In the morning, when be opened his door, he found Pertos Godelhausser lying on the corridor floor, all bloody and unconscious. Down the hall there was a trail of blood to show how the old man had crawled all this way for help. Sebastian felt a momentary wash of overwhelming incompetency that he had not provided help. He was desperately sorting through his shattered mind for a plan, for something to do with the body, when Pertos raised his head and asked for help. He wasn’t dead yet!
Sebastian bent to the old man. “What?”
“My room. The autodoc. I couldn’t get into it myself.”
Sebastian did not understand what the autodoc was until Pertos explained it was the same machine that had fixed his broken leg. And since the idiot remembered that so clearly, he could now operate, if only by routine.
`With Pertos directing him, he managed to get the retreival tray out of the autodoc, and he lifted Pertos onto it with ease. After an embarrassing and interminable clumsiness, he worked the security belt through its clamps across the puppet master’s chest. He shoved the tray into the wall slot from which he had withdrawn it. The machine swallowed Pertos smoothly and began making diagnostic sounds as if it were digesting him.
Exhausted, the idiot sank into a chair and watched the wall, unable to understand why Pertos should be bloody and what the old man might have done to cause such a disaster.
After a while, he ate.
He thought about Bitty Belina.
For a time, he almost forgot that the puppet master was in the autodoc. When be rose to go look for Pertos, he remembered and felt sheepish and sat down to wait a while longer.
Time seemed to pass slowly.
In the adjoining room, puppets were giggling . . . .
Pertos had a huge appetite when he was released by the computerized physician some four hours later. He was healed; the scars were gone. He had lost six pounds as the sutodoc had forced his body to contribute to the accelerated healing processes by burning some of its stored fat. He ordered several steaming meals from the central grocery delivery bank, and the plastic containers of hot food slipped from the pneumatic tubes into the delivery receptacle. He spread these out on the table, opened them and devoured the contents with an enthusiasm he felt for few things these days.
Sebastian watched him, curious but asking no questions.
“Better,” Pertos said when he had finished half the food, before him and was toying with his glass of wine now more than with fork and spoon.
“What?” Sebastian asked, taking the old man’s breach of silence as a cue for his own inquisitiveness.
“Heritage Leaguers. They came on me by surprise.”
“Why?”
Pertos pushed away from the table, his face suddenly clouding. He looked at the door joining his room to the room the puppets occupied. The sound of merriment came through the thin portal. Wissa was laughing, and two of the three suitors were shouting in some game or other. Belina’s own whispery giggle came through now and then. Pertos approached the door, examined it, then spun the lock dial and threw the door wide.
The puppets stopped squealing, looked up at him. None of them were smiling. There was a litter of tiny glasses and bits of food on the floor. Wissa was naked, stunningly dark and beautiful.
Sebastian averted his eyes, though he was not sure why.
“You let them in,” Pertos said to the puppets.
They watched him.
“You let them in your room and through the adjoining door”
It was Bitty Belina who spoke. “Who?” she asked. But there was something about her tone that said she already knew who.
“The Heritage Leaguers. Trimkin and those four men he brought with him.” Pertos wasn’t Pertos, because he wasn’t smiling.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bitty Belina said.
“When I crawled into the hall to get help it was because no one in your room seemed to hear me. And when I had to go for Sebastian, I found my own door still locked, from the inside. So they came and went somehow else.”