THE FOREVER WAR by Joe Haldeman

I got used to seeing it grow, so the sight never repelled me. But when Marygay came to visit, it was a jolt-she was ambulatory before the skin on her new arm had started to grow; looked like a walking anatomy demonstration. I got over the shock, though, and she eventually came in for a few hours every day to play games or trade gossip or just sit and read, her arm slowly growing inside the plastic cast.

I’d had skin for a week before they uncased the new leg and trundled the machine away. It was ugly as hell, hairless and dead white, stiff as a metal rod. But it worked, after a fashion. I could stand up and shuffle along.

They transferred me to orthopedics, for “range and motion repatterning”-a fancy name for slow torture. They strap you into a machine that bends both the old and new legs simultaneously. The new one resists.

Marygay was in a nearby section, having her arm twisted methodically. It must have been even worse on her; she looked gray and haggard every afternoon, when we met to go upstairs and sunbathe in the broken shade.

As the days went by, the therapy became less like torture and more like strenuous exercise. We both began swimming for an hour or so every clear day, in the calm, pressor guarded water off the beach. I still limped on land, but in the water I could get around pretty well.

The only real excitement we had on Heaven-excitement to our combat-blunted sensibilities-was in that carefully guarded water.

They have to turn off the pressor field for a split second every time a ship lands; otherwise it would just ricochet off over the ocean. Every now and then an animal slips in, but the dangerous land animals are too slow to get through. Not so in the sea.

The undisputed master of Heaven’s oceans is an ugly customer that the angels, in a fit of originality, named the “shark.” It could eat a stack of earth sharks for breakfast, though.

The one that got in was an average-sized white shark who had been bumping around the edge of the pressor field for days, tormented by all that protein splashing around inside. Fortunately, there’s a warning siren two minutes before the pressor is shut down, so nobody was in the water when he came streaking through. And streak through he did, almost beaching himself in the fury of his fruitless attack.

He was twelve meters of flexible muscle with a razor-sharp tail at one end and a collection of arm-length fangs at the other. His eyes, big yellow globes, were set on stalks more than a meter out from his head. His mouth was so wide that, open, a man could comfortably stand in it. Make an impressive photo for his heirs.

They couldn’t just turn off the pressor field and wait for the thing to swim away. So the Recreation Committee organized a hunting party.

I wasn’t too enthusiastic about offering myself up as an hors d’oeuvre to a giant fish, but Marygay had spearfished a lot as a kid growing up in Florida and was really excited by the prospect. I went along with the gag when I found out how they were doing it; seemed safe enough.

These “sharks” supposedly never attack people in boats. Two people who had more faith in fishermen’s stories than I had gone out to the edge of the pressor field in a rowboat, armed only with a side of beef. They kicked the meat overboard and the shark was there in a flash.

This was the cue for us to step in and have our fun. There were twenty-three of us fools waiting on the beach with flippers, masks, breathers and one spear each. The spears were pretty formidable, though, jet-propelled and with high-explosive heads.

We splashed in and swam in phalanx, underwater, toward the feeding creature. When it saw us at first, it didn’t attack. It tried to hide its meal, presumably so that some of us wouldn’t be able to sneak around and munch on it while the shark was dealing with the others. But every time he tried for the deep water, he’d bump into the pressor field. He was obviously getting pissed off.