I had selected almost nothing in this room. The possibilities of taste had become so endless I had simply thrown up my hands and taken what came with the apartment.

Maybe that was what I'd been reluctant to let Brenda see. I supposed you could read as much into what a man had not done to his environment as what he had done.

While I was still pondering that-and not feeling too happy about it-Brenda came out of the washroom. She had a bloody piece of gauze in her hand, which she tossed on the floor. A low-slung robot darted out from under the couch and ate it, then scuttled away. Her skin looked greased, and the pinkish color was fading as I watched. She had visited the doc.

"I had radiation burns," she said. "I ought to take the disneyland management to court, get them to pay the medical bill." She lifted her foot and examined the bottom. There was a pink area of new skin where the cut had been. In a few more minutes it would be gone. There would be no scar. She looked up, hastily. "I'll pay, of course. Just send me the bill."

"Forget it," I said. "I just got your lead. How long were you in Texas?"

"Three hours? Four at the most."

"I was there for five hours, today. Except for the gravity, it's a pretty good simulation of the natural Earthly environment. And what happened to us?" I ticked the points off on my fingers. "You got sunburned. Consequences, in 1845: you would have been in for a very painful night. No sleep. Pain for several days. Then the outer layer of your skin would slough off. Probably some more dermatological effects. I think it might even have caused skin cancer. That would have been fatal. Research that one, see if I'm right.

"You injured the sole of your foot. Consequence, not too bad, but you would have limped for a few days or a week. And always the danger of infection to an area of the body difficult to keep clean.

"I got a very nasty injury to my hand. Bad enough to require minor surgery, with the possibility of deep infection, loss of the limb, perhaps death. There's a word for it, when one of your limbs starts to mortify. Look it up.

"So," I summed up. "Three injuries. Two possibly fatal, over time. All in five hours. Consequences today: an almost negligible bill from the automatic doc."

She waited for me to go on. I was prepared to let her wait a lot longer, but she finally gave in.

"That's it? That's my story?"

"The lead, goddamit. Personalize it. You went for a walk in the park, and this is what happened. It shows how perilous life was back then. It shows how lightly we've come to regard injury to our bodies, how completely we expect total, instant, painless repairs to them. Remember what you said? 'It's not fixed!' You'd never had anything happen to you that couldn't be fixed, right now, with no pain."