Mr. Adam Read Online Free PDF Page B

before.”
    â€œThere hasn’t been, recently,” Adam said. “That’s just it.”
    Marge, who had been prowling the room, examining the hunting prints, the fireplace, the bookcases, and the curtains, giggled. “I like him,” she said to nobody in particular. “He’s nice.”
    From the upstairs came a sharp, feminine cry, suddenly bitten off in the middle. Adam began to shake. He collapsed on the sofa, and I was startled by the small number of cubic feet he occupied, sitting down, contrasted with his height, standing up.
    â€œLook, Homer,” I said, sitting down beside him, “I’m going to have to ask you a lot of questions, so I might as well start now.”
    Marge produced highballs, and an hour later she appeared with sandwiches. Just after dark the sounds from upstairs became more businesslike, and then Dr. Blandy shouted: “Hey, down there. It’s all over. It’s a girl—a fine girl! No trouble at all!”
    â€œHow much,” I yelled back, “does she weigh?”
    â€œWhat an inane question!” Marge said.
    â€œI know, but you always ask it first.”
    Dr. Blandy shouted: “She’s average and normal. When they’re average and normal I always say they weigh seven pounds.”
    I walked to the phone on the hall table and called Circle 6-4111, and asked for Pogey. “J.C.,” I said, “here is a flash.” I enunciated each word clearly: “Flash—a girl baby was born to Mr. and Mrs. Homer Adam in Tarrytown, New York, at”—I glanced at my watch—“six fifty-one today!”
    â€œYou sane and sober, Steve?” J.C. inquired.
    â€œCertainly.”
    â€œDid you say Adam?”
    â€œHonest to Christ, J.C., it is Adam A-D-A-M.”
    â€œYou will,” J.C. ordered quietly, “give me a bulletin to follow flash within five minutes. You will then dictate a complete story, and don’t hesitate to call in with new leads and inserts. Why this is the biggest story—”
    â€œSince the Creation,” I suggested.
    â€œNo,” he said quietly, “just the biggest since Mississippi.”

CHAPTER 3
    T he history of Homer Adam, until the day he became the world’s lone post-Mississippi father, would not have earned him more than a three-paragraph obituary in his home-town newspaper, even if he had died an unusual and violent death.
    He was born in Hyannis, Nebraska, a small but prosperous cattle town. His great-grandfather had crossed the plains in a covered wagon (something of which the editorial writers made much when the repopulation schemes were being considered). His grandfather was a cattleman, and his father was a wholesale grocer.
    As a boy he was rather shy, and spent more time collecting stamps and Indian artifacts than he did playing football or riding and hunting. “You see,” he confided in me, “I was much too tall for my age. The older, but smaller boys used to beat me up. I think it gave me an inferiority complex.”
    He wanted to be an archeologist, but his parents didn’t think it was practical. He compromised on geology, and they sent him to the Colorado School of Mines, where his record was good enough toget him a job with the Guggenheims immediately after graduation. When war came, the Draft Board doctors, examining his gangling form, at first classified him as 4-F, but he probably would have attained 1-A eventually had not the government found a use for his special qualifications and dispatched him to Australia.
    Living in a little mining town planted in the desert near Alice Springs made him homesick, and he became a prodigious letter writer. He wrote all his letters to Mary Ellen Kopp, a secretary in the Guggenheims’ New York office. When he returned from Australia they were married, after a suitable engagement period.
    These were the main facts, as he gave them to me while we sat in the living room of the gatehouse,