Daniel and Evelyn and I take turns staying by his side. They want one of us there all the time for a few days, to talk to him when he wants to listen, and to report any sudden change.

After about two weeks of no change, O’Hara was given the option of either taking John home with her or having him transferred to the Extended Care Facility. The ECF was primarily an old folks’ home, with a few younger people like John, who didn’t need a lot of medical help but did need to be fed and changed. Even if it hadn’t been at the 0.6-gee level, the ECF would have been out of the question because of the indignities O’Hara witnessed there. It was crowded and understaffed and smelled of stale urine and gastric juices. People mumbled and cried and the cube was on all the time.

The obvious third option, cryptobiosis until nanosurgery was possible again, seemed too risky. The brain was the most delicate organ preserved, and was the locus of almost all fatalities on restoration. Sylvine Hagen said she might give John a 10 percent chance of surviving, though even if he lived, he might not have enough cerebral organization left to make nanosurgery useful. They didn’t tell John.

What they finally did was take John back to his quartergee office, which they had converted into a sickroom. It wasn’t difficult to care for him, once he mastered the bedpan and urinal and was able to feed himself after a fashion. They rigged up an “answer board” that had the numbers from 0 to 9 and YES, NO, and MAYBE. They all had beepers that he could call with a button by his bedside, and they split up responsibility for answering his calls.

O’Hara wound up on duty more often than Evelyn or Daniel, which was not unreasonable, since she could do most of her work from John’s console. Dan was busier than he had ever been as Coordinator, since he’d gone back to his old Earth Liaison/Engineering post when they’d begun talking to Key West, and was busy all day meeting with various specialists, working out the right way to phrase questions so that the marginally educated Earthlings could find the right answers in their old-fashioned books.

Sandra finally overcame her sadness and fear enough to come play checkers with John. Everyone was relieved to see that he played a vicious and intelligent game. He initially refused to play Owari, because he didn’t have good enough left-hand coordination to count out the pebbles, but she pleaded and wheedled until he did it, which gave her a much better success rate than the physical therapist, whom John saw as a dangerous adversary.