"I wish to Klono I knew." The Tellurian was puzzled, groping. "No hurry doing anything about her—what was done to her has been done, and no one this side of Hades can undo it—unless I can fit these pieces together into some kind of a pattern I'll never know what it's all about—none of it makes sense—" He shook himself and went on: "One thing is plain. She won't die. If they had intended to kill her, she would have died almost instantly. They figure she's worth saving; in which I agree with them. At the same time, they certainly are not planning on letting me tap her knowledge. They may be planning on taking her away from us. Therefore, as long as she stays alive—or even not dead, the way she is now—guard her so heavily that an army can't get her. If she should happen to die, don't leave her body unguarded for a second until she's been autopsied, and you know she'll stay dead. The minute she recovers, day or night, call me. Might as well take her to the hospital now, I guess."
The call came soon that the patient had indeed recovered.
"She's talking, but I haven't answered her," Gerrond reported. "There's something strange here, Kinnison."
"There would be—bound to be. Hold everything until I get there," and he hurried to the hospital.
"Good morning, Dessa," he greeted her in Aldebaranian. "You are feeling better, I hope?"
Her reaction was surprising. "You really know me?" she almost shrieked, and flung herself into the Lensman's arms. Not deliberately; not with her wonted, highly effective technique of bringing into play the s.a. equipment with which she was so overpoweringly armed. No; this was the utterly innocent, the wholly unselfconscious abandon of a very badly frightened young girl. "What happened?" she sobbed, frantically, "Where am I? Why are all these strangers here?"
Her wide, childlike, tear-filled eyes sought his; and as he probed them, deeper and deeper into the brain behind them; his face grew set and hard. Mentally, she now was a young and innocent girl! Nowhere in her mind, not even in the deepest recesses of her subconscious, was there the slightest inkling that she had even existed since her fifteenth year. It was staggering; it was unheard of; but it was indubitably a fact. For her, now, the intervening time had lapsed instantaneously—five or six years of her life had disappeared so utterly as never to have been!
"You have been very ill, Dessa," he told her gravely, "and you are no longer a child." He led her into another room and up to a triple mirror. "See for yourself."
"But that isn't I?" she protested. "It can't be! Why, she's beautiful!"
"You're all of that," the Lensman agreed, casually. "You've had a bad shock. Your memory will return shortly, I think. Now you must go back to bed."