back, and tottered a few steps toward the corridor. The linoleum under his feet was exactly the color of bleu cheese dressing, with chives. This comparison came to his mind unbidden as he struggled toward the door, outside which stood a sentinel with a weapon. Rick, looked like. The air policeman who had been assigned to White Sphinx not long after his own arrival in Zarakal. The kid should have rotated home by now. Why was he still playing soldier for Kaprow? He had always pooh-poohed the idea of reenlisting.
“Johnny!” his mother called.
The bleu-cheese floor was treacherous. His legs were not going to negotiate the crossing.
“Where’s my daughter?” he cried. “Where’s the Grub?”
When he fell, his mother and the air policeman helped him from the floor. He was scarcely conscious of being assisted. The sting in his nostrils, the weakness of his legs, the salty film in his eyes—these things bespoke a deeper discomfort, a more compelling hurt.
“What the hell have you people done with my baby?”
* * *
He was virtually a prisoner in the hospital, the only patient in an otherwise deserted ward on the third floor. After they had sedated him again, and his mother had returned to the VOQ, and he had slept another six to eight hours, Woody Kaprow visited him. The blue African sky in his window had been displaced by sunset, a conflagration of interthreading pastels. Stars were also visible, high and sparse. Although he was shivering in the chilly room, he liked the starched hospital gown no more than he would have a straitjacket.
As his mother had done earlier, Kaprow engaged in a lengthy monologue. He stared across the bed at the door, scrupulously avoiding Joshua’s eyes. Even though he never moved his head, his pale eyes flickered excitedly as he explained that they had almost given Joshua up for dead; that the entire White Sphinx Project was under a cloud because of their inability to monitor his activities in the past; that Blair expected and ought to receive a series of extensive reports on the mission as soon as Joshua felt well enough to face the Great Man; and that he, Kaprow, had approved Jeannette Monegal’s visit to help Joshua ease himself back into the turbid waters of the late twentieth century.
“In a sense, Joshua, you’ve been reborn. You’re going to have to take a little time to grow back into your old world. I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”
“I want to see my daughter.”
“Joshua, that isn’t your daughter.”
“I want to see the child I brought back with me.” Joshua pulled himself to a sitting position and looked piercingly at the physicist, who shifted his gaze to a photograph of President Tharaka that some wag had hung on the door to the water closet. The old man was wearing his hominid skull and a plush leopard-skin cloak. “Just tell me if I brought a child back with me, Dr. Kaprow. Was that a dream or did it really happen?”
“There’s an infant in the maternity ward downstairs, Joshua, an infant you were clutching in your arms when we retrieved you from the Backstep Scaffold. She’s a strange little creature but perfectly healthy. They treated her for jaundice right after we brought the two of you in. Put her under sun lamps with cotton batting over her eyes. She’s well now, though.”
“I fathered her, Dr. Kaprow.”
“Joshua, you were away from us only a little over a month. It’s natural you should be disoriented, though. There’s no need to worry. Things’ll straighten out for you soon enough.”
“A little over a month?”
“Thirty-three days. I insisted that we drop the scaffold at least four times a day, for two hours each go—but our transcordions were apparently out of synch, and if you hadn’t returned when you did, well, pretty soon I would’ve had to buckle under to an order to depressurize The Machine and cut our losses.”
“Namely, me.”
“You and a sizable amount of time and money.”
“I was gone at least two years. I fell in love with a habiline, I fathered a child, I watched my wife die in childbirth. What you’re telling me doesn’t correspond to what I know about what happened, and I was the one who was there. I know what happened to me, Dr. Kaprow!”
“Look, here’s a calendar on your bedside table—”
“I don’t give a damn about any goddamn calendars,” Joshua said levelly. “I brought a child back with me, and I’m her father.”
Kaprow finally looked directly at Joshua. As colorless