In the very green darkness Chiquita lay. She was surely dead. There was no possibility of a mistake.
But beside her—
Beside her something moved! Beside that shrunken, lifeless skin, something quivered, curled and lifted. It came frolicking toward them, flying—something small, smaller even than Donna, a mere doll beside the dead Chiquita, racked and shrunken though she was.
It was a spaceling!
A baby spaceling! Its red nose winked swiftly; it looked at them with bright, friendly eyes. "Oh, you darling!" cried Donna, holding out her arms to it, and it licked at her face with a slim, quick, black tongue.
"Look there!" croaked Ryeland, astonished beyond words, pointing. There was another tiny, seal-like creature . . . and a third, and a fourth, and—there seemed to be a dozen of them, frolicking and darting with their tiny noses blinking comically, pink light and orange, red and almost purple.
Ryeland said softly: "Chiquita may be dead, but her children are not."
There were eight of them in all, as well as they could count their quicksilver, gamboling shapes. Eight baby spacelings, frolicking like pups. Had they been born after the death of the mother, in some reproductive mystery of the spacelings? Had they been born before, and wandered off? Ryeland could not know. He only knew that they were here.
"Thank heaven," whispered Donna, as Ryeland carried one out into the light to see it.
"Thank Something," murmured Ryeland. "Look, Donna. They're just like adult spacelings, but tiny. Born fully formed—obviously, they are able to maintain a field, able to use the jetless drive! Fortunately for us. Though," he said remembering the lost corner of their paradise, "I think they could stand a little more practice."
He stopped, looking up, jaw hanging.
Out there somewhere past the air curtain, something moved and winked.
"The Plan rocket!" cried Donna in terror.
"No! No," shouted Ryeland, leaping up. "Don't you see? It's too small too close. It's a spaceling! Quiveras has come back, and—look! There's someone else. He has brought Donderevo back with him!"
Donderevo! Six feet eight inches tall, a dark-faced man with blue eyes that blazed. His spaceling brought him daintily into the air bubble of their little haven, and Ron Donderevo sprang free. "Donna!" he cried, and caught her hand.
Joyously Donna threw her arms about him, pressing her face against his bronzed cheek. When she drew free, she said: "Ron, this is Steve Ryeland."
"I remember," Ryeland whispered breathlessly. "When I was a Tech-nicub, about eight years old. And you were a medical student from space, wearing a collar because your people hadn't accepted the Plan—"
Chuckling, the huge man gripped his hand. Ron Donderevo's fringed leather jacket was open at the throat. His neck was a brown muscular column. A thin scar circled it, but he wore no collar.
"And I remember you," Donderevo rumbled. "I admired your father. A philosopher and a historian, as well as a mathematician. He's the scholar who helped me understand the real meaning of the space frontier."
"Your collar?" Ryeland interrupted him. "You really got out of it?"
"Out of the collar, and out of the place they call Heaven." Donderevo nodded solemnly. "I was luckier than your father."
"I was never told what became of him."
Ryeland caught his breath to ask another question, but the sudden iron constriction of his own collar stopped him. He wanted to know how Donderevo had got away, but he was afraid to know the answer. He was afraid that Donderevo would confirm the strange story of Angela Zwick —that Ryeland was the imitation man that the anti-Plan surgeons had assembled in Donderevo's collar, to cover his escape.
"Ron?" Donna's voice was quick and quivering with concern. "Can you get Steve out of his collar?"
"Not quite the way I was taken out of mine." Ron Donderevo shook his shagged, craggy head. "Mine was removed in the surgical center at the stockpile where I had been sent for salvage. Half a dozen surgeons helped, using the best equipment—"
"What was done with your collar?" Ryeland interrupted.
"I promised not to tell," Donderevo said.
"Was a patch—?" Ryeland had to gulp and start again. "Was a patchwork man assembled in it? A kind of living dummy to take your place until the spaceling could carry you away?"
"Right." The big man nodded casually. "I don't suppose it matters to anybody now."
It mattered very much to Ryeland. His flesh turned numb and cold . . . as it must have been before it was sutured and cemented back into the likeness of a man. His knees felt weak.
"What's wrong, Steve?" Donna asked. "You look so pale!"
He couldn't tell her that he was that decoy, that patchwork of junk meat.
"I was hoping you could take my collar off," he told Donderevo. That was a matter desperate enough to account for his agitation. "If you learned medicine on Earth, can't you—can't you possibly do the operation?"
Donderevo started to shake his head, and suddenly looked hard at Ryeland's face. He glanced at Donna, and peered again at Ryeland. His own face twitched and stiffened, gray beneath the bronze.
"I suppose I could try," he admitted reluctantly. "Of course you understand that I lack the experience and the fine equipment those surgeons had. Operating here, with only a portable surgery, without trained assistants, I can promise you one chance in four that you'll survive the operation—one chance in five that you'll walk again, even if you do survive."
Ryeland fell dizzily back against a great crystal branch. Twittering iridescent bird-fish, jarred loose, swam tinkling away.
"And yet," rumbled Donderevo compassionately, "you are right, Steve, for you have no chance otherwise. The Plan can kill you in ten seconds, as easy as that. The rocket is less than three million miles away. Push a button—poof!—your code impulse is transmitted—you're dead. And so am I," he said earnestly, "and poor Quiveras here, and Donna. So you are right, for you see, Steven, we must save you somehow or you may kill us all."
"Describe it to me," said Ryeland emptily. "Tell me what it entails. Exactly."
Donderevo hesitated, and then began.
Ron Donderevo, that huge man, his hands soft as a maiden's, his voice deep as a tiger's growl; Ron Donderevo had performed many an operation for the Plan.
But on Earth, in the Body Bank, he said with meticulous care, there were things that could not be duplicated here. There were nurses and surgeons beyond counting. (Here was only young Donna and old Quiveras, neither of them trained.) There was equipment by the warehouse-full. Here was only what had been packed in on the back of spacelings. Enough, yes—if nothing went wrong. But there were no extras. If a blood pump should fail, there was no other. There in the Body Bank was the unmatched reservoir of human parts that constituted a reserve against spoilage. And here were only the four of them, and no more parts than they needed to go around.
The first step, he said, would be to create an atmosphere of asepsis around the anesthetized Ryeland. Easy enough, particularly in the negligible gravity of the spaceling's bubble, and particularly where the only ambient germs were those the four of them had brought in. A soft hissing from a yellowish metal tube Donderevo had brought—he demonstrated it—accounted for a polyantibiotic spray.
Then—scalpels, retractors, sutures, clamps. Sterile and inherently inhospitable to microscopic life, they came out of the gleaming containers at Donderevo's orders. Donna was whitefaced but steady as she listened and looked at the instruments. She shrank away as he described how the first scalpel would trace a thin red line around Ryeland's neck, just under the collar; but then she was all right.
The epidermis and dermis would have to be slit and pulled back, like a stocking from a leg. Red flesh and white muscle would swiftly be cut and retracted. The great trapezius muscles would have to be cut, caught and held—it was important that muscles be kept under tension. The small blood vessels of the neck needed to be tied off; the large ones—the carotids, the jugular, the vertebral blood supply—were to be cut and quickly clamped to the plastic tubes of a double-chambered mechanical heart—not because Ryeland's own heart was out of circuit, yet, but because there was blood loss, constantly, from every vessel and uncountable capillary, from the disturbed cells themselves. Extra reserves of blood were needed and held in the mechanical heart's chambers, for a man's own heart was not equal to the task.