“How do you feel?” everyone seemed to ask.

“Hungry,” Doug kept repeating. But no one brought him anything to eat.

Gradually he began to piece it together from the babbling of their chatter. Nanotherapy. He was alive and well. And would be for a long time to come. It was a lot to take in over a few minutes. It seemed to Doug as if just a few minutes ago he was dying from radiation poisoning. Now they were telling him he would live forever, just about.

“Could I just have something to eat?” he shouted over their voices.

Everyone stopped and stared at him.

“I’m starving,” Doug said.

“You see?” said the old fat guy. “Just as I told you!”

INFIRMARY

Bianca Rhee came back, shyly, almost tiptoeing into Doug’s cubicle after everyone else had left. He had eaten a full dinner, napped a short while, then asked for another dinner. Its remnant crumbs were all that was left on the food tray when Rhee entered and smiled happily at him.

“How do you feel?” she asked, sitting on the edge of his bed because there was no chair in his cubicle.

“Fine,” said Doug with a big grin. “I feel as if I could run up to the top of Mt. Wasser in my bare feet!”

“The nanotherapy is really working.”

“I guess it is.”

“Do you feel — different?”

Doug thought about it for a moment. “No,” he answered. “Not different, exactly. Just — a little tired, but good, just the same. Like I’ve just won my fifth gold medal in the Olympics.”

“That’s wonderful,” she said.

“What about you?” Doug asked. “Have you been checked over? Are you okay?”

She shrugged. “We all took more of a radiation dose than we should have, but I’m okay. No obvious medical problems.”

“Obvious?”

“Oh, I might have a two-headed baby someday.” She tried to laugh.

“And your chances of getting cancer?” Doug asked.

“A few percent higher.”

“Oh.”

“But that won’t happen until I’m old and gray,” she said.

“Besides, there’s no history of cancer in my family.”

“That’s good,” Doug said, but he thought, There will be now, most likely.

Then he noticed that her coveralls were sweat-stained, and there was a fine sheen of perspiration on her forehead.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked. “You’re perspiring.”

“Oh.” Rhee looked more embarrassed than worried. “I — I was exercising a little.”

“Exercising?”

She nodded, keeping her lips clamped tight This isn’t the time to tell him I practice dancing, she decided. He’s a nice, guy, but he’d laugh. The fat little gook in ballet slippers, pretending she’s a ballerina in the low gravity of the Moon. Anyone would laugh.

So they talked about the expedition, about Brennart and what heroism was all about. Doug told Bianca that Brennart was already dying of cancer and had nothing much to lose by his daring.

She shook her head. “I still think it was a real bonkhead thing to do. Just because he wanted be a hero was no reason for you to take such a risk.”

“We would’ve been okay,” Doug insisted, “if the hopper hadn’t broken down.”

“Sure.”

“Well, anyway, I appreciate your coming out to get us. You saved my life.”

Bianca blushed. “I didn’t do much. The radiation was back to normal by then.”

“Still, you must’ve volunteered. Didn’t you?”

“Well… yes, I guess I did.”

“And my vidcam,” Doug went on. “You saved that, too, didn’t you? The corporation owes you a lot”

Her expression changed. “I didn’t do it for the corporation,” Bianca said, so low mat Doug could barely hear her.

“Still,” he said, “you’re as much a hero as anybody.”

She shook her head. “Not really.”

Doug sensed that something had gone slightly off track.

Bianca had been smiling and friendly up to a moment ago, but now she seemed to be almost sad, almost — disappointed.

“Tell me all about it,” he said. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

“It was all in a rush, you know,” she said, still looking unhappy, almost bitter. “Kind of confused. Killifer was pretty nervous, really wired tight. He got pissed off because I grabbed his suit by mistake.”

Doug listened as she haltingly told him what they were doing while he and Brennart were stuck underneath the hopper on the mountaintop.

“… and when you started mumbling about the Yamagata people, he didn’t want to believe you.”

“Killifer?”

“Right. He didn’t like the idea of going out again to find them. He didn’t like it all”

Doug let out a sigh. “I guess I don’t blame him.”

Rhee’s face contracted into a puzzled frown. “And there was something semi-weird, too.”

“Semi-weird?” Doug grinned at her.

“When I got your vidcam, there was another piece of something… a flat oblong hunk of ceramic or metal. I don’t think it’s part of the vidcam. It was all white on one side and gold on the other.”

“Doesn’t sound like anything from the vidcam.”

“No. Besides, the vidcam looked intact to me. Maybe it was something Killifer had on him. I was in his suit, remember. Maybe he already had it in his pocket.”

Curious, Doug asked, “How big was it?”

She shaped it with her hands. “Oh, just about fifteen centimeters long, I think. Maybe half that wide.”

“White on one side and gold on the other?”

“I took it along with your vidcam, and then left it in my quarters,” Rhee said, looking even more puzzled. “But it’s disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Doug sat up straighten.

“It was on my bureau yesterday, but now it’s gone.”

“Are you sure—”

“Of course I’m sure!” she snapped.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” — he laid. “Has anybody else been in your quarters?”

Rhee shook her head. But before she could say anything, the door to Doug’s cubicle slid back and Joanna stepped through. Even in ordinary blue coveralls she radiated power and decision. Zimmerman waddled in behind her, still in his rumpled three-piece suit with the lab coat thrown over it.

Rhee hopped off the bed. “I’m glad you feel so well, Doug,” she said. Impulsively, she darted forward and gave Doug a peck on the cheek, then rushed past Joanna and Zimmerman and left the room.

“Who’s that?” Joanna demanded.

“The woman who saved my life,” said Doug.

Joanna frowned, while Zimmerman smiled bemusedly.

“Does that give her the right to kiss you?” Joanna asked sharply.

“Oh come on, Mom! It was just a friendly little smack.”

“You don’t have to feel obligated to somebody for doing their job,” Joanna said.

Doug laughed lightly. “Simmer down, Mom. She’s just a friend. I hardly even know her, actually.”

Zimmerman eyed him thoughtfully. “Perhaps the nano-machines enhance your sexual attractiveness, hah?”

Doug frowned at the old man. “You must be Dr. Zimmerman, right?”

“Yah.” Zimmerman clicked his heels and bowed slightly, his paunch making it difficult to go farther.

“How soon can I get out of here?” Doug asked. “I feel fine. Terrific, in fact”

Glancing at the monitors over Doug’s bed, Zimmerman said, “Another few hours. There are some tests I must do. Then you get out of bed and I leave this glorified cave and return to civilization.”

Joanna paced over to the other side of the bed. “Do you really feel fine?”

“Like I said, terrific. Really.”

His mother looked across the bed at Zimmerman. Doug saw tears in her eyes. “You’ve saved him.”

The sloppy old man shrugged, suddenly too embarrassed to say anything.

And Doug realized the enormity of what had happened to him. I would have died, he told himself. Under any normal circumstances I would be dead now.

He looked at Zimmerman with different eyes and saw a man of strength and vigor and the kind of passion that dares to challenge anyone, everyone who stands in the way between him and his life’s work. Governments had outlawed nanotherapy. Ignorant mobs had burned nanolabs and killed researchers. But Zimmerman plugged doggedly ahead, despite all of that. Doug understood that even a fat old man can be heroic.