It occurred to him to wonder what had happened to the discarded wreckage of his hand and arm, but then he decided he would rather not know. Instead he asked, "I won't need a sling or a cast?"
The apprentice surgeon shrugged. Obviously proud of his work, he kept coming back to look at it. "Can give you one if you like. Most people think they do better without. You should have good control of the major muscles before you leave the hospital."
The patient was repeatedly assured that he could expect to achieve a rapid return of natural function in his arm within a few days, and steady, gradual improvement after that. The artificial limb would then serve him for an indefinite period, basically as long as he wanted to keep it; some people got to like them so well that they elected to keep them permanently. But the majority of patients preferred flesh and blood, which in most cases could be grown in to be virtually indistinguishable from the original; maybe even a little stronger, or capable of finer movement. Some pianists claimed they actually gave a finer performance with the hardware hand. But growing back an organic arm or leg took time—months or even years of disability—and that could wait until after the war, or at least until after the immediate military emergency. A functional artificial hand would not impair a spacer's usefulness.
"One or two of my own colleagues are wearing the same model you are." That was the surgeon's trump card. "And they use them to perform surgery."
Within a few hours after the surgery, Nifty Gift was up on his feet again, tottering around his small private hospital room. And in a couple of days he was spending most of his time up on his feet and walking about, left arm in a temporary sling. One of the nurses told him that it made him look dashing.
After the long session in the operating room, and when the debriefers were out of sight, Gift said to one of the medical people, "While I was riding home in that damned courier, I was dreaming about my deathdream." The pink elephant had been stalking him.
The woman looked at him blankly for a moment.
"You know. Or maybe I'm talking to someone in the wrong department. The official name is termdream. It was a strange feeling. I was dreaming that I was going to activate it."
The doctor, or technician, had known all along what he was talking about. Now she was reassuring. "Not an uncommon reaction. I shouldn't worry about it."
Every evening, before going to sleep in his little room, which was equipped with a real bed, not just a cot, Nifty stood out on his room's small balcony, in the open air, for several minutes with his eyes closed, letting the lingering glow of an Earthlike sunset bathe his face, feeling the free breeze move his hair, smelling the nearby sea.
Nerve probes carried out over the couple of days following the operation, while Gift remained in the hospital, indicated that the melding between nature and artifice was proceeding satisfactorily. Once in a while the artificial fingers would twitch on their own, but already he had feeling in them, a pins-and-needles kind of thing, and he could, if he concentrated, get them to open and close.
"If you don't get a gradually returning function in a couple of more days, a considerable improvement in movement, come in and see us."
Evidently the doctor had forgotten that the patient was supposed to be going home on leave. But Gift wasn't going to remind her, and perhaps get his leave canceled or delayed. "I will," he assured her, and nodded solemnly.
When the people from Hypo concluded their last hospital visit with him, Gift thought they had been somewhat reassured by what he'd told them. There had been no suggestion that they doubted anything about his story. One of the debriefers had hinted in passing that Gift's wound would doubtless earn him a medal. The spacer hadn't thought of that before, and somehow the news only cast a faint shadow of gloom over his inspired new enjoyment of life.
Gift remained for several days in the base hospital at Port Diamond. What the medics did for him there, at last included deactivating his deathdream. He took this as a sure sign that he wouldn't be going back into deep space, at least not anywhere near the front lines. Not in the foreseeable future, anyway. Anyone who had survived what he had survived would certainly at least have the option of moving to some easier kind of duty. Certain kinds of instructorship would be his for the choosing. And he, like the rest of his crew, had been about due for rear echelon duty anyway, based on the length of their tour of duty out on the front.
Soon the medics were lifting the deactivation helmet from his head. Now he could think about the pink elephants, engaged in their improbable routine, without tearing his brain apart. An image came of a pachyderm with its tusks embedded in gray matter.
Part of the thing was still in place, as they had warned him it would be. Think the right preliminary thought and there the elephant was. They assured him that this was normal.
He raised tentative fingers—right-hand fingers—and felt gingerly under the hair at the back of his head. His skullport was still there, just under the skin. It felt like a tiny, scabbed pimple.
His rehabilitators calmly assured him that now he could think about anything he liked, without either being able to manipulate the icon, or do himself any harm.
In turn he assured them, not quite as calmly, that he wasn't going to try.
''Most people say that. But sooner or later they do. There's a kind of fascination about it. Don't worry, it can't hurt you now."
Four days had passed since the surgery on his arm, and one day since the deathdream's quenching. The medics had given signs that they were just about finished with Nifty Gift, for the time being at least.
On that last evening of his stay in the hospital, he was surprised by someone calling up to him while he was standing out on the little balcony of his room.
"Spacer Gift?" The voice was feminine, and so quiet that Gift was momentarily not sure that he had heard it. As if the speaker did not want to be overheard.
He looked down at the ground some twenty feet below. A single figure stood there. The caller was a well-dressed young woman, standing on the grass amid the flowers and midget palm trees, the latter offering her some concealment from the people occasionally passing on the meandering walks and peaceful lawns that stretched between this building and the other units of the hospital.
Gift, gripping the wooden railing with both hands, stared down for a long moment in silence. His visitor's appearance, in the soft glow of the receding day, was vaguely Oriental. Large, trustful eyes, that when she was listening to someone gave the impression that she was taking in and believing every word. The startling green of her eyes was a direct result of some genetic tinkering undertaken by her grandmother, purely for cosmetic effect.
"You are Spacer Gift, aren't you? The one who rode the robot courier in from way across the Gulf? You're the only survivor of your scoutship crew?"
"Who're you?" he countered.
"Jory Yokosuka." The large, bright eyes were aimed at Gift. Moist red lips parted, looking ready for action of one kind or another. "I represent Home Worlds Media. They wouldn't let me in to see you. You know you're not being allowed any visitors?"
"Oh." Now he saw that the young woman was holding in one fist what looked like a small recorder. No visitors? The Hypo people of course had been coming and going freely, and it had never occurred to the patient to expect anyone else.
"I didn't notice about the visitors," he said.
"Take it from me, a few have tried to see you. How're you feeling now?" she queried cheerfully.
He drew a deep breath, tugged with both hands on the balcony's wrought-iron railing. "Not bad. Considering."
"That's great. I'd like to talk to you a bit. I wouldn't expect you to give away any military secrets." Her tone made the very idea seem farfetched.
A journalist. Of course, why not? Gift couldn't remember ever talking to one before. But now, yes, he was going to have to expect that kind of thing, for a while at least.
Well, it hadn't been a scoutship, but he wasn't going to say that. He didn't want to talk to her, and in his present
condition he didn't suppose he'd have any trouble in making his point. All he'd have to do, probably, would be to wave his wounded arm like some magic talisman.
"They tell me," he offered, "that I'm going to do a press conference in a couple of days. Just before I go on leave."
The woman was cheerfully uninterested in any managed press conferences that might be scheduled. "What kind of a ship were you on? It was a scoutship, right?"
"Right." The debriefers had been very specific about what he should say when he was questioned. It was the answer they had told him to give, and in a sense it was true. They had promised him some heavy coaching later, just before he saw the press. There was no need to go into the heavy modifications and special equipment that Hypo put into its special vessels.
"What caused the destruction of your ship? Enemy action of some kind, right?" Then when the lady on the ground saw Gift hesitate, she quickly added: "You don't have to talk about that. Or tell me exactly where it happened. No? All right. There were maybe five or six livecrew beside yourself?"
He grunted something; a Hypo spy ship, unlike an ordinary scout, carried twice that many. The debriefers had given him no specific instructions on that question.
"Port Diamond was your home port?"
"That's right." No one had actually told him not to talk to reporters before the conference. They probably just hadn't thought that he'd run into one this soon.
"You had some good friends on board?" Jory Yokosuka's eyebrows contorted in an exaggerated show of sympathy. No doubt the recorder was working, though he couldn't see where she'd put it. She was holding her empty hands folded together as if in supplication.
It would certainly sound strange if he said no to that last question. "Yes. A couple."
The reporter was nodding slowly. "I suppose your best friends were other people who had the same job aboard that you did."
"Yep."
"What was your job?"
"We're not supposed to talk about that."
"Oh? Most crewpeople don't mind talking. Was your ship part of a task force?"
"No."
"Working for Hypo, maybe?" This question came in the same rhythm and tone as the preceding one.
The start he felt, the shock administered by that word coming from an outsider, must have showed in his face. The wide trusting eyes were looking up at him, waiting eagerly to be given some kind of an answer, and he couldn't tell if they had registered his shock or not.
Gift muttered something and turned away, retreating back into his hospital room.
Jory Yokosuka's soft voice pursued him briefly. "I'd like to see you again when you're recovered. Have another little talk?"
He didn't answer. When he cautiously peeked over the balcony railing again, two minutes later, the lawn below was empty.
About half an hour later, listening to the brief recording she had made, a handful of sentences spoken in the spacer's voice, the young journalist confirmed her first impression that something about Nifty Gift was… not quite right. Of course the man was wounded, of course he had been through a lot. But instinct whispered there was something more.
She filed that private assessment away in the back of her mind, for possible action later, when there would be time to look for smaller angles on the war. Some human interest items.
Right now she had a bigger job to look forward to, if she could get it. But…
Her speculative shot regarding Hypo had hit home somehow. Nifty Gift seemed to know what Hypo was, even if Jory herself had yet to learn.
FOUR
Port Diamond base, though large for a military installation, naturally covered only a speck of the land and water surface of the planet Uhao, which orbited a very Sol-like sun. Uhao was renowned for its climate, and considered a meteorological paradise by most Earth-descended humans, who had made it a favorite tourist destination. There was a general impression among first-time visitors that this was what Earth itself ought to have been like. Romantics convinced themselves that the Cradle World really had been like this, once upon a time. Oceans, generally free of noxious bugs as well as giant storms and icebergs, sparkled in the sun.
Being the home of Hypo headquarters, this naturally had been the spy ship's home port—and still was for a hundred or a thousand other spy ships.
In the distant reaches of this world, there were also some strange alien archaeological sights to see.
As a rule, intelligence technicians who were engaged in jobs of the type from which Nifty Gift had just escaped, spacers whose work took them out on the front line against berserkers, were deliberately kept in ignorance of what the machinery they tended in deep space was supposed to accomplish. Should these people someday fall captive to the enemy—which was always a distinct possibility—information they did not possess could never be extracted from them by any means. Of course, Gift and his colleagues were bright enough to make some shrewd guesses about the purpose of it all, though they were officially discouraged from doing so.
Until now, Gift had wisely kept his guesses to himself.
When Nifty at last saw the tall gates of the hospital close behind him, on his first excursion out into the world, he was riding in the back of an unmarked government ground car, headed for the headquarters of Hypo. He really didn't have a whole lot of choice about his destination.
The code name referred to some thirty or forty people, out of the thousands who were stationed at the Port Diamond base. These, and a vastly greater number out in spy ships collecting data, made up the human component of one of the two prime teams of Solarian intelligence specialists. These folk were already hard at work integrating the latest intercepted berserker communications, brought in on Gift's courier, into their reading and interpretation of berserker plans. A very similar intelligence effort (code-named Negat) was taking place on Earth itself. The two sets of scholarly experts were in frequent contact with each other.
That long-range berserker communications were being intercepted at all was an amazing and closely guarded military secret. At distances literally astronomical, too great for the practical sending and reception of light waves or radio waves, the only practical way for people or machines to exchange information was by means of couriers, much like the one that had saved Gift's life, traveling at superluminal speeds. And to copy the information carried aboard such a machine, without stopping or even touching the device itself, was a feat that seemed to border upon witchcraft.
The main workroom of Hypo was underground, behind and below an unprepossessing and unobtrusively guarded entrance on the surface—there were two entrances, in fact, the second out of sight from the surface, and the two connected so that you had to go through both in series in order to get in.
Hypo had grown into its own department, more or less, quite separate from the other functions of military intelligence. Currently it occupied the subterranean levels of a middle-sized gray building on the base, under a sign suggesting the presence of the accounting branch of the inspector general's office. Gift, who had visited these premises only twice before, both times more than a year ago, paused uncertainly on getting out of the ground car. But his driver-escort was right with him, taking him by the elbow, and the two men went down the basement stairs to the right of the building's main entrance, to the unmarked door at the bottom. Here the escort was left behind.
Inside, Gift was given a warm welcome by people of a wide assortment of ranks, mostly in sloppy uniforms. Down here, the dress code had no high priority. Most of these folk Gift could not remember ever seeing before, but they had been expecting him. One or two faces were vaguely familiar from his last visit about six months ago.
One of the first things these friendly almost-strangers hastened to inform him was that the first technicians to come aboard the courier, after it had been scooped up by a tender and carried down to base, had been surprised to see what the lone passenger, restricted to an emergency tool kit and to tasks he could perform with only one hand, had managed to accomplish. So was every
one else who heard about it. Any autopilot in military use was about as routinely foolproof as any complicated Solarian artifact could be made to be. All the engineers had been able to say, after a thorough examination of the hardware, was that it was certainly possible that this unit had been temporarily disabled by the effect of some berserker weapon, or weapons used in combination. Both sides in the war sometimes used devices that worked by altering or displacing patterns of information. Mindbeams came in two general classifications: scattering and switching.
So far Gift, sensitively aware, picked up no faint suggestion that anyone was considering blaming him for anything.
Around him was all friendliness and respect. Gradually he began to relax.
Like its passenger, the little courier that had brought Gift home had sustained minor damage from berserker weapons. That last shot fired after his scooter as it bore him away to safety had come close indeed. But its human passenger had suffered only slight physical injury, and a perfectly understandable psychological shock.
Also the courier's modest cargo of information, fruits of the spy ship's violently terminated mission, was essentially intact. Nothing startling there, probably, but in this business every shred counted, and had been paid for in human lives and treasure.
Spacer Gift's story, in the version he had earlier worked out for himself under the debriefers' questions, and which they now seemed perfectly willing to accept, placed the two shipmates he had left behind under some faint shadow of possible blame. At least he began to worry, unreasonably, that it might do so. Slowly he realized this, and vaguely it bothered him.
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