Felicia walked beside Brad’s gurney as it guided itself toward the surgical center. She looked grim, tight-lipped.
Already slightly woozy from the preoperative sedation, he reached out and clutched her hand. “Don’t be mad at me.”
Her eyes widened with surprise. “Mad at you? I’m not mad at you!”
“You’re not happy.”
“Oh Brad … you … I…”
The doors to the operating room swung open automatically, but the gurney stopped itself. “No visitors allowed beyond this point,” it announced flatly.
Felicia leaned over Brad’s supine body and kissed him. “I’ll be waiting for you, darling.”
“Yeah,” he mumbled. “Me too.”
“I love you.”
“Me too.”
* * *
Brad awoke and saw Felicia drowsing in a big cushioned chair at the side of his bed. He was in one of the infirmary’s recovery rooms. It was small but neat, clean and bright, smelling faintly of antiseptics and … flowers? A row of diagnostic machines lined one wall, but they were silent. No beeps or hums.
He felt no pain, but everything seemed slightly fuzzy, out of focus.
They’ve screwed up my eyes! he thought.
He blinked a few times and his vision cleared somewhat. But it was different, somehow.
Okay, he told himself, your left eye has been replaced by a miniaturized camera. Dr. Yamagata said it’s sending signals through my optic nerve just the way my real eye did, so I’ve still got stereoscopic vision.
But it wasn’t quite the same. Somehow his vision seemed sharper, he realized. He focused on the far wall of the room and could make out tiny cracks in the plastic facing that were invisible when he closed his left eye. I’m a lot better than twenty-twenty now, he realized.
No pain, although he felt slightly dopey, slow-witted. He raised his right hand and started counting the pale blond hairs along his fingers.
“You’re awake!”
Felicia was staring at him.
“Hi.”
She got up from the chair and took his face in both her hands. “You’re awake,” she repeated breathlessly.
“How do I look?”
“Fine.”
“My new eye?”
“It looks just like your old one,” she said, smiling happily.
He wrapped an arm around her neck, pulled her to him, and they kissed.
Then he heard the door open. Felicia straightened up and Brad saw Dr. Yamagata stride into the room, peering at him intently. He must have been watching me, Brad thought, although he couldn’t see a surveillance camera anywhere in the small room.
“How do you feel?” Yamagata asked.
“Okay. A little dull, sort of.”
“That’s the anesthetics. It takes an hour or two for the nervous system to fully recuperate from the electrical blocks.”
Felicia asked, “Is he all right?”
Grinning broadly, the physician replied, “Your husband was an ideal patient. Everything went quite smoothly. His new eye is transmitting quite clearly to the monitoring system.”
Brad realized what that meant. “It’s transmitting everything?”
“Everything you see,” said Yamagata. “In a few days we will implant the aural transmitter in your ear. Then we will receive everything you hear, as well.”
“I won’t have any privacy at all.”
“Not while you have the implants in you. You will have guardian angels with you at every moment.”
Thirty million klicks away, Brad knew.
He glanced at Felicia. Instead of looking distressed, she seemed almost mischievously cheery.
“You’ll have to keep your eyes closed in bed,” she said, with a giggle.
Brad thought, And we’ll have to keep damned quiet, too.
* * *
“Now I know what it’s like to be in the army, in basic training,” Brad complained.
The two months after his surgery had been spent in survival training, and stuffing every bit of knowledge about conditions on Gamma’s surface into Brad’s brain.
Yamagata and his surgical team had implanted a communications link that connected Brad to Emcee with the speed of light. Still, Kosoff, Littlejohn, and every other department head tried to pour all their specialized knowledge into Brad’s brain.
And Kosoff insisted that Brad take a course in survival. The ship’s auditorium was converted into a virtual-reality simulation of Gamma’s surface, with utterly realistic-looking trees and rocks and even streams gurgling past Brad’s booted feet.
Tifa Valente drove Brad mercilessly through the simulated wilderness.
Whenever he complained about the rigors of the training, she would reply urgently, “This could be the difference between life and death for you, Brad. You’ve got to learn to live with the planet’s environment. We won’t be there to rescue you if you fall into a puddle of quicksand.”
“There isn’t any quicksand on Gamma,” he grumbled.
“None that we’ve discovered,” Tifa countered. “Yet.”
So day after day Brad plowed through survival training, learning how to keep himself alive on the surface of Gamma.
“I’m not going to be alone down there,” he pointed out to Tifa one afternoon as they took a break for tea. “The whole idea of this mission is to make contact with the aliens.”
The cafeteria was half empty. Tifa had walked them to a small table far from the dispensing machines where people pulled their choices of food and drink. Not even the serving robots came near their table.
Her long face totally serious, she said, “Those aliens might not like having a stranger suddenly invade their territory. You might have to run for your life.”
Groaning inwardly at the thought of adding wind sprints to his training, Brad replied with equal seriousness, “They’re not violent. We haven’t seen one single act of violent behavior.”
“And how many scenes of having a human burst in on them have we seen?” she countered.
Brad shrugged. Tifa looked determined, unyielding. Her deep violet eyes were staring at him. He saw that tears were welling in them.
“Brad,” she said, her voice low, throaty. “If anything happened to you … I…”
He sat across the table from her, dumbfounded.
She lowered her eyes, murmuring, “You look and look and look, then when you find the man you want he’s already married.”
“Tifa … I had no idea. I mean … I never thought…”
“It’s all right.” She tried to smile. “You just make sure you get back here in one piece. Don’t you make a widow out of Felicia, she’s too nice a kid for that.”
Brad grabbed his teacup and took a long swallow. In the self-heated cup, the tea was burning hot. He gulped and choked and tried not to cough.
Tifa pushed her chair back and got up from the table. “I’ll see you in the VR sim,” she said, then hurried away.