Only Daniel was against it. He didn’t like the idea of the nature of their family life being dictated by some doctors’ schedules—by some doctors’ advance perceptions of their schedules, that could be wildly inaccurate. But Evy had the greatest stake in the question, since she was the only one planning to stay aboard ’Home after orbit, and she wanted to give the surgeons the go-ahead.

O’Hara was on the fence, nervous about okaying a life-threatening procedure, wanting the best for John, and selfishly wanting the whole mess to be settled one way or the other. How many husbands did she actually have—one, two, or one-and-a-fraction?

All three of them did agree that John’s attitude had been unambiguous. He would rather die than hang on alive but bound in the straitjacket of dumb paralysis.

O’Hara finally cast her vote with Evy, and they brought John out. At first it looked bad. His eyes opened, but he made no sign of recognizing his family, or anybody. The third morning, though, his eyes tracked O’Hara. She explained the situation to him and he nodded.

The operation took nine hours. Evy was not a surgical nurse, but she was allowed to attend as a supernumerary fetch-and-carry. She told O’Hara about an odd minute when she had to crouch under the table and hold a urinal for the senior surgeon, young enough to be her granddaughter, to straddle. It was scary: that child is trying to concentrate on brain surgery, my husband’s life literally in her hands, and at the same time convince her urogenital sphincter to overcome a lifetime of training and habit. But brain surgeons are used to long operations, even if Evy was not.

They had been warned that the results of the operation might not be apparent for some time, so nobody was alarmed when John didn’t show any immediate improvement. Within a week he had his yes-no-shit vocabulary back, and could also count up to ten. He was able to leave the hospital for his quarter-gee sickroom.

But he stayed at that level of verbal ability. After a month, the doctors conducted a series of tests and had to admit that the operation probably wasn’t going to make any difference. His brain was getting plenty of oxygen. It just wasn’t doing any good.

BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE

Age 55.43 [11 Theresa 428]—Actually, this starts about ten days ago. Too busy to write, molding young minds, perverting the will of die people, whatever.

They’ve put me in charge of the Induction section—Aptitude Induction Through Voluntary Hypnotic Immersion—on the reasonable basis that nobody else wants to touch it. Also, I was in charge of it back in Earth orbit, and actually went through the first half of the procedure myself, in the process of creating Prime.