His tongue was thick. “M I hungry? Yes, hungry.” She was laughing. The sound of it dispelled the horror for a moment, filling his heart with something like delight. “I felt you did it for me,” she said.
“Didn’t,” he managed.
She didn’t say anything. She knew what he meant. She felt his anguish, even his guilt. And his nascent hope as well. Her maternal instinct to comfort him was enormous; she wanted to protect him in his newness. She leaned close to him and whispered in his ear. “Peter, remember what you said? About how things were meant to happen? Well, this was meant to be.” “S’a miracle,” he said with difficulty, and his eyes misted. “Yes, a miracle.”
Suddenly he was crying like a baby. In the next moment he wanted all the tubes yanked out of his body. Nurses were called to restrain him. After a few minutes he calmed down. He asked for solid food. “Peter, not vet.”
“I’ll walk out,” he said, his voice ragged but stronger than before. He was unsure whether he meant it or was trying to make her laugh, but it had that effect. Beatrice laughed, and nurses ran to confer with Wolfe about food. Wolfe was cautious, but Peter was given the equivalent of baby food, a mash of nutrients that he apparently found delicious. He ate with the fierce pleasure of a child at his mother’s breast. Whenever he asked for something, people jumped as never before. His thoughts grew more complex once he was satisfied. He wondered if he now had some terrible leverage, now that he was the pioneer craft in their exploration of this brave new world. So fragile and singular upon such an uncharted sea. And there was no denying that was true-it was the first thing Beatrice had described to him, once the)’ were able to carry on a sustained conversation. He couldn’t find it in his heart to tell her how frightened he was himself. He told her how normal he felt, although every time he glimpsed his new body, he was terrified by its otherness. He dissembled, and did it well. He didn’t have to lie about everything, to be sure. He told her of his overwhelming love and gratitude to her for staying by him, for all she must have suffered during the hellish procedure and its uncertain aftermath. Thanks to Beatrice, even thanks to Wolfe and his shadowy organization, he was alive. But when he was alone, he was accompanied by a leaden fear. He was himself and he wasn’t. He would never be purely himself again. He was a third thing. The eeriness of his situation haunted him, never so much as when he was about to fall asleep. Worse was when he was hurled groggy from his frequent nightmares, long arduous affairs in which he reexperienced the pain of his cancer, as if whatever remained of his soul was telling him to be thankful, to forget guilt and savor life. A week after he had regained consciousness, Peter suddenly began spewing out theorems, postulates, formulae-all manner of random shards of textbook physics-as if his brain was up and doing calisthenics after a long, long sleep. And soon he had to stop and think before he could ask where his doubts had gone. At week six, he stood on his own for the first time. In isolated bursts, he now found himself speaking cogently about the Hammer, pouring out ideas that were fresh and original and sent Wolfe scrambling for stenographers. The next day, he asked for a full-length mirror. Beatrice watched him as they wheeled it in. He stood in front of it a full five minutes before speaking. The sight of his body, its evoking familiarity, seemed to mock him. It’s me, he told himself. Then why did it look and feel so foreign? Until the age of sixty or so, he had felt a seamless continuity between his past and his present, as if he’d never really been different, in mind or body, from what he was at age twenty, almost as if he’d never been a child at all. And here he was again, age thirty-five, and the effect was every bit as startling as standing in front of a funhouse mirror, or seeing himself from an entirely new angle in a clothing store mirror. That can’t be me, he said silently to his reflection. And it isn’t, his reflection answered back. “S’been a while,” he said thickly. His speech control, though improving, was still uncertain, especially when he was talking about things that frightened him; the science had come forward easily, almost unbidden. “Since you looked like that?” said Beatrice gently “About forty years. “N’even while shaving.”
She understood without his having to elaborate-that over the years he’d fallen into the habit of not really looking at his reflection at all, for fear of noticing some new collapse or blemish; his dermatolo.. gist had, in effect, become his mirror. Beatrice knew the feeling all too well. “Body’s better’n mine was.”
“Well, different,” she said.
“He took good care,” he said. That, of course, was at the root of it. Somebody else had owned this body. He, an aged man in a process nature had mandated for all time and all species, had gone against that law and stolen this body for himself. He wondered if in the process he had forfeited some precious part of his own identity. A part of him was sure he had. But another part, a growing part, stirred in restless rebellion against such doubts. This part, and he suspected it was the body itself, wanted only to live. In that sense, the body was his now, no matter how dark that truth might be. You can’t very well give it back, anyway, can you? he told himself. “Thank God he took care of it,” Beatrice was saying. He swung around slowly to stare at her. He saw her flinch, and then realized that she was suddenly selfconscious of her own body compared to his. He took her, somewhat clumsily, into his arms. It felt good to hold her. The familiar smells of her hair and skin thrilled his senses, and he loved her with all his heart. Perhaps that was all that mattered. Over the next few days, she showered him with attention of every sort, and he reveled in it. He complained about the bad food at the Fountain Compound and they sent out for seafood from local restaurants. He found his speech improving every day, and he began to eat ravenously, including items he had learned to avoid, like cream sauces and rich cheeses. He discovered he could read a newspaper at ten feet, and smell nightblooming jasmine when the nearest bush was apparently a quarter mile away. And he began to have erotic dreams. They were vague enough to report to Beatrice. Whoever his partner had been, she had vaporized instantly upon waking. “I don’t suppose it was me,” said Beatrice. Peter laughed. “Of course it was you,” he said. “Who else would it be?” She accepted his statement, and so did he. Although he actually had no idea if that were so or not.
In a much shorter time than anybody had ever dared hope to expect, the key members of Peter’s team were flown in from White Sands. Hank Flannagan, Cap Chu and Rosemarie Wiener got off at Vieques Airport knowing only that they were in for an exciting surprise, and that they should be prepared to stay. Beatrice hunted down Alex Davies, who had been avoiding her. She found him in his tiny cubicle, the cinder-block walls utterly bare except for an enormous velvet clown painting. He was so engrossed in his computer screen he didn’t look up as she entered. She caught a glimpse of a file name, H. BRINKMAN 1963-? Alex was scrolling through it furiously. As Beatrice took a step closer, he spun around with a yelp. “Sorry to startle you,” said Beatrice. What was he up to? The screen was layered with windows, but when she tried to read further, Alex swiftly clicked back to his screensaver. “Just catching up on some e-mail,” said Alex. “What’s up?” He was acting awfully furtive, but Beatrice had her priorities. “We’re having a briefing on Peter. His team is arriving and we need to discuss the cover story.” “Yeah? How’s the old man feeling about this? Excuse me, the new man.” “I think he feels two ways,” said Beatrice. “Appropriate,” said Alex. “So, you think he’s going to be able to handle it? Old cowboy, new horse?” rushed him back to bed and administered anticoagulants, along with cholesterol-reducing drugs designed to help reverse the sclerotic changes in his seventy-six-year-old cerebral blood vessels. He responded within a few hours and they gave him a CAT scan. There was a cloudy area in his left hemisphere, but it cleared even as they shot the scans. “Could have been anything,” Wolfe said quietly, his expression grave. “One tiny fleck of clotted material from any of a dozen sutures We’re lucky it hasn’t happened before.” By the next day, Peter was joking about it, but the general mood had grown somber. He was placed under twenty-fourhour watch, and a strict protocol was established to monitor and test his physiological parameters three times a day. Meanwhile he harassed the clinic’s nurses, in a wheelchair. “Where’s Hawking? I’ll race him to the chow line,” he shouted, but nobody joined in the laughter. Beatrice retreated to their room, trying to keep herself from flying apart. Flannagan and Chu wondered what had become of their new boss and why their lab sessions had been put on hold, and Rosemarie Wiener was in a lovesick funk. Oscar Henderson phoned Wolfe every hour, demanding progress reports and asking when in hell they could expect work to resume on the weapon. But it would be a while. Peter had only partial use of his left arm and leg, and his recollection of the previous day was poor, including the astonishing ideas that he had presented. With heavy hearts, they began the process of teaching him what he had taught them only twenty-four hours earlier.