That was true enough, as far as it went. But Hand was fairly certain that Nichols saw through the subterfuge involved. Hand was now operating entirely on his own, a fact which he would try to conceal by referring to his longstanding and close relationship to his cousin.

But the doctor made no further reference to the matter. His smile vanished, and he continued with his medical assessment.

"What you will discover when you come into your cousin's presence is that he speaks-quite easily, in fact-but his speech makes no sense. It's as if the mechanism which translates thoughts into words has been broken. The technical medical term for the condition is 'aphasia.' Beyond that…"

He leaned back in the chair in his office. "He's apparently still not recognizing anyone. The temporal lobes are involved in handling visual content, too. He's apparently had no seizures yet, but he might have them in the future. And he's apparently suffering from occasional onsets of blind fury." Sourly, he added: "You'll have to forgive my excessive use of the term 'apparently.' I'm no longer on the scene and the few reports I've gotten since I left are skimpy at best."

"Will he recover?"

"He might, yes. But there's no way to know yet, Colonel-nor, even if he does recover, do we know how long it might take."

"Your best estimate, please."

Nichols shrugged. "Assuming he recovers at all, and given that it's now been several weeks since the injury, I don't see much chance of any major improvement until a few months have gone by. I could easily be proven wrong, you understand."

"Could it take years?"

"Possibly. But…" Nichols made a little face. "Look, here's how it is with brain traumas. Strokes, too. There are some outliers, true enough. There have even been a few cases where people recovered after almost twenty years in a coma. But the general rule of thumb is that once what you might call the normal recovery period has passed, the odds that the patient will recover start dropping pretty quickly. So my gut feeling is that if Gustav Adolf doesn't recover-mostly, anyway-within a year, then he's not going to recover at all."