“Hey, son.” Steve stopped stuffing articles in a bag and turned to face him. His brown eyes looked wounded. “It’s not like that. I’d like nothing better than for Frank to be well and leading the expedition, but he’d want me to carry on his work, now, wouldn’t he?”
Diego shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you ever think that maybe he’s like he is because he didn’t want to keep on?”
“What? You mean, he willed himself into the state he’s in now”-Steve was clearly incredulous-“because he didn’t do a good job the first time? Diego, my boy, that is not clear thinking.”
Diego shrugged again, a disgusted lifting and dropping of his shoulders. It hurt to think about Dad. It hurt to think about Lavelle. He didn’t even want to think about losing Steve the same way and he realized he was pulling a number on him, trying to guilt-trip or scare him into not going.
“I don’t know, Steve. Maybe the mission isn’t such a good idea, huh? What are they going to do if you find the stuff?”
“You’ve been too much in the company of Bunny and the villagers, Diego. Be sensible. The company has a lot of bucks invested in this planet.”
“You haven’t given it a chance,” Diego shot back. “I thought you would take care of Dad when you got here but all you’ve been doing is taking over his job. You’re just like all the other company geeks. You don’t give a damn about us, this planet, or anything else except the fraggin’ company!”
“Diego … son.”
“I’m not your son,” Diego said hotly, storming toward the door. “Goodbye. I’m going to see my dad. And hey, if you come back in the same shape he’s in, I’ll get you an adjoining bed!”
When green-coated men and women decide to give you a going over, you let them get on with it, cooperating when you have to. Especially when hovering over the proceedings is a block-shaped marine with piggy, close-set eyes: the kind you just know likes to twist arms and has some mighty painful nerve blocks he’s dying to practice on a live and wriggling body. So Yana went along with the procedure, privately resenting every intrusion, draining, pricking, probe, and order. When she could, she sneaked glances at the scans, trying to remember from all-too-recent experience if she could detect any alterations, improvements, or changes in the results. She did better with X rays, and could even find the thickening around her innumerable repaired broken bones. Then one of the medics, the skinny woman with the jaw like a vise, altered the screens so she couldn’t see the ones of her lungs-the ones she most wanted to check out.
“It’s my body,” she said in a growl of complaint. “I got the right to look!”
They ignored her, as they had done since she had been ordered into their presence. She did catch terms like “unusual remission,” “minimal scarring,” “regenerative,” and “improvement”: the last two words she liked hearing very much, but she would have liked to know where the improvement and regeneration had happened. Actually, she didn’t need them to tell her that her lungs were sound again-lungs that she had been told would never completely heal from the gas she had inhaled on Bremport. Petaybee had done that for her. Would they believe it had been the planet? Probably not!
The medics were deep in consultation for a long while after the last of the examinations had been completed. One or another kept glancing at her as if she had grown tentacles or oozed slime or perhaps turned into a new sort of humanoid specimen they could dissect for the good of Mankind.
Ignoring the tension in her guts, Yana forced herself to relax-as much as anyone could on the hard examination table. She succeeded well enough so that she was jerked out of a doze by a rough hand.
The one she had come to think of as “Ornery-eyes” indicated, with a grunt and a jerk of his thick thumb, that she was to accompany him. The medics didn’t pause in their discussion to observe her departure. Then she noticed that Ornery-eyes was sweating, great circles under his armpits and down his shirt back. Out in the corridor she could appreciate why: they must have turned the heat up as high as it would go. He jerked his thumb in the direction they were to take.