 Why do they need an incubator?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1954. One thousand seventy-five miles above the wrinkled surface of Earth, a woman was in pain. There, high in the emptiness of space, Space Station One swung in its orbit. Once every two hours, the artificial satellite looped completely around the planet, watching what went on below. Outside its bright steel hull was the silence of the interplanetary vacuum; inside, in the hospital ward, Lieutenant Alice Britton clutched at the sheets of her bed in pain, then relaxed as it faded away. Your husband may be the finest rocket jockey in the Space Service, but that doesn't give him the right to come blasting up here on a supply rocket just to get you pregnant!" "But that was two and a half months ago! "The question is: what do we do next? Why, I wouldn't let you get into an airplane, much less land on Earth in a rocket! The terrible pressure of a rocket landing would increase her effective body weight to nearly half a ton; an adult human being couldn't take that sort of punishment for long, much less the tiny life that was growing within her. Her pregnancy had never made her uncomfortable; the slow rotation of the wheel-shaped station about its axis gave an effective gravity at the rim only half that of Earth's surface, and the closer to the hub she went, the less her weight became. According to the major, the baby was due sometime around the first of September. And at a maximum of half of Earth gravity, you shouldn't weigh more than seventy pounds then. And then, only half an hour ago, a meteor had hit the radar room. The self-sealing walls had closed the tiny hole quickly, but even in that short time, a lot of air had gone whistling out into the vacuum of space. The depressurization hadn't hurt her too much, but the shock had been enough to start labor. "Something wrong, doctor?" "Incubator," he said, without taking his eyes off the clock. "Incubator. We can't deliver a seven-month preemie without an incubator." But as soon as we get within radio range of White Sands, I'll ask them to send up an emergency rocket with an incubator. It will be at least three hours before they can get a ship up here.
 The baby is two months early.
 The baby is one month early.  The baby is three months early.  The baby is two months early.  The baby is four months early.