“Thank you, honey,” she said absently, pursuing a thought. “Wouldn’t it have been better to phone him?”

“Who?”

“Brad, of course.”

“Oh. Oh, sure, except it was sort of private. I didn’t want anyone listening in. And besides, I didn’t think he’d be answering the phone. In fact, the desk clerk wouldn’t admit he was ever there. And I had to go to Security to get a lead on where he might be.” He had a sudden thought; he knew Dorrie liked Brad, and he wondered for a half second if she was upset at Brad’s immorality. The thought dismissed itself, and he burst out admiringly, “Honey, I have to say you’re taking this beautifully. Most women would be in hysterics by now.”

She shrugged and said, “Well, what’s the use of making a fuss? We both knew this could happen.”

He ventured, “I won’t look very good, Dorrie. And, you know, I think the physical part of our marriage will be down the drain for a while — even not counting the fact I’ll be away on the mission for better than a year and a half.”

She looked thoughtful, then resigned; then she looked directly at him and smiled. She got up to come over beside him and put her arms around him. “I’ll be proud of you,” she said. “And we’ll have long, long lives after you get back.” She ducked back as he reached to kiss her and said playfully, “None of that, you’ve got to get back. What are you going to do about Brad?”

“Well, I could go back to the motel—”

She said decisively, “Don’t do it, Roger. Let him look out for himself. If he’s up to something he shouldn’t be, that’s his problem. I want you to get back to the meeting, and — Oh, say, that’s right! I’m going out again. I’ll be passing quite near the motel. If I see Brad’s car in the lot I’ll put a note on it.”

“That didn’t even occur to me,” he said admiringly.

“So don’t worry. I don’t want you thinking about Brad. With all that’s coming up, we have to be thinking of you!”

Jonathan Freeling, M.D., F.A.C.S., A.A.S.M.

Jonny Freeling had been in aerospace medicine long enough to have lost the habit of dealing with cadavers. Particularly he was unused to cutting up the bodies of friends. Astronauts didn’t usually leave their bodies behind when they died, anyway. If they died in line of duty it was unlikely there would be any p.m.; the ones that were lost in space stayed there, the ones that died nearer home were usually boiled to gas in the flame of hydrogen and oxygen. In neither case was there anything to put on a table.

It was hard to realize that this object he was dissecting was Willy Hartnett. It wasn’t as much like an autopsy as like, say, field-stripping a carbine. He had helped put these parts together — these platinum electrodes here, these microminiaturized chips in their black box there; now it was time to take them apart again. Except that there was blood. In spite of everything, Willy had died with a lot of wet, seeping human blood still in him.

“Freeze and section,” he said, serving up a gobbet on a glass slide to his general-duty nurse, who accepted it with a nod. That was Clara Bly. Her pretty black face reflected sadness, although one could not tell, Freeling reflected, lifting out a dripping metal strand that was part of the vision circuits, how much of the sadness was over the death of the cyborg and how much over her interrupted going-away party. She was leaving to get married the next day; the recovery room just behind that door was still festooned with crepe and paper flowers for her party. They had asked Freeling if they should clear it away for the autopsy, but of course there was no need to; no one would be recovering in that recovery room.

He looked up at his surgical assistant, standing where the anesthesiologist would have been in a normal operation, and barked, “Any word from Brad?”

“He’s in the building,” she said.

Then why doesn’t he get his ass down here? is what Freeling thought, but he didn’t say it, only nodded. At least he was back. Whatever grief was coming because of this, Freeling wouldn’t have to carry it alone.

But the more he probed and fished, the more he found himself baffled. Where was the grief? What had killed Hartnett? The electronic components didn’t seem to be wrong; every time he removed one it was rushed off to the instrumentation people, who workbenched in on the spot. No problems. Nor did the gross physical structure of the brain give any immediate explanation…

Was it possible that the cyborg had died of nothing at all?

Freeling leaned back, conscious of sweat under the hot lights, instinctively waiting for his scrub nurse to wipe it off. She wasn’t there, and he remembered and wiped his forehead on his sleeve. He went in again, carefully separating and removing the optical nerve system — what there was of it; the major sections had gone with the eyes themselves, replaced by electronics.

Then he saw it.

First blood seeping under the corpus callosum. Then, as he gently lifted and probed, the gray-white slippery sheath of an artery, with a bulge that had burst. Blown. A cardiovascular accident. A stroke.

Freeling left it there. The rest could be done later or not at all. Maybe it would be as well to leave what was left of Willy Hartnett as close to intact as it was. And it was time for the meeting.

The conference room doubled as the hospital library, which meant that when a meeting was going on, look-up research stopped. There were cushioned seats for fourteen people at the long table, and they were all filled, with the overflow on folding chairs, squeezed in where they could. Two seats were empty; they were for Brad and Jon Freeling, off on a last-minute run to the lab for final results on some slides, they said; actually so that Freeling could brief his boss on what had happened while he was “out to lunch.” Everybody else was there, Don Kayman and Vic Samuelson (now promoted to Roger’s back-up man, and not looking as though he liked it), Telly Ramez, the chief shrink, all of the cardiovascular people muttering among themselves, the top brass from the administrative sectors — and the two stars. One of the stars was Roger Torraway, uneasily sitting near the head of the table and listening with a fixed smile to other people’s conversations. The other was Jed Griffin, the President’s main man for breaking logjams. His title was only Chief Administrative Assistant to the President, but even the deputy director treated him like the Pope. “We can start any time, Mr. Griffin,” urged the deputy director. Griffin’s face spasmed a smile and he shook his head.

“Not until those other fellows get here,” he said.

When Brad and Freeling arrived, all conversation stopped as though a plug had been pulled. “Now we can begin,” snapped Jed Griffin, and the worry to his tone was evident to everyone in the room, every person of whom shared it. We were worried too, of course. Griffin did not want to carry his worry alone and promptly shared it with everyone in the room: “You don’t know,” he said, “how close this whole project is to being terminated, not next year or next month, not phased out, not cut down. Through.”

Roger Torraway took his eyes off Brad, and fixed them on Griffin.

“Through,” repeated Griffin. “Washed out.”

He seemed to take satisfaction in saying it, Torraway thought.

“And the only thing that saved it,” said Griffin, “was these.” He tapped the oval table with a folded wad of green-tinted computer printouts. “The American public wants the project to continue.”

Torraway felt a clutching touch at his heart, and it was only in that moment that he realized how swift and urgent the feeling of hope that had preceded it had been. For a moment it had sounded like a reprieve.

The deputy director cleared his throat. “I had understood,” he said, “that the polls showed a considerable, ah, apathy about what we were doing.”