?
He had been sitting at Stanford Hospital for hours. His neck and back were sore from sleeping on the hard plastic furniture, and now, staring at the clock once more, he willed the thin red line to go slower, for each precious second offered more hope, life, for this unborn baby.
His baby.
At first Peter had not wanted to believe the doctor, insisting that there had been a mistake, a mix-up, that he was just a friend of Ivy's, and it couldn't possibly be his baby. But the doctor relayed to Peter, from Ivy, that she had been with no one else in more than a year before Peter, and no one after. The doctor offered to conduct a simple blood test that would settle the matter, but Peter decided against it.
He knew Ivy was telling the truth. It was his baby, and he prayed that it not be delivered. Not just yet. It needed more time.