Raimey felt his breath catch in his throat. "Eight years? That's all?"

"That's all." Faraday paused. "Eight Jovian years, of course. Earth equivalent would be ninety-six."

Raimey smiled sardonically. "Cute," he said. "Standard salesman's tactic: Make it sound bad, then move in with the soother. Hoping I won't even notice that my life expectancy right now is ten years longer than that. Earth years, that is."

Faraday shook his head. "Read the stats," he advised quietly. "You're a quadriplegic now, with heightened susceptibility to all sorts of diseases and accidents. Your life expectancy from this moment on is another thirty years, max. Probably less. Become a Qanska, and you can triple it."

He lifted his eyebrows again. "Put that in your profit column."

Raimey turned his head away again. It was tempting. God help him, this whole insane idea was actually tempting. To be able to move again, even if it was in an alien body.

To be able to live again.

"I'll think about it," he told Faraday, not looking back at the other.

"Take your time," Faraday said. There was the sound of footsteps, and the beep of a business card being swiped across Raimey's hospital room phone. "My number's in the phone," he added. "Call me any time."

"Don't hold your breath."

"Good-bye, Mr. Raimey," Faraday said.

More footsteps, out the door and fading down the corridor, and he was gone.

"Yeah," Raimey murmured to himself. "Good-bye."

That was the crux of the whole thing, wasn't it? Good-bye. Good-bye to everything he'd ever known.

But then, to be brutally honest, how much of it was actually left anyway?

It was three-thirty in the morning, with the silence of a nighttime hospital room pressing in around him, when he finally gave up.

TWO

The Contact Room, as it had been dubbed, seemed very quiet as Faraday passed through the security door and stepped inside. Quiet, but with the sense of a coiled spring about it.