"She'll do."
"Will it work?"
"How the hell do I know?" the psychiatrist answered roughly.
They were silent for a moment, watching the small figure of the woman leaning forward tensely over the microphone, as if by her nearness she might make her husband hear.
"You know," Banning said musingly, "I get the feeling this is all the fault of SpaServ, somehow. Some little thing we overlooked. A little more training, maybe."
The woman's soft voice droned on, not quite carrying distinctly to the two men, though the warmth and urgency of it was evident in her tone.
"I think you did all right with your training," Colin said finally. "He came back, didn't he?"
4.
Harkins slept only lightly, turning restlessly in the large control chair. Finally the pain of his headache increased to the point he could no longer sleep at all, even lightly. Just before he wakened, he thought he heard a sound at once intolerably loud and somehow soothing. Which was impossible, of course.
Opening the viewport shutter a crack, he found the land outside lit ambiguously by the false dawn that was beginning to spread against the eastern hills.