“Enjoy your peace of mind while you still have it. You two especially, since you’ll probably want to stay together. The prosthetics you get on Heaven will work just fine, but every time you look at his mechanical leg or you look at her arm, you’re going to think of how lucky the other one is. You’re going to constantly trigger memories of pain and loss for each other. You may be at each other’s throats in a week. Or you may share a sullen kind of love for the rest of your lives.
“Or you may be able to transcend it. Give each other strength. Just don’t kid yourselves if it doesn’t work out.”
He checked the readout on each thermometer and made a notation in his notebook. “Doctor knows best, even if he is a little weird by your own old-fashioned standards. Keep it in mind.” He took the thermometer out of my mouth and gave me a little pat on the shoulder. Impartially, he did the same to Marygay. At the door, he said, “We’ve got collapsar insertion in about six hours. One of the nurses will take you to the tanks.”
We went into the tanks-so much more comfortable and safer than the old individual acceleration shells-and dropped into the Tet-2 collapsar field already starting the crazy fifty-gee evasive maneuvers that would protect us from enemy cruisers when we popped out by Aleph-7, a microsecond later.
Predictably, the Aleph-7 campaign was a dismal failure, and we limped away from it with a two-campaign total of fifty-four dead and thirty-nine cripples bound for Heaven. Only twelve soldiers were still able to fight, but they weren’t exactly straining at the leash.
It took three collapsar jumps to get to Heaven. No ship ever went there directly from a battle, even though the delay sometimes cost extra lives. It was the one place besides Earth that the Taurans could not be allowed to find.
Heaven was a lovely, unspoiled Earth-like world; what Earth might have been like if men had treated her with compassion instead of lust. Virgin forests, white beaches, pristine deserts. The few dozen cities there either blended perfectly with the environment (one was totally underground) or were brazen statements of human ingenuity; Oceanus, in a coral reef with six fathoms of water over its transparent roof; Boreas, perched on a sheared-off mountaintop in the polar wasteland; and the fabulous Skye, a huge resort city that floated from continent to continent on the trade winds.
We landed, as everyone does, at the jungle city, Threshold. Three-fourths hospital, it’s by far the planet’s largest city, but you couldn’t tell that from the air, flying down from orbit. The only sign of civilization was a short runway that suddenly appeared, a small white patch dwarfed to insignificance by the stately rain forest that crowded in from the east and an immense ocean that dominated the other horizon.
Once under the arboreal cover, the city was very much in evidence. Low buildings of native stone and wood rested among ten-meter-thick tree trunks. They were connected by unobtrusive stone paths, with one wide promenade meandering off to the beach. Sunlight filtered down in patches, and the air held a mixture of forest sweetness and salt tang.
I later learned that the city sprawled out over 200 square kilometers, that you could take a subway to anyplace that was too far to walk. The ecology of Threshold was very carefully balanced and maintained so as to resemble the jungle outside, with all the dangerous and uncomfortable elements eliminated. A powerful pressor field kept out large predators and such insect life as was not necessary for the health of the plants inside.
We walked, limped and rolled into the nearest building, which was the hospital’s reception area. The rest of the hospital was underneath, thirty subterranean stories. Each person was examined and assigned his own room; I tried to get a double with Marygay, but they weren’t set up for that.
“Earth-year” was 2189. So I was 215 years old, God, look at that old codger. Somebody pass the hat-no, not necessary. The doctor who examined me said that my accumulated pay would be transferred from Earth to Heaven. With compound interest, I was just shy of being a billionaire. He remarked that I’d find lots of ways to spend my billion on Heaven.