o Orne's room, lifted the inspection hood, looked down at him.
The day nurse was a tall, lean-faced professional who had learned to
meet miracles and failures with equal lack of expression. However, this
routine with the dying I-A operative had lulled her into a state of
psychological unpreparedness. _Any day now, poor guy_, she thought. And
she gasped as she opened his sole remaining eye, said:

"Did they clobber those dames on Heleb?"

"Yes, sir!" she blurted. "They really did, sir!"

"Good!"

Orne closed his eye. His breathing deepened.

The nurse rang frantically for the doctors.

It had been an indeterminate period in a blank fog for Orne, then a time
of pain and the gradual realization that he was in a creche. Had to be.
He could remember his sudden exposure on Heleb, the explosion--then
nothing. Good old creche. It made him feel safe now, shielded from all
danger.

Orne began to show minute but steady signs of improvement. In another
month, the doctors ventured an intestinal graft that gave him a new
spurt of energy. Two months later, they replaced missing eye and
fingers, restored his scalp line, worked artistic surgery on his burn
scars.

Fourteen months, eleven days, five hours and two minutes after he had
been picked up "as good as dead," Orne walked out of the hospital under
his own power, accompanied by a strangely silent Umbo Stetson.

Under the dark blue I-A field cape, Orne's coverall uniform fitted his
once muscular frame like a deflated bag. But the pixie light had
returned to his eyes--even to the eye he had received from a nameless
and long dead donor. Except for the loss of weight, he looked to be the
same Lewis Orne. If he was different--beyond the "spare parts"--it was
something he only suspected, something that made the idea, "twice-born,"
not a joke.

* * * * *

Outside the hospital, clouds obscured Marak's green sun. It was
midmorning. A cold spring wind bent the pile lawn, tugged fitfully at
the border plantings of exotic flowers around the hospital's landing
pad.

Orne paused on the steps above the pad, breathed deeply of the chill
air. "Beautiful day," he said.

Stetson reached out a hand to help Orne down the steps, hesitated, put
the hand back in his pocket. Beneath the section chief's look of weary
superciliousness there was a note of anxiety. His big features were set
in a frown. The drooping eyelids failed to conceal a sharp, measuring
st