"Chet, Chet! Don't try to get up!" First time Alex has ever called me by my first name. Kinsman realized with a detached part of his mind.
"I'm all right," he said, relaxing, sinking back into the water bed's warm caress. "Just a dream ... a bad dream."
One of the nurses, a tall leggy African, had a syringe in her hand. Landau waved her away.
As they unfastened the web harness Kinsman lay back and let the buoyancy of the water carry him. The room was big, huge by lunar standards, and plushly furnished. The ceiling was richly paneled in wood, the floor thickly carpeted; deep comfortable chairs and couches were scattered in a smooth luxurious arrangement.
The other nurse touched a button on the wall and the drapes slid back, letting sunlight filter through the ceiling-high windows. There was a spacious desk by the windows, with various electronic gadgetry neatly arranged on its top and a special contour chair behind it.
For the freak. Kinsman realized as he saw his exoskeleton stacked beside the chair, like some smothering insect waiting to envelop him.
Most of the electronics was medical checkout equipment. Landau used it to test Kinsman's vital systems, shaking his head and frowning unhappily through the brief procedure. As the nurses helped Kinsman into his clothes and then into the braces, he asked the Russian doctor, "Well, Alex, how'm I doing?"
Landau, sitting on a regular chair next to the desk, bit his lower lip as he scanned the readout on the desktop display screen.
"Terribly, if you must know the truth," he answered. "The heart pump cannot sustain you through any physical exertion at all."
The black nurse lifted Kinsman's right leg and clamped 529 the foot brace on while the other—she looked Armenian to Kinsman, maybe Greek—did the same for his left.
"So I won't exert myself," he said lightly. "Who needs to, with such expert help at hand?" He would have patted their heads but his arms felt too heavy and he feared he could not coordinate them properly.
"This is no joking matter," Landau replied grimly.
Kinsman could not even shrug comfortably. "All right, Alex. So I'll sit still and do nothing more strenuous than talk."
"Your heart reacts to emotional stress also, you know."
The nurses bent him forward to hook up the back brace.
"Ummph. But, Alex, I feel a helluva lot better now than I did yesterday. What happened? Did I pass out or what?"
"You collapsed," Landau said. Bitterly, he went on, "And for a reason that I should have foreseen, but was too stupid to. The air you were breathing. It was heavily contami- nated, polluted with carbon monoxide and soot and other filth. Your lungs were strained, which put an additional workload on your heart. You were faced with a serious cardiac insufficiency and you collapsed. The exoskeleton would not permit you to fall, so you hung inside, quite unconscious."
"I had a heart attack?"
Landau shook his head. "No, not what a layman would call a heart attack. Merely an insufficiency of oxygen-carrying blood getting to your brain."
"Like a blackout in a high-gee maneuver."
