Healer

("That won't work,") Pard warned. ("Even if you did manage to knock him unconscious, what good would it do us? Just play along; I want to hear more about these Children of The Healer.")

So Dalt allowed Giff to inspect his flamestone as he sat motionless. "I'm no Son of The Healer. As a matter of fact, I wasn't aware that The Healer ever had children."

Giff let go of Dalt's gem and let it dangle from its cord again. "Just a figure of speech. We call ourselves his children—great-great-great-grandchildren would be more accurate—because none of us would have been born if it hadn't been for him."

Dalt gave him a blank stare and Giff replied in an exasperated tone, "I'm a descendant of one of the people he cured a couple of hundred years ago. She was a victim of the horrors. And if The Healer hadn't come along and straightened her out, she'd have been institutionalized for all her life; her two sons would never have been born, would never have had children of their own, and so on."

("And you wouldn't be here standing guard over us, idiot!") Pard muttered.

"The first generation of Children of The Healer," Giff went on, "was a social club of sorts, but the group soon became too large and too spread out. We have no organization now, just people who keep his name alive though their families and wear these imitation flame-stones. The horrors still strikes everywhere and some say The Healer will return."

"You believe that?" Dalt asked.

Giff shrugged. "I'd like to." His eyes studied Dalt's flamestone. "Yours is real, isn't it?"

Dalt hesitated for an instant, engaged in a lightning conference. Should I tell him?

("I think it's our only chance. It certainly won't worsen our situation.")

Neither Pard nor Dalt was afraid of physical violence or torture. With Pard in control of all physical systems,

Dalt would feel no pain and could at any time assume a deathlike state with a skin temperature cooled by intense vasoconstriction and cardiopulmonary activity slowed to minimal level.

Yeah. And I'd much prefer getting out of these cuffs and turning a few tables to rolling over and playing dead.

("That would gall me, too. Okay—play it to the hilt.")

"It's real, all right," Dalt told Giff. "It's the original."

Giff's mouth twisted with skepticism. "And I'm president of the Federation."

Dalt rose to his feet, lifting the gravcuff with him. "Your boss is looking for a man who's been alive for two or three centuries, isn't he? Well, I'm the man."

"We know that."

"I'm a man who never sickens, never ages ... now what kind of a healer would The Healer be if he couldn't heal himself. After all, death is merely the culmination of a number of degenerative disease processes."

Giff mulled this over, accepting the logic but resisting the conclusion. "What about the patch of silver hair and the golden hand?"

"Pull this skullcap off and take a look. Then get some liquor from the cabinet over there and rub it on my left wrist.

After a full minute's hesitation, wherein doubt struggled in the mire of the afterglow of the cassette, Giff accepted the challenge and cautiously pulled the skullcap from Dalt's head. "Nothing! What are you trying—"

"Look at the roots," Dalt told him. "You don't think I can walk around with that patch undyed, to you?"

Giff looked. The roots in an oval patch at the top of Dalt's head were a silvery gray. He jumped away from Dalt as if stung, then walked slowly around him, examining him as if he were an exhibit in a museum. Without a word, he went to the cabinet Dalt had indicated before and drew from it a flask of clear orange fluid.

"I ... I'm almost afraid to try this," he stammered, opening the container as he approached. He poised the bottle over Dalt's wrists where they were inserted into the gravcuff, hesitated, then took a deep breath and poured the liquor. Most of it splashed on the floor but a sufficient amount reached the target.

"Now rub," Dalt told him.

Without looking up, Giff tucked the flask under his arm and began to massage the fluid into the skin of Dalt's left wrist and forearm. The liquor suddenly became cloudy and flesh-colored. Giff took a fold of his coveralls and wiped the solution away. From a sharp line of demarcation at the wrist on down over the back of the hand, the skin was a deep, golden yellow.

"You are The Healer!" he hissed, his eyes meeting Dalt's squarely for the first time. "Forgive me! I'll open the cuff right now." In his frantic haste to retrieve the key from his coveralls, Giff allowed the liquor flask to slip from beneath his arm and it smashed on the floor.

"Hey! That was real glass!" Dalt said.

Giff ignored the crash and the protest. The key was in his hand and he was inserting it into its slot. The pressure around Dalt's wrists was suddenly eased and as he pulled his hands free, Giff caught the now-deactivated cuff.

"Forgive me," he repeated, shaking his head and fixing his eyes on the floor. "If I'd had any idea that you might be The Healer, I would've had nothing to do with this, I swear! Forgive—"

"Okay! Okay! I forgive you!" Dalt said hurriedly. "Now, do you have a blaster?"

Giff nodded eagerly, reached inside his coveralls, and handed over a small hand model, cheap but effective at close range.

"Good. Now all we've got to do—"

"Hey!" someone yelled from the other side of the room. "What's going on?"

Dalt spun on reflex, his blaster raised. It was Hinter and he had his own blaster ready. There was a flash, then Dalt felt a searing pain as the beam from Hinter's weapon burned a hole through his chest two centimeters to the left of his sternum. As his knees buckled, everything went black and silent.

XII

Rushing to the upper level at the sound of Giff's howl, Kanlos came upon a strange tableau: the prisoner—Dalt, or whatever his name was—was lying on his back with the front of his shirt soaked with blood and a neat round hole in his chest ... very dead. Giff kneeled over him, sobbing and clutching the empty gravcuff to his abdomen; Hinter stood mutely to the side, blaster in hand.

"You fool!" he screamed, white-faced with rage. "How could you be so stupid!"

Hinter took an involuntary step backward. "He had a blaster! I don't care how valuable a guy is, when he points a blaster in my direction, I shoot!"

Kanlos strode toward the body. "How'd he get a blaster?"

Hinter shrugged. "I heard something break up here and came to investigate. He was out of the cuff and holding the blaster when I came in."

"Explain," he said, nudging the sobbing Giff with his foot.

"He was The Healer!"

"Don't be ridiculous!"

"He was! He proved it to me."

Kanlos considered this. "Well, maybe so. We traced him back to Tolive and that's where The Healer first appeared. It all fits. But why did you let him loose?"

"Because I am a Son of The Healer!" Giff whispered. "And now I've helped kill him!"

Kanlos made a disgusted face. "Idiots! I'm surrounded by fools and incompetents! Now we may never find out how they kept him alive this long." He sighed with exasperation. "All right. We've still got a few rooms left to search."

Hinter turned to follow Kanlos. "What about him?" he said, indicating Giff.

"Useless button-head. Forget him."

They went below, leaving Giff crouched over the body of The Healer.

XIII

("C'mon. Wake up!") Wha' happen?

("Hinter burned a hole right through your heart, my friend.")

Then how come I'm still alive?

("Because the auxiliary heart I constructed in your pelvis a couple of hundred years ago has finally come in handy.")