'What is this-perhaps?' I asked.
Child's voice box made the words seem sinister when they were actually spoken in fear.
'Perhaps,' he said, his face impassive, 'it would be better for all of us if no one outside of this room ever discovered that you have regained sanity and are ready to return to your own body. It would be less trouble to get you doing work for us. We would not have to pay you anything. All in all, perhaps it would be a wise idea.'
The nurse paid no attention. But her pleasant face mirrored her tacit agreement with Morsfagen.
The doctor took my pulse, listened at my chest with a stethoscope, checked my eyes and ears, ignoring what transpired around him.
The guard, by the door, had Morsfagen's impassive look.
I was alone.
Except for Child's intellect, which had expanded my own. There was a cunning about me now that I had not possessed before. Morsfagen would think he knew me: fast on the cutting remarks, but low on cleverness. But that had changed, and I was now every bit as devious as he.
'One problem,' I said.
'What's that?'
'I've told you that it took me this full month to shake loose of my own madness and to free myself from Child's insanity. I nearly lost my mind again trying to find a way through his subconscious landscape. You scanning all this so far?' He indicated that he was by saying nothing.
'Now, if I'm trapped in this frame, welded so closely to his mind, I'm going to succumb to his insanity again- and this time it will be permanent. I couldn't stand the ordeal of recovery again.' In that whispered, deathlike rattle of Child's, the words took on even more sincerity than I had tried to give them.
Morsfagen looked doubtful. It was almost as if he could sense the change in me, sense the expanded awareness and cunning. But he could not take the chance that I was not telling him the truth, and he knew that I had won. He was going to have to console himself with the fact that at least he now had me in full mind for future use; if he tried to play for full stakes and keep me locked in Child's body, he might very well wind up with nothing. And military careers are not built on blunders.
'Bring him along,' he ordered the doctor. 'We'll let him have his body back.' He smiled at me, but it was not a pleasant smile. 'But you'd better cooperate, Kelly. It's time of war now, and that rules out your brand of frivolity.'
'I understand perfectly,' I said, not without a touch of sarcasm.
'I'm sure you do.'
And he left the room.
Minutes later, they wheeled me into the corridor to keep my rendezvous with my own coma-ridden flesh
All the while, I gloried in the thought that I was swiftly getting the upper hand and that before they realized what had happened, I would be in my former position of dominance. There were two minds' worth of energy within me, plus the complex intellect of Child now amplifying my own. They were mere men, I told myself, and they stood no chance at all.
I did not realize that I was making the same mistake that I had made twice before. In the old days, I had convinced myself that I was a god of sorts, the Second Coming, and my life had been disastrous because of that fantasy. In Child's subconscious, I had eagerly sought to be transformed into the mythic images of Tibetan wolves, into something transcending humanity, and that might have cost me my mind and my eventual recovery. And now, as I was wheeled down the corridor, I again looked at myself as more than a man, as a minor god soon to prove his power. Because I had never allowed myself to associate with 'mere men,' I did not understand them, or myself. And my latest delusions of grandeur were bound to lead to ultimate disaster
And did.
II
My legs were cramped, and even a slight bit of movement made my shoulders ache, for the staff had not been exercising my body with the proper degree of enthusiasm during the month it had been vacant. I felt weak, and my stomach was a hard knot. Having been fed intravenously for some four weeks, the stomach had shrunk and felt like a clenched fist in there, squeezing my guts. Otherwise: fine. And since it was such a delight to be housed in my own flesh once again, I was willing to overlook the little aches and pains of readjustment to life. I didn't complain, and I tried not even to grimace.
Morsfagen seemed disappointed by that.
They wheeled Child's carcass out of the room. It would continue to live, though it would never exhibit intelligence again. It was a husk, nothing more. I still had not told them, for I was still not free of the AC complex and out of their immediate reach. Morsfagen would not take kindly to such a trick, and I didn't want to be around whenever he discovered it.
I showered, washed away the weeks of sickbed smell.
The hot water seemed to loosen my cramped muscles, and dressing was only half the ordeal I had expected. When I slipped into my jacket and checked my reflection in the mirror, Morsfagen said, 'Your shyster is waiting downstairs.'
I held back the witty reply designed to demolish him, for I knew that was exactly what he wanted. He was searching for some reason to slap me down, either with his fists or with a preventive detention arrest. Why we had hit it off so miserably from the start, and why our hatred for each other was now twice what it had been, I didn't know. True, we were altogether different types, but the antagonism we felt for each other was deeper and more unremitting than a mere clash of personalities.
'Thank you,' I said, leaving him with nothing to attack. I walked to the door, opened it, and was halfway into the corridor before he replied.
'You're welcome.'
I turned and looked at him and saw that he was smiling, that same cold smile of hatred which I had grown used to by then. He had said 'you're welcome,' but not with any seriousness-which meant that he understood me and knew that I understood him too.
'We'll contact you day after tomorrow,' he said.
'There's a lot of work to do. But, after what you've been through, you deserve a little rest.'
'Thank you,' I said.
'You're welcome.'
Again. And grinning this time too
I closed the door and walked down the hall to the bank of elevators with a dark-haired, blue-eyed, six-foot- fourinch guard as company. We didn't say much of anything to each other on our way downstairs, not so much out of any particular dislike for each other as out of a sheer lack of anything to say, like a nuclear physicist and an uneducated carpenter at the same cocktail party, neither exactly superior, but both separated by a mammoth communications gap.
Down
Harry was in the lobby, tearing his hat apart, and when the elevator doors opened, he gave the thing a particularly vicious mangling with his big hands and started toward us.
He was smiling the first genuine, friendly, uncomplicated smile I had seen since I had awakened in Child's body. He hugged me, living up to the image of the father figure, and he had tears in his eyes which he could not manage to conceal.
I was not concealing my own tears at all. I dearly loved this clumsy, pudgy, sloppily dressed Irishman, though most of my life had been spent in playing down that love. Maybe it was because I had learned early to hate and despise as self-protection. When Harry separated me from that world inside the AC complex and showed me what actual love was, I never lost my suspicion. And it is easier to act less involved so that if you're hurt later, the anguish doesn't show so much and give your adversary satisfaction. Now unchecked, evidence of that love flowed.
