As he had done each evening—he had missed only one night, awakening after dark on the day NIK-700 left the Freeman Camp in his place—Hendley sat at a table in the central park, a half-empty glass before him, and watched the sunset. There were clouds above the horizon, and against this billowing canvas the sun painted a dazzling richness of colors—fiery red, gold, lavender, vivid streamers of yellow. Hendley shifted restlessly in his chair. So quiet! he thought impatiently. There had been nothing of interest going on through most of the day.
Unmoved by the spectacle on the horizon, he let his gaze wander across the tops of the distant line of trees, indifferently over a green expanse of lawn, to come to rest at a swimming pool near the foot of the slope. A girl was standing by the pool, wearing only the thin white strips affected for bathing. Hendley's eyes lingered on the ripe curves of her body. He wondered if she could be the same girl he had met on his first day in the camp almost a week before, the one who had led him off among the bushes. That chapter had been unfinished. Her Contracted had interrupted them. Hendley thought that he really ought to look her up some day....
His good hand reached absently for the inevitable glass with the inevitable whiskey. His left hand rested on the table, still held in its rigid plastic braces, still wrapped with a cumbersome white bandage. There was little pain now, unless he grew careless and brushed the hand too hard against a table edge or door frame. And the doctor had assured him that the bones were set properly, that they were slowly knitting together and would eventually be almost normal. No deformity would result.
Hendley could think of the event now without having the bile of anger rise to his throat, and without beginning to tremble. That first night, pushing aside the lingering shreds of the drug's effects as he struggled to consciousness, he had begun to rave wildly. He'd banged his hand in his furious thrashings, and had almost fainted with the pain. The doctor—he'd worked in the medical center of City No. 7 before coming to the Freeman Camp, Hendley learned later, and enjoyed keeping up his medical activities just for amusement—had given him an opiate to put him to sleep. The next afternoon Hendley had been more rational. He had been allowed to sit outside in the park and watch the sun go down, his awe in the vision tempered by the raw bitterness that remained in his mind and heart.
Ann had gone. Hendley had been unable to learn anything about her, but the doctor had assured him that she would have departed with the troupe of showgirls on the morning after the show. At noon on that same day, Nik, wearing Hendley's identity disc adapted to his wrist with a concealed expansion mechanism, had left on the copter for the city, clothed in the uniform with the visitor's sleeve emblem.
"There's no point in exciting yourself now," the doctor had told Hendley cheerfully. "It's done, and you might as well accept it."
"He'll be back!" Hendley had retorted. "He's insane to think he can get away with impersonating me. Why ever did he do it? I still can't understand!"
"There's some don't take to freedom," the doctor said. "But he knew what he was doing. Insane he might be, but he's very levelheaded about it." The chunky man chuckled at the paradox. "He planned this all out for a long time."
The doctor, whose name was JMS-908, but whom Hendley always thought of simply as the doctor, was an amiable, very hirsute man a head shorter than Hendley, with thick hairy arms and stubby hands covered with mats of black hair across the backs, even along the fingers. They were hands whose sure delicacy of touch always seemed incongruous. After the first day Hendley was unable to hold any enmity toward him. The affair had not been of the doctor's doing.
"I like to keep in practice," the doctor said more than once. "If you don't, you lose your touch. Man's not a machine that can be started up any time you feel like it by just pushing a button...."