Feeling fury rising within her, Joanna said, “I don’t want a cause celebre. I want a normal, healthy son!”
“Healthy, he will be,” said Zimmerman. “Normal, never.”
Trying to cool her down, Cardenas said, “Think of it, Joanna. He’ll never get ill. He might never even get old! And if he’s ever injured, the nanomachines will repair him.”
Joanna thought of it. And turned to Greg, who stood mute and deathly pale, staring through the observation window at his half brother.
Slowly Doug woke from a long, deep dream. He had been swimming with dolphins the way he’d done when he was a kid visiting Hawaii except that the water was cold, numbingly cold and so dark that he could only sense the dolphins swimming alongside him, big powerful sleek bodies gliding effortlessly through the cold black waters. Don’t leave me behind, he called to them, but somehow he was on the Moon and it was Brennart standing beside him whispering something, the secrets of the universe maybe, but Doug could not hear the man’s words.
And then his eyes opened.
He saw that he was in some kind of hospital room. Moonbase. The infirmary. Low rock ceiling painted a cheerful butter yellow. A wide mirror took up almost the whole wall on one side of his bed. He could hear the humming and beeping of electronic monitors over his head.
The door opened and Bianca Rhee stepped through.
“You’re awake!” she said looking happy and surprised and awed and curious, all at once.
Doug grinned at her. “I guess I am.”
“How do you feel?”
“Hungry!”
Bianca’s smile threatened to split her face in two. Before she could say another word, a medic in crisp white coveralls pushed through the door angrily.
“What’re you doing in here?” he demanded of Rhee. “No one’s allowed in here without—”
“Shut up!” Doug snapped. “She’s my friend.”
The man glared at Doug. “No one is allowed inside this cubicle without specific permission from the resident M.D., friend or not.”
Over the next ten minutes, Doug learned how wrong the young medic was. Rhee dutifully left his cubicle, but his mother, Greg, and several strangers poured in, including a funny-looking fat older man with an unlit cigar clamped ludicrously in his teeth.
His mother fell on his neck, crying for the first time he could remember. Greg smiled stiffly. The others stared at the monitors while they checked his pulse, thumped his chest, and performed other ancient medical rituals.
“How do you feel?” everyone seemed to ask.
“Hungry,” Doug kept repeating. But no one brought him anything to eat.
Gradually he began to piece it together from the babbling of their chatter. Nanotherapy. He was alive and well. And would be for a long time to come. It was a lot to take in over a few minutes. It seemed to Doug as if just a few minutes ago he was dying from radiation poisoning. Now they were telling him he would live forever, just about.
“Could I just have something to eat?” he shouted over their voices.
Everyone stopped and stared at him.
“I’m starving,” Doug said.
“You see?” said the old fat guy. “Just as I told you!”
INFIRMARY
Bianca Rhee came back, shyly, almost tiptoeing into Doug’s cubicle after everyone else had left. He had eaten a full dinner, napped a short while, then asked for another dinner. Its remnant crumbs were all that was left on the food tray when Rhee entered and smiled happily at him.
“How do you feel?” she asked, sitting on the edge of his bed because there was no chair in his cubicle.
“Fine,” said Doug with a big grin. “I feel as if I could run up to the top of Mt. Wasser in my bare feet!”
“The nanotherapy is really working.”
“I guess it is.”
“Do you feel — different?”
Doug thought about it for a moment. “No,” he answered. “Not different, exactly. Just — a little tired, but good, just the same. Like I’ve just won my fifth gold medal in the Olympics.”
“That’s wonderful,” she said.
“What about you?” Doug asked. “Have you been checked over? Are you okay?”
She shrugged. “We all took more of a radiation dose than we should have, but I’m okay. No obvious medical problems.”
“Obvious?”
“Oh, I might have a two-headed baby someday.” She tried to laugh.
“And your chances of getting cancer?” Doug asked.
“A few percent higher.”
“Oh.”
“But that won’t happen until I’m old and gray,” she said.
“Besides, there’s no history of cancer in my family.”
“That’s good,” Doug said, but he thought, There will be now, most likely.
Then he noticed that her coveralls were sweat-stained, and there was a fine sheen of perspiration on her forehead.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked. “You’re perspiring.”
“Oh.” Rhee looked more embarrassed than worried. “I — I was exercising a little.”
“Exercising?”
She nodded, keeping her lips clamped tight This isn’t the time to tell him I practice dancing, she decided. He’s a nice, guy, but he’d laugh. The fat little gook in ballet slippers, pretending she’s a ballerina in the low gravity of the Moon. Anyone would laugh.
So they talked about the expedition, about Brennart and what heroism was all about. Doug told Bianca that Brennart was already dying of cancer and had nothing much to lose by his daring.
She shook her head. “I still think it was a real bonkhead thing to do. Just because he wanted be a hero was no reason for you to take such a risk.”
“We would’ve been okay,” Doug insisted, “if the hopper hadn’t broken down.”
“Sure.”
“Well, anyway, I appreciate your coming out to get us. You saved my life.”
Bianca blushed. “I didn’t do much. The radiation was back to normal by then.”
“Still, you must’ve volunteered. Didn’t you?”
“Well… yes, I guess I did.”
“And my vidcam,” Doug went on. “You saved that, too, didn’t you? The corporation owes you a lot”
Her expression changed. “I didn’t do it for the corporation,” Bianca said, so low mat Doug could barely hear her.
“Still,” he said, “you’re as much a hero as anybody.”
She shook her head. “Not really.”
Doug sensed that something had gone slightly off track.
Bianca had been smiling and friendly up to a moment ago, but now she seemed to be almost sad, almost — disappointed.
“Tell me all about it,” he said. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
“It was all in a rush, you know,” she said, still looking unhappy, almost bitter. “Kind of confused. Killifer was pretty nervous, really wired tight. He got pissed off because I grabbed his suit by mistake.”
Doug listened as she haltingly told him what they were doing while he and Brennart were stuck underneath the hopper on the mountaintop.
“… and when you started mumbling about the Yamagata people, he didn’t want to believe you.”
“Killifer?”
“Right. He didn’t like the idea of going out again to find them. He didn’t like it all”
Doug let out a sigh. “I guess I don’t blame him.”
Rhee’s face contracted into a puzzled frown. “And there was something semi-weird, too.”
“Semi-weird?” Doug grinned at her.
“When I got your vidcam, there was another piece of something… a flat oblong hunk of ceramic or metal. I don’t think it’s part of the vidcam. It was all white on one side and gold on the other.”
“Doesn’t sound like anything from the vidcam.”
“No. Besides, the vidcam looked intact to me. Maybe it was something Killifer had on him. I was in his suit, remember. Maybe he already had it in his pocket.”
Curious, Doug asked, “How big was it?”
She shaped it with her hands. “Oh, just about fifteen centimeters long, I think. Maybe half that wide.”