Bible Stories for Adults Read Online Free PDF

Logos.
    â€œWhat’ll they do to her?” I asked.
    â€œThey’ll look at her.”
    â€œWhat else?”
    â€œThey’ll look, that’s all.”
    I snorted and said, “You’ll be just in time for birthday cake,” though the fact was I didn’t want any of those big shots gawking at our baby, not for a minute.
    As it turned out, only Borealis had a piece of Asa’s cake. His three pals were hyperserious types, entirely dismayed by the idea of eating from cardboard Apostolic Succession plates. They arrived brimming with tools—with stethoscopes and oscilloscopes, thermometers and spectrometers, with Geiger counters, brainwave monitors, syringes, tweezers, and scalpels. On first seeing Zenobia asleep in her crib, the four doctors gasped in four different registers, like a barbershop quartet experiencing an epiphany.
    Hashigan told us Zenobia was “probably the most important find since the Taung fossil.” Croft praised us for keeping the
National Enquirer
and related media out of the picture. Logos insisted that, according to something called the Theory of Transcendental Mutation, a human-gestated biosphere was “bound to appear sooner or later.” There was an equation for it.
    They poked and probed and prodded our baby; they biopsied her crust. They took water samples, oil specimens, jungle cuttings, and a half-dozen pinches of desert, sealing each trophy in an airtight canister.
    â€œWe need to make sure she’s not harboring any lethal pathogens,” Logos explained.
    â€œShe’s never even had roseola,” Polly replied defensively. “Not even cradle cap.”
    â€œIndeed,” said Logos, locking my baby’s exudations in his briefcase.
    â€œAll during this rude assault,” I wrote in the November
Down to Earth
, “Zenobia made no sound. I suspect she wants them to think she’s just a big dumb rock.”
    Â 
    Now that such obviously important folks had shown an interest in our biosphere, Asa’s attitude changed. Zenobia was no longer his grotesque little sister. Far from being a bothersome twit, she was potentially the greatest hobby since baseball cards.
    All Asa wanted for Christmas was a Johnny Genius Microscope Kit and some theatrical floodlights, and we soon learned why. He suspended the lights over Zenobia’s crib, set up the microscope, and got to work, scrutinizing his baby sister with all the intensity of Louis Pasteur on the trail of rabies. He kept a detailed log of the changes he observed: the exuberant flowering of Zenobia’s rain forests, the languid waltz of her continental plates, the ebb and flow of her ice shelves—and, most astonishingly, the abrupt appearance of phosphorescent fish and strange aquatic lizards in her seas.
    â€œShe’s got fish!” Asa shrieked, running through the house. “Mom! Dad! Zenobia’s got lizards and fish!”
    â€œWhether our baby’s life-forms have arisen spontaneously,” we told the readers of
Down to Earth
, “or through some agency outside her bounds, is a question we are not yet prepared to answer.”
    Within a month our son had, in true scientific fashion, devised a hypothesis to account for Zenobia’s physiognomy. According to Asa, events on his sister were directly connected to the atmosphere around Garber Farm.
    And he was right. Whenever Polly and I allowed one of our quarrels to degenerate into cold silence, Zenobia’s fish stopped flashing and her glaciers migrated toward her equator. Whenever our dicey finances plunged us into a dark mood, a cloak of moist, gray fog would enshroud Zenobia for hours. Angry words, such as Polly and I employed in persuading Asa to clean up his room, made our baby’s oceans bubble and seethe like abandoned soup on a hot stove.
    â€œFor Zenobia’s sake, we’ve resolved to keep our household as tranquil as possible,” we wrote in
Down to Earth.
“We’ve