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tires appeared to have been slashed. “I think the nurse’s aides were a bit less physical during their strike,” she observed. “It looks like my bike gets chained to the bed in the on-call room. Andrew, don’t you have the feeling that someone other than the maintenance men has helped organize all this?”
    “You mean Everwell?”
    Sarah shrugged. “Possibly. But they’re not the only candidate. Thanks to Axel Devlin, there are more than a few people who have the wrong impression about the way we do things here.”
    Devlin, a
Herald
columnist with an unabashedly conservative slant, had dubbed MCB Crunchy Granola General. He made it a frequent target of “Axel’s Axe” in his popular Take It or Leave It column. As an M.D. with extensive training and expertise in acupuncture and herbal therapy, Sarah herself had been mentioned in the column on two occasions, not at all flatteringly. She never had figured out how Devlin learned of her.
    “Who knows?” Andrew responded with no great interest. He nodded toward the dozen or so picketers. “They are a gnarly group, I’ll say that for them. Not a tattooless deltoid in the bunch.” He paused at the door marked
Staff Only
and turned to her. “Well, Dr. Baldwin, are you ready to pop up a level?”
    Sarah stroked her chin thoughtfully, then took Truscott’s arm.
    “What options exist for me are either unacceptable or illegal, Dr. Truscott,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
    •  •  •
    Fifty feet above the pristine mountain pool, Lisa Summer poised on the cliff’s edge. But for the garlands of white lilies around her neck and her head, she was naked. The sun glinted off her long, perfect body and sparkled in her straw-gold hair. All around her, wildflowers billowed, blanketing the cliffs and cascading down the rocks beside the shimmering falls. High overhead a solitary hawk glided effortlessly against the cloudless, azure sky
.
    Lisa tilted her head back and let the sun warm her face. She closed her eyes and listened to the churning water below. Then, arms spread, she tightened her toes over the edge, took a final, deep breath, and pushed off. Wind and spray caressed her face as she floated more than fell past the falls, twisting and tumbling through the crystal air … downward … downward … downward …
    “Hang in there, Lisa. Beautiful. Hang in there. The contraction’s almost over. A minute ten … a minute twenty. That’s it. That’s it. Oh, you did great. You did just great.”
    Slowly Lisa opened her eyes. She was propped on the futon in her cluttered room, bathed in the rays of the early-morning sun. Heidi Glassman, her housemate, friend, and birthing coach, sat beside her, stroking her hand. Across from her, waiting, were the crib and changing table she had found at Goodwill and meticulously refinished.
    The weeks of practice in class and at home were paying off. Lisa was now in her third hour of active labor, but thanks to the series of sensual images she had developed, the pain of every contraction so far had been easily subverted.
    Dr. Baldwin called the process internal and external visualization. It was, she had told Lisa, a modest form of self-hypnosis—a technique that, if practiced diligently, would enable Lisa to make it through even difficult labor and delivery without any anesthesia or other drugs. For some contractions, Lisa used external visualizationto send herself soaring off her mountain cliff or for a wondrous undersea ride on the back of a dolphin. For others, she used internal visualization to see the actual muscles of her womb and the baby boy within, and to mentally buffer them both with thick cotton batting.
    “How’re you doing?” Heidi asked.
    “Fine. Just fine,” Lisa said dreamily.
    “You look very peaceful.”
    “I feel wonderful.”
    Unaware she was doing so, Lisa slowly opened and closed her hands.
    “Five minutes apart for nearly an hour. I think it may be time to call.”
    “There’s time,”