Chapter III: "How do you feel?" Quotis asked

"Still stiff," said the patient.

"But otherwise?"

"Otherwise fine. They told me how you saved my life, doctor," the patient said in Arcturan.

"I'm still surprised how well you speak my language."

"I seem to have a gift for tongues. I can speak Earthian, Arcturan, Sirian, Fomalhaution, and naturally, my own Kedaki. All of them with just about no accent, all of them equally well."

"We'll be taking the bandages off today. You still don't have any hair, but that ought to grow back later. You're alive, and that's what counts. Can you believe that every square inch of your skin surface was gone when they found you last month?"

"That's what the nurses keep telling me. Do you think that after the bandages are removed, doctor, they might find out about me?"

"We were hoping your memory would come back of its own accord. Otherwise," Quotis shrugged, "there are other ways. As you can imagine, thousands of your fellow Kedaki are still missing, after the quake. Most of them probably will never be found, so there ought to be thousands of people through here to look at you--when you're well enough. Never fear, one of them will know you."

"But the prison office? Doesn't it mean something that I was found in the prison office?"

"It might, but the prison authorities report that all their men are accounted for, safe, killed, injured--none missing. Why, do you remember working in the prison?"

"No," said Rhodes, "I don't remember anything."

"Relax! Please, relax. Someone will know you. Someone will be able to trigger that memory of yours. Relax, if you will...."

"There were no marks of identification on me?"

"No, none. Your clothing was burned off. You were naked as well as completely skinned," said Quotis, beaming. "Remarkable cure. Remarkable. On Arcturus, when I return, I will astound the medical profession. Here on Kedaki, unfortunately, there is no such organized profession. Well, now, about your new skin...."

"What about fingerprints?" Rhodes persisted. "My identity may not be important to you, doctor. But it's important to me."

"I understand, I understand. I didn't mean to be so callous. But consider. You have no fingerprints. It will be a while before the whorls re-establish themselves on your new skin. Immediately after the operation, before you were bandaged, we took your retinal pattern, but there was no record of it in the Junction City Identity Center or with the local police. There is absolutely no way you can be identified, except through your own memory or the efforts of your Kedaki friends and relatives to find you. In time, I'm sure everything will straighten out. Meanwhile," said Quotis, smiling, "if you're ready, we can remove the bandages from your face. Tomorrow, from the rest of your body. If there are any imperfections, don't worry. Eventually, the artificial skin we have given you shall become your old skin again. I mean that literally. For example, if we have left out--through ignorance--a birthmark or a mole, it will reappear again after six or seven months have passed. Your fingerprints will also, as I have indicated, re-establish themselves. If we have made your pigmentation too light or too dark, your true color will also appear after some months.... Well, then, are you ready? Ready for that first look at yourself? It might help, you know. It might trigger something!" cried Quotis enthusiastically.

Even while he was speaking, he had begun to remove the bandages from Rhodes' face. "The room will be dark," he said. "Gradually, we will increase the light. Your eyes have been in darkness for a long time."

"My eyes...." said Rhodes in sudden fear.

"You are worrying about them? You needn't. They were examined when the retinal pattern was taken. Miraculously, as miraculously as the fact that you are alive, your eyes are all right. Now, then, here we are! See--ummmm, no you cannot see yet. It is dark. There, a little more light. A little more. The eyes, they are all right?"

"It seems awfully bright."

"Any light would, at first. There, a little more. But you are young! Hardly more than a boy, I should judge. The purple of your skin--yes, the purple looks fine.... Not a mark, not a trace. My boy, you will not even be scarred."

His face still felt stiff, but very cool. The contact with air was very welcome and the soft stirring of the currents of air as the doctor's hands did some final adjustments on the bandages which still covered him from the neck down, tucking them back into place.

The first thing he saw was the doctor, a small bespectacled man with the vividly orange skin of a full-blooded Arcturan. The doctor was all smiles, and understandably. Then he saw a mirror. It was held before his face and he was aware of the doctor's slight intake of breath as he waited for a reaction, hoping some forgotten memory might be triggered.

He looked in the mirror. "I--I'm purple!" he gawked.

The doctor frowned. "Of course, purple. The Kedaki color."

"I'm sorry. I don't know why it startled me."

"Well, I can tell you. I am an Arcturan. This is an Arcturan hospital, and we have been speaking Arcturan. Even if you had been unable to see until today, you associated everything about this place with Arcturus. Probably," and Dr. Quotis laughed, "you were expecting orange skin."

"Probably," said Rhodes, and laughed with him.

"Well, enough excitement for one day. If you are strong enough, tomorrow we can have the first of your visitors, people trying to identify you. I warn you, there will be hundreds, thousands."

"Any time you say," Rhodes replied eagerly. But behind the eagerness was a certain vague confusion. Why had the purple tints of his new skin stirred him so strangely? Purple. Kedaki skin color. What else did he expect?

* * * * *

The Director of the Five Bureau, the Kedaki Secret Police, said, "Stop acting like a fool, please."

"But sir," wailed the prison warden. "I tell you, the Earthman's body was not uncovered in what remained of the prison."

"What does that mean?" the Director demanded scornfully. "I have here the final earthquake casualty report for Junction City--shall I read it to you? There are over six thousand people still missing, my dear warden. Six thousand."

"Yes, I know," persisted the prison official. "But doesn't it seem strange that of all the inmates and guards at the prison, the Earth archaeologist alone is missing?"

"Nevertheless, we can assume that virtually all of those missing are dead, buried forever under the debris of the municipal disaster."

"Still, you know how important this Earthman is, what trouble he can cause...."

"_I_ know," snapped the Director arrogantly, "But do you?"

"Well, I have been told...."

"Told! Told what you had to know, told to furnish the Earthman with a maximum security cell, and so forth. You know nothing!"

"I still...."

With a wave of his hand, the Director dismissed the warden. Then, sitting alone at his desk, he lit a cigarette. It was an Earth-cigarette, and a good one. These things, the Director mused, we accept from the outworlders. Their little luxuries. But their way of life, he told himself, never. Whatever threatens our way of life, we seek out and destroy. He leaned on a corner of the desk's surface and in a moment a serving girl came obsequiously into the room with a tray. Patting her rump playfully, as you might stroke the head of a dog, the Director selected the bottle he wanted from the tray, indicating that she should make him a drink. He waited, watching her graceful movements as she set down the tray and poured the liquid into a delicate glass of Regan crystal. The drink, heady and delicious, was Aldeberanean fire wine. He savored it slowly, then with a gesture indicated that the girl, who wore nothing but a kirtle to cover the nakedness of her loins, should depart. He leaned back and thought: This too--not the wine, but the woman.

Because the woman would be impossible if the Kedaki way of life were changed. A system, he went on thinking, founded on bedrock as strong as the pull between the planets.

Metempsychosis....

Do you believe in reincarnation? he asked himself. He chuckled, the sound deep in his throat. He was no fool and did not hold a fool's belief. But the others? The servant classes, the slaves? Yes, they believed. All their lives, they were indoctrinated to believe. Reincarnation was the stuff of which their dreams were fashioned, and so it was that they accepted the hard lot of lifelong servitude with the hope that in their next birth, had they led a good, loyal life, they would be born to a higher station.

Change that? thought the Director. He shook his head slowly, grimly. But the Earthman Rhodes had been a problem, for in the age-old ruins of Balata 'kai he'd stumbled on the manuscript of _The Book of the Dead_, a five thousand year old document which had first propounded the beliefs of metempsychosis. _The Book of the Dead_ was a dangerous document, a document which could ignite Kedak in revolutionary conflagration, for it showed clearly that the so-called gods of the earliest Kedaki civilization were not gods at all and their so-called revelation of metempsychosis not a revelation at all but a clever trick calculated to win them a life of ease at the expense of gullible subjects.

What am I thinking? the Director asked himself. The Earthman Rhodes is dead, of course. He couldn't possibly be alive. I'm as bad as the warden, but the warden is a fool who knows nothing.... Still, even if the warden is a fool and Rhodes is dead, _The Book of the Dead_ is still missing. And if there is one chance in a million that Rhodes lives, then every stone on this planet must be turned to find him....