four by four. Let's see. Five in this incubator, five in the next, five in the . . . There were over two hundred dishes in all!

Impossible. I looked down at them again, feeling a chill. Nothing seemed to be in them yet, at least as far as I could tell, but then human eggs are microscopic. So if ova were . . .

When he supposedly was doing that in vitro on the Mayan woman, was he actually extracting eggs?

Get serious. That was not where they came from.

By then I was well along the Kubler-Ross scale, past de­nial and closing in on anger, but still . . . so many! How could they all—

I turned and examined the row of plastic-covered jugs at the back of the lab, lined up, six in all. Now I had to know what was in them.

I was still shaky, but I steadied myself, walked over, pulled back the plastic, and touched one. It was deathly cold, sweat­ing in the moist air. When I flipped open its Frisbee-sized top, I saw a faint wisp of vapor emerge into the twilight of the room . . .

Then it dawned on me. Of course. They were cryo-storage containers. He'd need them to preserve fertilized eggs, em­bryos.

I lifted off the inside cover and placed it carefully onto the bench, where it immediately turned white, steaming with mist. Then I noticed a tiny metal rod hooked over the side of the opening. When I pulled it up, it turned out to be at­tached to a porous metal cylinder containing rows of glass tubes.

What's . . .?