“Has my wife been called?” I asked.
“Yes, she’s on her way. I told her the operation was successful. Mr. Brady, have you ever had surgery before?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Did they note a highly accelerated rate of repair? Of tissue recovery?”
I said nothing.
Dr. Wintaub said, “Can you account for this, Mr. Brady?”
“Hormone production,” I said.
“Not possible.”
“I’d like to be discharged,” I said. “So I can go home tonight with my wife.”
“That is out of the question, Mr. Brady. After an operation of this severity—”
“I’ll sign out AMA,” I said. “Against medical advice. Bring me the forms.”
“No way, Mr. Brady. I won’t cooperate with you. We are going to study you until we know what has taken place in your body following surgery. When you came in here, one lung was almost—”
“Bring me my clothes,” I said.
“No.” Dr. Wintaub left the room; the door shut after him.
I got out of bed and searched the closet and drawers. No clothes, except for a hospital gown. I put that on. If I had to I would leave that way. Neither Dr. Wintaub nor the hospital could hold me in view of my complete recovery.
There was no doubt of my recovery. I could feel it physically, and in my mind I was aware of it, as aware as I had been that night I comprehended Johnny’s birth defect. The only problem I had was getting home. And that was a minor one.
I left the hospital room and walked down the hall, looking into rooms with open doors, until I saw a room with no one in it. The patients were out getting exercise after finishing dinner. Entering the room I opened the clothes closet. All I could find were a pair of fuzzy carpet slippers, a woman’s bright print dress with plunging backline, and a turban made of pastel fabric. It would be better if I resembled a woman, I realized; they would be looking for a man. Fortunately, the woman whose clothes these were had an enormous build; I was able to get into all of them, and, after picking up a pair of dark glasses from a drawer, I set out into the hall again.
No one stopped me or interfered with me as I made my way down the corridor to a stairwell. Moments later I had reached the ground floor and had come out onto the parking lot. All that remained was to sit on a bench watching the incoming cars until I saw Rachel’s Maverick.
I found a bench off to one side, seated myself, and waited.
An unspecified interval later—my watch was gone, either destroyed or in the patients’ property safe—the green Maverick pulled hastily into a slot and Rachel and Johnny emerged, both distraught and disheveled.
As Rachel hurried up the walk past my bench I stood up and said, “Let’s take off.”
Halting, she stared at me in amazement.
“I wouldn’t have recognized you,” she said finally.
“They didn’t want me to leave.” I walked toward the car, motioning her to accompany me.
“Can you leave? I mean, are you well enough? The doctor said you’d undergone major surgery on your chest—”
“I’m fine,” I said. “The satellite healed me.”
“Then the satellite is what you’ve been experiencing.”
“Yep,” I said, getting into the car.
“You do seem physically okay . . . but you certainly look funny in those clothes.”
“You can pick up my personal effects tomorrow,” I said, slamming the car door after me. “Hi, Johnny,” I said to my son. “Recognize Daddy?”
My son stared at me sourly and with suspicion.
“The satellite could have provided you with better clothes,” Rachel said.
“I don’t think it does that,” I said. “You have to find your own. That’s what I did.”
“Maybe you should have waited until it thought of something,” Rachel said. She shot me a glance as she drove from the hospital parking lot. “I’m glad you’re all right.”
As we found our way out onto the freeway, I thought to myself, I certainly got a printout while I was under the anesthetic. Did Valis engineer my accident so he could speak to me? No, Valis engineered my recovery so he could work through me. He took advantage of a bad situation and brought something out of it: the best colloquy we have had and probably will ever have. What I know now, I realized, is boundless. The major pieces are in place. The delight of finding each other, Valis and I. Father and son, together again. After millennia. The relationship restored.
But I understood something else which was not good. We really did not have a chance of toppling Fremont. Not really. Because of my position at Progressive Records we could do something; we could distribute what we knew in subliminal form on an LP, buried in subtracks and backup vocals, scrambled about in the sound-on-sound that our mixers provided us. Before the police got us we could pass on what we knew, Sadassa and I, to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of Americans. But Ferris Fremont would stay in power. The police would destroy us, would forge counterdocumentation and proof; we would go and the regime would survive.
Still, it was worth doing. I knew that absolutely; Valis had set this in motion and Valis could not err. He would not have brought Sadassa and me together, flooded me with help and information, if it wasn’t worth it. To make it worth it, we did not have to win completely. We needed only a certain victory, one within reason. We could, perhaps, initiate a process that others more numerous and powerful would complete someday in the future.
Valis’s will was not fully realized on Earth. This was the adversary’s realm, the Prince of this world. Valis could only work within this world, work with a small remnant of men; he was the minority party, here, speaking as a still small voice to one man or a handful, from a hush, in sleep, during an operation. Eventually he would win. But not now. These were not the end
