"Victoria's boy dying? Here? Oh, the poor thing! And Madrena's back on Chargon ... the election. Oh, yes, of course. I'll get right over to the hospital!" Stetson signed off, broke the contact. _The High Commissioner's wife yet!_ he thought. Then, because he had to do it, he walled off his sorrow, got to work. At the medical center, the oval creche containing Orne hung from ceiling hooks in a private room. There were humming sounds in the dim, watery greenness of the room, rhythmic chuggings, sighings. Occasionally, a door opened almost soundlessly, and a white-clad figure would check the graph tapes on the creche's meters. Orne was lingering. He became the major conversation piece at the internes' coffee breaks: "That agent who was hurt on Heleb, he's still with us. Man, they must build those guys different from the rest of us!... Yeah! Understand he's got only about an eighth of his insides ... liver, kidneys, stomach--all gone.... Lay you odds he doesn't last out the month.... Look what old sure-thing McTavish wants to bet on!" On the morning of his eighty-eighth day in the creche, the day nurse came into Orne's room, lifted the inspection hood, looked down at him. The day nurse was a tall, lean-faced professional who had learned to meet miracles and failures with equal lack of expression. However, this routine with the dying I-A operative had lulled her into a state of psychological unpreparedness. _Any day now, poor guy_, she thought. And she gasped as he opened his sole remaining eye, said: "Did they clobber those dames on Heleb?" "Yes, sir!" she blurted. "They really did, sir!" "Good!" Orne closed his eye. His breathing deepened. The nurse rang frantically for the doctors. It had been an indeterminate period in a blank fog for Orne, then a time of pain and the gradual realization that he was in a creche. Had to be. He could remember his sudden exposure on Heleb, the explosion--then nothing. Good old creche. It made him feel safe now, shielded from all danger. Orne began to show minute but steady signs of improvement. In another month, the doctors ventured an intestinal graft that gave him a new spurt of energy. Two months later, they replaced missing eye and fingers, restored his scalp line, worked artistic surgery on his burn scars. Fourteen months, eleven days, five hours and two minutes after he had been picked up "as good as dead," Orne walked out of the hospital under his own power, accompanied by a strangely silent Umbo Stetson. Under the dark blue I-A field cape, Orne's coverall uniform fitted his once muscular frame like a deflated bag. But the pixie light had returned to his eyes--even to the eye he had received from a nameless and long dead donor. Except for the loss of weight, he looked to be the same Lewis Orne. If he was different--beyond the "spare parts"--it was something he only suspected, something that made the idea, "twice-born," not a joke. * * * * *