all his vital functions, five tubes dripping fluids of various colors and consistencies into arms, an oxygen tube up his nostrils, bandages everywhere, and hints of blood starting to seep through the dressings.
I figured it was a waste of time, that he was never going to wake up again, but I stuck around for another hour, just to pay my respects to the man who’d saved a little girl’s life. Then, as I was about to leave, his eyelids flickered and opened. His lips moved, but I couldn’t hear him, so I pulled my chair over to the bed.
“Welcome back,” I said gently.
“Is she here?” he whispered.
“The girl you saved?” I said. “No, she’s fine. She’s with her parents.”
“No, not her,” he said. He could barely move his head, but he tried to look around the room. “She’s got to be here this time!”
“Who’s got to be here?” I asked. “Who are you talking about?”
“Where is she?” he rasped. “This time I’m dying. I can tell.”
“You’re going to be fine,” I lied.
“Not unless she gets here pretty damned soon.” He tried to sit up, but was too weak and sprawled back on the bed. “Is the door unlocked?”
“There isn’t any door,” I said. “You’re in the recovery ward.”
He looked genuinely puzzled. “Then where is she?”
“Whoever it is, she probably doesn’t know you’ve been wounded,” I said.
“She knows,” he said with absolute certainty.
“Was she at the spaceport?”
He shook his head weakly. “She wasn’t even on the planet,” he said.
“You’re sure you don’t want me to ask at the desk?”
“You can’t. She doesn’t have a name.”
“Everyone’s got a name.”
He uttered a sigh of resignation. “If you say so.”
I was starting to feel sorry I’d stuck around. I wasn’t bringing him any comfort, and his answers weren’t making any sense.
“Can you tell me anything about her?” I asked, making one more attempt to be helpful before I packed it in and went home.
I thought he was going to answer, he certainly looked like he was trying to say something, but then he passed out. A couple of minutes later all the machines he was hooked up to started going haywire, and a couple of young doctors raced into the room.
“Is he dead?” I asked.
“Out!” ordered one of the doctors.
They bent over the bed, going to work on him, and I figured I’d only be in the way if I stayed there, so I walked out into the corridor. Before long they emerged from the room.
“Is he dead?” I asked again.
“Yeah,” answered one of them. “Were you a friend of his?”
I shook my head. “No. I just brought him here from the spaceport.”
The doctors walked down the corridor, going to wherever doctors go when they’ve lost a patient, and a couple of orderlies showed up with an airsled. One of them was the one I’d spoken to before.
“I told you he wouldn’t last a day,” he said. “Why do these guys think they can charge into a stream of bullets or lasers and come away in one piece?”
“These guys?” I repeated.
“Yeah. This is the second one this month. There was this guy, maybe three weeks back. He stumbles upon a bank robbery, and instead of calling the cops he just lowers his head and charges these four armed guys.” He exhaled deeply and shook his head. “Poor bastard never got within twenty yards of them.”
“Was he D.O.A.?” I asked.
“Close to it,” replied the orderly. “He was sure someone was coming to be with him, and was desperate to make sure everyone at Admissions knew where to send her.”
“Her?”
“I think it was a her.” He shrugged. “I could be wrong. He wasn’t making much sense. I thought he couldn’t remember his name for a couple of minutes. Turns out he was right and I was wrong. Daniel Daniels. Funny name.” His companion started shifting his weight uneasily. “If you don’t have any more questions, we’ve got to schlep this guy down to the basement for an autopsy. We were on our break, but we’re a little short-handed this week.”
I stepped aside to let them go into the room, and decided it was time to return to the spaceport. But just for the hell of it, I stopped by Admissions before I left and asked if anyone had inquired about Seymour.
No one had.
* * * *
When I got back to my office, I was still curious, so I had the computer hunt up with little there was on Seymour and on Daniel Daniels. Seymour was easy; born and raised in Miami, went to college here, spent nine years in the space service, honorably discharged after getting shot all to hell in a firefight on Kobernykov II, informally known as Nikita. Came back home, got a realtor’s license, and was selling beachfront property until two years ago, when he suddenly seemed determined to prove he was either a hero or bulletproof or both. Since then he’d tried to throw his life away three different times; the first two times the hospital made him keep it, this time they didn’t.
Daniels was harder. There were actually four Daniel Daniels living in Miami at the start of the year. You’d think their parents would have had a little more creativity. Two were still around. One had died of relatively natural causes at the age of 93. And then there was the one the orderly had told me about.
He was 33 years old. Dropped out of school at 16, signed a couple of minor-league soccer contracts, got cut both times, joined the space service when he was 20, served seven years, got out on a medical discharge, and had been going from one menial job to another ever since.
I checked the medical discharge. He got it after catching some serious flak on Nikita. He recovered physically, but he’d been seeing a shrink for depression for four years before the night he tried to take on a gang of teenaged hoods and got turned into an animated cinder for his trouble. It took them a year to put him back together with a brand-new epidermis—and damned if he didn’t go out and do something equally suicidal a month later. Even the police weren’t sure what happened—they found him after all the shooting was over—but he was filled with so much lead of so many different calibers that he had to have taken on at least six armed men.
And that was it: two unexceptional men who had nothing in common but the town they lived in and the planet they’d served on, each willingly faced certain death for no apparent reason—and then, when they were saved, went right out and faced it again.
I was still pondering it when Captain Symmes called me into his office to give him my report.
