“What do you mean, brighter?” Brad snapped.

“More bright. More light from your face.”

“Yeah,” said Brad, realizing he was beginning to feel giddy again. “I think I may be running a temperature. I’d better get out of here. This gauze, it’s supposed to keep me from infecting you, but it’s only reliable for fifteen minutes or so—”

“Before you go,” whispered the voice insistently. “Do something for me. Turn off the lights again for a minute.”

Brad shrugged and complied. “Yeah?”

He could hear the ungainly body shifting in the bed. “I’m just turning to get a better look,” Roger reported. “Listen, Brad, what I wanted to ask you is, how are things working out? Am I going to make it?”

Brad paused for reflection. “I think so,” he said honestly. “Everything’s all right so far. I wouldn’t crap you, Roger. This is all frontier stuff, and something could go wrong. But so far it doesn’t look that way.”

“Thanks. One other thing, Brad. Have you seen Dorrie lately?”

Pause. “No, Roger. Not for a week or so. I’ve been pretty sick, and when I wasn’t sick I was damn busy.”

“Yeah. Say, I guess you might as well leave the lights the way you had them so the nurses can find their way around.”

Brad turned up the switch again. “I’ll be in when I can. Practice trying to close your eyes, will you? And you’ve got a phone — call me any time you want to. I don’t mean if anything goes wrong — I’ll know about that if it happens, don’t worry; I don’t go to the toilet without leaving the number where I can be reached. I mean if you just want to talk.”

“Thanks, Brad. So long.”

At least the surgery was over — or the worst of it, anyway. When Roger came to realize that, he felt a kind of relief that was very precious to him, although there were still more unrelieved stresses in his mind than he wanted to handle.

Clara Bly cleaned him up and against direct orders brought him flowers to boost his morale. “You’re a good kid,” whispered Roger, turning his head to look at them.

“What do they look like to you?”

He tried to describe it. “Well, they’re roses, but they’re not red. Pale yellow? About the same color as your bracelet.”

“That’s orange.” She finished whipping the new sheet over his legs. It billowed gently in the upthrust from the fluidized bed. “Want the bedpan?”

“For what?” he grumbled. He was into his third week of a low-residue diet, and his tenth day of controlled liquid intake. His excretory system had become, as Clara put it, mostly ornamental. “I’m allowed to get up anyway,” he said, “so if anything does happen I can take care of it.”

“Big man,” Clara grinned, bundling up the dirty linen and leaving. Roger sat up and began again his investigation of the world around him. He studied the roses appraisingly. The great faceted eyes took in nearly an extra octave of radiation, which meant half a dozen colors Roger had never seen before from IR to UV; but he had no names for them, and the rainbow spectrum he had seen all his life had extended itself to cover them all. What seemed to him dark red was, he knew, low-level heat. But it was not quite true even to say that it seemed to be red; it was only a different quality of light that had associations of warmth and well-being.

Still, there was something very strange about the roses, and it was not the color.

He threw off the sheet and looked down at himself. The new skin was poreless, hairless and wrinkle-free. It looked more like a wetsuit than the flesh he had known all his life. Under it, he knew, was a whole new musculature, power-driven, but there was no visible trace of that.

Soon he would get up and walk, all by himself. He was not quite ready for that. He clicked on the TV set. The screen lit up with a dazzling array of dots in magenta and cyan and green. It took an effort of will for Roger to look at them and see three girls singing and weaving; his new eyes wanted to analyze the pattern into its components. He clicked stations and got a newscast. New People’s Asia had sent three more nuclear subs on a “courtesy visit” to Australia. President Deshatine’s press secretary said sternly that our allies in the Free World could count on us. All the Oklahoma football teams had lost. Roger clicked it off; he found himself getting a headache. Every time he shifted position the lines seemed to slope off at an angle, and there was a baffling bright glow from the back of the set. After the current was off he watched for some time the cathode tube’s light failing, and the glow from the back darkening and dimming. It was heat, he realized.

Now, what was it Brad had said? “Feel around, near where your sinuses are.”

It was a strange feeling, being in the first place in an unfamiliar body and then trying to locate inside it a control that no one could quite define. Just in order to close the eyes! But Brad had assured him he could do it. Roger’s feelings toward Brad were complex, and one component of them was pride; if Brad said it could be done by anyone, then it was going to be done by Roger.

Only it wasn’t being done. He tried every combination of muscle squeezes and will power he could think of, and nothing happened.

A sudden recollection hit him: years old, a memory from the days when he and Dorrie had first been married. No, not married, not yet; living together, he remembered, and trying to decide if they wanted to publicly join their lives. That was their massage-and-transcendental-meditation period, when they were exploring each other in all the ways that had ever occurred to either of them, and he remembered the smell of baby oil with a dash of musk added, and the way they had laughed over the directions for the second chakra: “Take the air into your spleen and hold it, then breathe out as your hands glide up on either side of your partner’s spine.” But they had never been able to figure out where the spleen was, and Dorrie had been very funny, searching the private recesses of their bodies: “Is it there? There? Oh, Rog, look, you’re not serious about this…

He felt a sudden interior pain swell giddyingly inside him, and leaned back in desolation. Dorrie!

The door burst open.

Clara Bly flew in, bright eyes wide in her dark, pretty face. “Roger! What are you doing?”

He took a deep, slow breath before he spoke. “What’s the matter?” He could hear the flatness in his own voice; it had little tone left, after what they had done to it.

“All your taps are jumping! I thought — I don’t know what I thought, Roger. But whatever was happening, it was giving you trouble.”

“Sorry, Clara.” He watched as she hurried over to the monitors on the wall, studying them swiftly.

“They look a little better,” she said grudgingly. “I guess it’s all right. But what the hell were you doing to yourself?”

“Worrying,” he said.

“About what?”

“Where my spleen is. Do you know?”

She stared at him thoughtfully for a moment before she replied. “It’s under your lower ribs, on your left side. About where you think your heart is. A little lower down. Are you putting me on, Roger?”

“Well, kind of. I guess I was reminiscing about something I shouldn’t have, Clara.”

“Please don’t do it any more!”

“I’ll try.” But the thought of Dorrie and Brad was still lurking there, right under the conscious of his mind. He offered, “One thing — I’ve been trying to close my eyes, and I can’t.”

She approached and touched his shoulder in friendly sympathy. “You’ll do it, hon.”

“Yeah.”

“No, really. I was with Willy around this time, and he got pretty discouraged. But he made it. Anyway,” she said, turning, “I’ll take care of it for you for now. Lights-out time. You’ve got to be fresh as a daisy in the morning.”

He said suspiciously, “What for?”

“Oh, not more cutting. That’s over for a while. Didn’t Brad tell you? Tomorrow they’re going to hook you into the computer for all that mediation stuff. You’re going to be a busy boy, Rog, so get some sleep.” She turned off the light, and Brad watched as her dark face changed into a gentle glow that he thought of as peach.