clops could afford medical computers on this scale.”
“This wasn’t for a knee-down job. This was from
mid-thigh.”
“Then I don’t believe it,” Nole said. “You’d need a
full megabrain, and at that the job might not come off.”
He gave Maddalena an apologetic glance, as though fear-
ing this was distasteful to her. “It’s the joint, you seees-
pecially the synovial membranes. Very tricky to
programme well.”
“What are you standing there for?” Langenschmidt
inquired sweetly. “Has, or has not, Justin Kolb two func-
tioning knees?”
Nole made a wordless noise and spun on his heel.
Maddalena sat down on the corner of the table where
Nole had set out his chessboard, and stared at Langen-
schmidt.
“I don’t quite see the significance of this,” she ven-
tured. “There are places where regeneration is available,
and if this man Kolb is the uh accepted lover of Alura
Quist, could she not have pulled strings to have him
treated on some more advanced planet?”
“If she had done so, the memory bank would have
mentioned it.” Langenschmidt began to pace the room.
“I didn’t. It gave me an unequivocal answer when I
asked who was responsible for Kolb’s eventual recov-
cry it named a Cyclopean doctor, who’s probably very
good in his limited sphere, but simply hasn’t got access
to the medical computer capacity needed for regener-
ation.”
Maddalena paled. “But what alternative treatment
could he have offered? Kolb did regain his leg, didn’t
he? Nole might have overlooked the fact that the limb
wasn’t an original, but he couldn’t have overlooked a
prosthetic!”
“Exactly,” Langenschmidt muttered, and fell silent.
They waited, neither saying anything, for twenty
minutes before Nole returned, his face pale above his full
brown beard.
“I don’t know what put you onto this, commandant,”
he began, “and equally I don’t know how I came to
miss”
“Save the apologies. What have you found now yon
have looked?”
“His right leg isn’t his own. It’s not regenerated is
what I meanregeneration counts as own-tissue sub-
stance.” Nole combed his beard with agitated fingers.
“That leaves one possibility. It’s a graft. An exception-
ally good one, what’s moreit must have been selected
most carefully to make a pair with the left leg. Well, of
course, the moment I discovered this I took a cell-sample
and processed it for genetic structure, and I’ve come up
with the most alarming result.”
Langenschmidt’s face was quite calm, as though he had
already worked out what revelation Nole had brought
them. He said merely, “Go on.”
“Well, it’s hard to be absolutely certain, but I’d say on
the basis of what I’ve just seen that the leg’s not merely
not his ownit’s also not Cyclopean in origin. At any
rate, the particular gene-structure of the cells I processed
has never been recorded on Cyclops.”
“Can you tell me where it is from?” Langenschmidt
snapped.
“I’ve set the computers to search, but there may not
be a definite reading.” Nole combed his beard again.
“Commandant, this is the most extraordinary thing I ever
heard of!”
vm
The screen of the subspace communicator lit. The
venture was a profitable one; the partners in it had be-
come able to allow themselves such refinements as inter-
stellar vision circuits. It showed a man with a face as
cruelly beaked as a Jackson’s buzzard, clad in the decent
black robe of a Receiver of the Sick, with the hood
thrown back on his shoulders. His hair was greying but
still luxuriant, and his face was lined more by reflected
concentration than by the passage of time.
This was Lors Heirndall, on whom Rimerley was to-
tally dependent.
“What is it?” he grunted, eyes scanning the image of
the doctor confronting him. Vaguely in the background
could be seen the interior of his headquarters, with a
rack of robes hanging like dead bats on the wall, a video-
graph playing over a recording of some music-drama or
other.
If he can’t read the crisis straight off my face, Rimer-
ley thought, / must be over the worst of the shock.
Indeed, he felt considerably better than he had done
when he finished speaking to Quist. As well as taking an-