There were five in the team. I knew one of them to speak to, though not well. He looked right through me.
They prodded me and turned me. They referred to the computer screen, consulted hastily, and apparently decided to pass the problem of the artificial leg on to others. All they were supposed to do was make the wimp look enough like me to fool FBI investigators in 1955. I was just a piece of meat wrapped up like a frozen steak in a supermarket.
The team worked damn well together. Nobody got in anyone else's way, everything needed was always at hand. Literally. They would reach without looking, and it would be there.
They were fast. They sliced that wimp's leg off and kicked it aside the instant it hit the floor. Meanwhile someone was extracting all the wimp's teeth and plugging in new ones that would look just like mine. They hooked up the artificial leg, slashed the wimp here and there in the places where my skinsuit shows scars. They peeled the skin away from her face and began building it from beneath, then closed it again and applied the forced regenerators. It healed without a scar.
But there were scars they wanted the wimp to have. The only way to make those is with a timepress field. When everybody was ready they plugged feedlines from big nutrient tanks into the wimp, connected her ureter and anus to evacuator lines, and jumped back.
The blue glow of the Gate surrounded the wimp. It began to breathe so fast the chest was a blur. Its hair and fingernails grew visibly. It used nutrient fluid so fast that it had to be pumped in, and it emitted urine in a pulsed, pressurized stream that hissed into a tank on the floor. In ten seconds it grew six months older. The scars healed normally.
They then pulled my jeans onto the wimp, inserted a funnel into its mouth and were about to pump it full of half-digested airline food when one of the workers looked at my face.
I mean she really looked at it. She had looked right at me several times before but nothing had registered.
Her eyes grew wide.
When she managed to make them realize who it was they were duplicating, the whole team helped me peel out of the plastic skin.
Things got a little hazy for a time.
I remember looking down at the sleeping face that looked just like mine. Then they were pulling me away from it. There -was a stout aluminium bar in my hands and a rip in the palm of my skinsuit from thumb to index finger. I had wrenched the bar loose from one of the examining machines.
And I had sure made a mess of that wimp.
I regret that. I really do. The thing had been wearing my jeans. and I never did get all the blood out of them.
The head of the wimp-building team trailed me all the way to the door.
He kept trying to apologize and I kept ignoring him If there was blame, it was mostly mine, but I didn't want to say that. Like plugging into life-support equipment, I view apologizing as a dangerous vice that can take over your whole life if you give in to it. Inside, I was whipping myself severely for pulling a tyro stunt like leaving my squealer in the ready-
room. Outside, I trust, I was at work and the man's apologies simply got in my way.
I had wasted five whole minutes in there. I would never know if those minutes were the margin between life and death for Pinky.
I wasted fifteen more seconds just getting through the door.
There were no procedures for it. The whole goat-sorting operation was designed to prevent anybody getting through easily. But with a few quiet, totally sincere death threats, I managed it. I raced up to Operations, told Lawrence to put every available operative on the search for Pinky's stunner in the city from which the flight had originated -- which I learned was Houston -- got him to extend the bridge again, and ... stepped ... through the Gate.
It was a shambles.
They had looked just about every place it was possible to look, and they had not been gentle. The aisle was knee-deep in torn seat cushions. The carpet was ripped up. The contents of the galley were strewn from nose to tail of the plane. Tiny bottles of booze clinked underfoot.
To make everything worse, the customized wimps began arriving.
So much. time had already been wasted that we had to hurry getting them placed. We seated a few and strapped them in, but most we just threw. We had our portapaks on full power, and we were strong. Instead of just enriched blood, adrenalin, and vitamins -- the wake-up mixture -- we were now getting an insane brew of hyperdrenalin, methedrine, Essence of Hysteria, TNT, and Kickapoo Joyjuice. We picked up those half-corpses and tossed them around like beanbags. I could have tom sheet metal with my eyebrows.
Three-quarters of the wimps had been through the process I had recently seen firsthand.
They looked exactly like the people they were replacing. To save time, the other quarter came premutilated. Most were hideously burned. Some were still smoking.
One is supposed to say the smell of charred human flesh is revolting. It's not actually. It smells pretty good.
Most of the wimps were still breathing. They'd existed an average of thirty years in the wimp tanks, kept alive by machines, exercised mechanically to keep the muscle tone.
Theoretically they didn't have the brains to breathe, but the fact is they were too dumb to stop. Most would still be breathing when they hit the ground.
It didn't take long to get them all through. When we were done we still had three minutes and forty seconds. I sent one of the team back to the future to see if anyone had located the stunner in Houston. The rest of us kept looking for it on the plane. The messenger returned with the expected bad news, and now we had two minutes and twenty seconds.
Pinky had calmed down, if you could call it that. She was no longer crying. I believe she was paralyzed with terror. I found Lilly Rangoon, the squad leader, and pulled her aside.
"I don't know Pinky well," I said. "What does she have in the way of twonkies?"
"Nothing. She's clean." Lilly looked away from me.
That's a rarity. We were talking about such things as artificial legs, kidneys, eyes -- medical implants of any kind that were too advanced for 1955. Pinky was a healthy girl. She would be a great loss to the teams, if for no other reason than that.
At the same time, her lack of medical anachronisms made Lilly's job a little easier. It would have fallen to Lilly to cut those items out and bring them back with us.
"Thirty seconds," someone called out.
"There's a minute leeway," I said. "We'll have to go on the dick. You stay long enough to get her skinsuit and -- "
"Shut your freaking mouth! I know my job. Now get out of my aircraft."
Nobody talks to me like that. Nobody. I looked into her eyes. If looks could freeze I'd have been a one-legged pop side.
"Right," I said. "See you in fifty thousand years."
I hurried to the front, where everyone was hanging back, away from the Gate. Nobody wanted to go. Neither did I. It would have been a lot easier to ride it in.
I looked back and saw Pinky hand something floppy to Lilly. I knew it was Pinky, though it didn't look like her, because there was no one else it could be. The floppy thing was her skinsuit. She was no longer a sexy stewardess; without her disguise she was a terrified, naked little girl.
Lilly gave her a salute which Pinky did not have the will to return, and sprinted toward me.
"Start walking through, or I start kicking ass," I said.
They did. I turned to Lilly.
"How old was she?" I asked.
"Pinky? She was twelve."
I didn't make the rule. I'm not trying to absolve myself by saying that. I think it's a good rule. If we didn't have it, I'd write it myself.
No hardware gets left behind. The penalty for carelessness is death. You bring it back, or you stay with it.