In an hour Wan’s fever began to recede. In twelve the twitchings and babblings diminished and he slept normally. But he was still very sick.
Mother and playmate, teacher and at-least-fantasy wife, now Janine became Wan’s nurse as well. After the first round of medication, she would not even let Lurvy give him his shots. She went without sleep to sponge his brow. When he soiled himself in his coma she cleaned him fastidiously. She had no concentration left for anything else. The amused or concerned looks and words from her family left her untouched, until she brushed Wan’s unkempt hair off his face, and Paul made a patronizing comment. Janine heard the jealousy in the tone and flared, “Paul, you’re sickening! Wan needs me to take care of him!”
“And you do enjoy it, don’t you?” he snapped. He was really angry. Of course, that sparked more anger in Janine; but her father put in, gently enough, “Let the girl be a girl, Paul. Were you not yourself once young? Come, let us examine this Trdumeplatz again-“
Janine surprised herself by letting the peacemaker succeed; it had been a marvelous chance of a furious spat, but that was not where her interests lay. She took time for a tight, small grin about Paul’s jealousy, because that was a new service stripe to sew on her sleeve, and then back to Wan.
As he mended he became even more interesting. From time to time he woke, and spoke to her. When he was asleep she studied him. Face so dark, body olive; but from waist to thigh he bad the palest skin, the color of bread dough, taut over his sharp bones. Scant body hair. None on his face except a soft, almost invisible strand or two-more lip-lashes than mustache.
Janine knew that Lurvy and her father made a joke of her, and that Paul was actually jealous of the attentions he had avoided so long. It made a nice change. She had status. For the first time in her life, what she was doing was the most significant activity of the group. The others came to her to sue for permission to question Wan, and when she thought he was tiring they accepted her command to stop.
Besides, Wan fascinated her. She mapped him against all her previous experience of Men, to his advantage. Even against her pen-pals, Wan was better looking than the ice-skater, smarter than the actors, almost as tall as the basketball player. And against all of them, especially against the only two males she had been within tens of millions of kilometers of in years, Wan was so marvelously young. And Paul and her father, not. The backs of old Peter’s hands bore irregular blotches of caramel-colored pigment, which was gross. But at least the old man kept himself neat. Even dainty, in the continental way-even clipped the hairs that grew inside his ears with tiny silver scissors, because Janine had caught him at it. While Paul- In one of her skirmishes with Lurvy, Janine had snarled, “That’s what you go to bed With? An ape with hairy ears? I’d puke.”
So she fed Wan, and read to him, and drowsed over him while he slept. She shampooed his hair, and trimmed it to a soup-bowl mop, allowing Lurvy to help her get it even, and blow-dried it smooth. She washed his clothes and, spurning Lurvy for this, patched them and even cut down some of Paul’s to fit him. He accepted it all, every bit, and enjoyed it as much as she.
As he grew stronger, he no longer needed her as much, and she was less able to protect him from the questions of the others. But they were protective, too. Even old Peter. The computer, Vera, burrowed into its medical programs and prepared a long list of tests to be performed on the boy. “Assassin!” raged Peter. “Has it no understanding of a young man who has been so close to death that it wishes to finish it?” It was not entirely consideration. Peter had questions of his own, and he had been asking them when Janine would allow it, sulking and fidgeting when she would not. “That bed of yours, Wan, tell me again what you feel when you are in it? As though you are somehow a part of millions of people? And also they of you, isn’t that so?” But when Janine accused him of interfering with Wan’s recovery, the old man desisted. Though never for long.
Then Wan was well enough for Janine to allow herself a full night’s sleep in her own private, and when she woke her sister was at Vera’s console. Wan was holding to the back of her chair, grinning and frowning at the unfamiliar machine, and Lurvy was reading off to him his medical report. “Your vital signs are normal, your weight is picking up, your antibody levels are in the normal range-I think you’re going to be all right now, Wan.”
“So now,” cried her father, “at last we can talk? About this faster-than-light radio, the machines, the place he comes from, the dreaming room?” Janine hurled herself into the group.
“Leave him alone!” she snarled. But Wan shook his head.
“Let them ask what they like, Janine,” he said in his shrill, breathy voice.
“Now?”
“Yes, now!” stormed her father. “Now, this minute! Paul, come you here and tell this boy what we must know.”
They had planned this, Janine realized, the three of them; but Wan did not object, and she could not pretend he was unfit for questioning any longer. She marched over and sat beside him. If she could not prevent this interrogation, at least she would be there to protect him. She gave formal permission, coldly: “Go ahead, Paul. Say what you want to say, but don’t tire him out.”
Paul looked at her ironically, but spoke to Wan. “For more than a dozen years,” he said, “every hundred and thirty days or so, the whole Earth has gone crazy. It looks like it’s your fault,
The boy frowned, but said nothing. His public defender spoke for him. “Why are you picking on him?” she demanded.
“No one is ‘picking’, Janine. But what we experienced was the fever. It can’t be a coincidence. When Wan gets into that contraption he broadcasts to the world.” Paul shook his head. “Dear lad, do you have any idea of how much trouble you’ve caused? Ever since you began coming here, your dreams have been shared by millions of people. Billions! Sometimes you were peaceful, and your dreams were peaceful, and that wasn’t so bad. Sometimes you weren’t. I don’t want you to blame yourself,” he added kindly, forestalling Janine, “but thousands and thousands of people have died. And the property damage-Wan, you just can’t imagine.”
Wan shrilled defensively, “I have never harmed anyone!” he was unable to take in just what he was accused of, but there was no doubt in his mind that Paul was accusing. Lurvy put her hand on his arm.
“I wish it were so, Wan,” she said. “The important thing is, you mustn’t do that again.”
“No more dreaming in the couch?”
“No, Wan.” He looked to Janine for guidance, then shrugged. “But that is not all,” Paul put in. “You have to help us. Tell us everything you know. About the couch. About the Dead Men. About the faster-than-light radio, the food-“
“Why should I?” Wan demanded.
Patiently, Paul coaxed: “Because in that way you can make up for the fever. I don’t think you understand how important you are, Wan. The knowledge in your head might mean saving people from starvation. Millions of lives, Wan.”
Wan frowned over that concept for a moment, but “millions” was meaningless to him as applying to human beings-he had not yet adjusted to “five”. “You make me angry,” he scolded.
“I don’t mean to, Wan.”
“It is not what you mean to, it is what you do. You have just told me that,” the boy grumbled spitefully. “All right. What do you want?”
“We want you to tell us everything you know,” Paul said promptly. “Oh, not all at once. But as you remember. And we want you to go through this whole Food Factory with us and explain everything in it-as far as you can, I mean.”
“This place? There is nothing here but the dreaming room, and you won’t let me use that!”
“It is all new to us, Wan.”
“It is nothing! The water does not run, there is no library, the Dead Men are hard to talk to, nothing grows! At home I have everything, and much of it is working, so you can see for yourself.”
“You make it sound like heaven, Wan.”
“See for yourself! If I can’t dream, there is no reason to stay here!”
Paul looked at the others, perplexed. “Could we do that?”
“Of course! My ship will take us there-not all of you, no,” Wan corrected himself. “But some. We can leave the old man here. There is no woman for him, anyway, so there is no pairing to destroy. Or even,” he added cunningly, “only Janine and I can go. Then there will be more room in the ship. We can bring you back machines, books, treasures-“