Chapter 2: Seventeen

She lay for a moment with her eyes closed, feeling fresh and alive, with the whole world opening out before her as though for the taking. Her first thought was, "It must be Spring! Pretty soon now, school will be out for the summer..."

She yawned and stretched and turned in the bed, enjoying the smell of fresh linen, the feel of smooth clean sheets against her bare legs, and opened her eyes. She wasn't in her little upstairs room that she had all to herself now that her big sisters were grown up and married. Then she remembered! She was grown up, too. Something bad had happened, she couldn't quite remember what for a second, but she would be all right. Neal would take care of her. He was nice.

But was he, really? She shook her head angrily as somewhere in the back of her mind echoed the spiteful cry of "Honky!" She could almost hear a taunting chorus of voices from her childhood, dominated by skinny old Aunt Jennifer's screechy voice telling her, over and over again; "You look out for them trashy white men. Mister Charley oney wants one thing from a Black gal, an' he don't keer how he gits it, neither!"

She tried to dispel the galling words, hating the way they made her feel, but still they clung like dirty slime to the edges of her mind. She knew that Aunt Jennifer was wrong. There had been plenty of boys she'd been out with, she told herself, in High School and after. Black, White, Hispanic, Oriental, or whatever. No one kind had a monopoly on 'wanting just one thing', but most of them had been real nice about it, and she'd had lots of fun without giving everything away.

More of her memories were coming back every day. Recent events were still fuzzy, some of them anyway, but old ones were as sharp as they could be, fresher and stronger than she could remember them ever being before the accident in her lab. No, it hadn't been an accident. Somehow, she was sure of that. The circuit diagram was pictured in her mind, even clearer than if she'd had it spread out under her nose or on the screen of her monitor. There was no way that it could have shorted out in exactly the way it had. Not without a little too much help...

She stretched again and yawned, slipping out of the fuzzy flannel pajama top that was all she'd ever worn to bed since she was grown up. Memories old and new chased each other through her head as she took full advantage of the hot shower in the tiny bath they'd put in next to her bedsitting room. She laughed aloud at the thought that this was even better than her own apartment in downtown Portland. For too many years she'd been the youngest child in a big family, forced to dash through a lukewarm shower before the last traces of hot water disappeared. Now, she could take as long a shower as she wanted, letting the steaming water beat down on her head and tingling body until the little room filled with swirling fog.

At last, glowing with steamy warmth, she reluctantly turned off the water. The exhaust fan whirred busily, the long mirror clearing as she rubbed and blotted herself thoroughly dry with a luxuriously thick and fluffy yellow towel taken fresh from the linen closet. She carefully studied her reflection, touching herself lightly with long tapering fingers. She still wasn't quite used to the thought that her body was all grown up, but she could certainly find no fault with what she saw. High, firm breasts with perky nipples that crinkled when she felt good about something, and a narrow waist that swelled into rounded hips and long, dancer's legs. This was how she'd always dreamed of looking, back when she'd been a skinny teenager sneaking peeks at pictures in her brothers' magazines, and now she did!

She had barely finished putting on the fresh clothes she'd laid out the night before, a prettily patterned dress over dainty undies, when footsteps in the hall were followed by a tapping at her door. She flew to open it, but her happy greeting was slightly dimmed when she saw that it was only Doctor Worth's sister.

"Mrs. Gordon, good morning."

"Up already, Miss Daniels? And, it's Leona, remember?"

"All right, Leona. But only if you remember to call me Jewel." She returned the older woman's smile, reminding herself that it was really kind of nice to have someone older around who she could talk to. Not that Mrs... that Leona was anywhere near as old as Doctor Worth. She wasn't at all the motherly type, and she was far too elegant for there to be more than a slight resemblance to her shaggy bear of a big brother. Her hair was a neatly shaped mass of golden braids beneath her nurse's cap, and her slender figure made her white uniform look as though it had just come from some expensive couturier's shop.

"I just couldn't stay in bed any longer." Jewel's expansive gesture took in the forested hills outside her window, fresh and green under the soft rain that fell from a muted gray April sky. "Isn't it a beautiful morning?"

"If you like the rain." Her lips curled in a faint smile of selfmockery. "I've lived too long in the desert country to really enjoy anything but blue skies and sunshine. How are you feeling this morning, as if I couldn't guess?"

"Just wonderful! My memory's lots and lots better, too." She sobered abruptly, sitting on the edge of her bed and looking shyly up at Leona. "Have you known Neal... Mr. Marten very long?"

"I've known of him for several years, ever since Mark went to work for him, but I just met him a couple of months ago when I moved back here from Nevada after my divorce. My brother thought that I needed to get out and meet people, so he gave a dinner party for me and invited a lot of his friends over. He seemed to think that I needed cheering up, or something." She smiled fondly at the memory, then glanced at her watch. "Mark wants to look you over this morning, but you still have plenty of time to eat some breakfast. I suppose you're hungry, as usual?"

"I sure am!" She was back on her feet, drifting about the room as though dancing to unheard music, enjoying the sensation of being young and alive. "What I would really like is some waffles with maple syrup, a couple of eggs over easy, and three or four little pig sausages if they have any."

"That sounds good to me, too." Leona picked up the phone that was perched on the end of a tiny table. "At least, a couple of waffles and an egg. I could really use a snack before I go off duty. I'll have the cafeteria send up enough breakfast for both of us."

They chattered on until the food arrived. Jewel waded into the meal with a good appetite, while Leona picked daintily at her smaller breakfast. Topping the meal off with a cup of strong black coffee, Jewel lit a cigaret, only to stub it out with an almost comic grimace.

"That was good," she sighed, pushing herself back from the depleted table. "You said that Dr. Worth wanted to give me some more tests?"

"He said to send you in any time you were ready." She glanced again at the stylishly tiny golden timepiece that clung, seemingly unsupported, to one wrist. "Why don't you go on along now. I'm off duty for the day, but I'll see you again this evening. You do remember where Mark's office is, don't you?"

Jewel nodded, frowning slightly as she left her room. Of course she remembered. It was just that a lot of her more recent memories weren't completely organized yet... Now, why had she put it that way? She let the thought slip away unheeded as she hastened along the upstairs hall and danced down broad staircases to the lower floor where the infirmary was located. With a cheery greeting for the nurse on duty at the desk, she went inside Doctor Worth's office.

"You really do remember most things just fine, then?" Doctor Worth seemed pleased with her reported progress as he prepared to administer the tests. "What kind of subjects did you study in junior high school?"

"They made all of us girls take Home Ec, but I liked Math and Science best. For one thing, I figured that there was a better chance for me to get a job that way after I got out of college. I didn't want to be like my sisters, getting married right out of the tenth grade or so and settling down to raise kids. Or like some of the other girls in my classes who didn't even wait to get married, just started having kids so they could go right onto welfare. Oh, and we all took Social Studies, of course. For what that was worth. They talk a lot about Black Studies, but they don't have too much that's any good, really. The books are too onesided, whichever side they're written from. I don't... didn't have to study very hard to get good grades. I can remember what happened in High School, and even after that. It just isn't as clear as my earlier memories, yet."

"What else do you remember about when you were a teenager?"

She smiled, remembering, and he thought to himself that the little girl of a few nights ago had grown up considerably. Instead of a child of five or six, here was a young girl of sixteen or seventeen, just bursting into young womanhood and enjoying every minute of it.

"I can remember lots and lots of things that I couldn't, even just last night. My memories seem to sort themselves out best while I'm sleeping. What do I remember best? Oh, going to movies and dances, and stuff. I had the most tremendous crush on my English teacher for most of a semester, until I found out that he had a fat wife and a halfdozen kids. That was when I decided to study Science. Is Neal married?" She tossed in the question artlessly.

He shook his head absently, studying the computer printouts from her folder. "Not any more. His wife and two teenaged children, a boy and a girl, died in a tragic automobile accident about eight years ago. It hurt him terribly to lose them like that, and it was several years before he managed to pull himself together. For the last four or five years, he's turned all of his energies to building up this business. He's worked very hard to put it together. Too hard, and it isn't getting any easier for him as it goes along."

"That's awfully sad." She looked downcast for a moment, then brightened. "Maybe it'll help, having me to look out for. Do you really think he'll adopt me?"

"What makes you think... Oh, yes. He did say something like that. I'm afraid that he was just joking. You're much too grown up now for anything like that to work. But how did you hear him? We were out in the hall, and I'm sure that the door was closed."

"I don't know. I could hear both of you, real clear, just like I can hear what they're saying in the next room, now. Do you think that Jake and Tony will be all right? They were knocked out in that same accident, weren't they?"

"Good heavens, girl! This is a pretty solid old building, and these walls are supposed to be just about soundproof. Yes, they're just in for followup testing. Both of them recovered immediately, and there seemed to be no ill effects. Neal gave them the rest of the day off, then assigned them to other labs until you'd be ready to go back to work." He pressed a button to call in his nurse. "Now, we're going to give you a few more tests. It's been six months since you were hired, so it's time you had another complete physical, anyway."

The tests were routine enough at first, she guessed. Samples of blood and other bodily fluids, graphs of her heartbeats and brain waves. Then they went on to Xrays and sonic scans. She wondered at first if something was wrong, but the doctor seemed increasingly pleased as he tested her further.

"You seem to be in amazingly good health." He put down the latest sheaf of computer printouts he'd been studying, and smiled across his desk at her.

"Is that good?" she asked, innocently.

"I hope so. You certainly don't seem to have been harmed by your accident." He spread the papers out on his desk, shuffling through them doubtfully for a moment as if he thought that they were trying to tell him something, then shook his head. "Helped, if anything. We'll have to keep an eye on you for the next few months, to make sure that no adverse reactions show up. Your hearing is exceptionally sensitive, your eyes focus well at any distance from inches to infinity, in any kind of light, and your reflexes are amazingly fast. Your records show that you had a slight tendency toward astigmatism in your left eye, but I don't find any sign of it now."

"Then the accident really didn't do much of anything to me?" She clasped her hands together in her lap, then relaxed as he smiled at her.

"I wouldn't say that. It delivered a tremendous jolt to your entire nervous system, since you were actually bending over the workbench when the circuit shorted out. Your body has thrown off any ill effects, however, and you don't seem to have come to any permanent harm. I'll want to retest you fairly often to see whether or not you regress back to the way you were, but unless and until any aftereffects show up you're about as healthy a person as I've ever examined."

"But... but what about my memory?"

"It seems to be coming back quite rapidly on its own, so my advice is for you to relax and just let it happen. Do a lot of reading, both technical and nontechnical. You might reread any of your highschool and college texts if you still have them, along with class yearbooks and any old letters you might have kept. Also, technical publications and manuals from the company library. I don't suppose you kept a diary? No? Well, most people don't. Neal can have more of your things brought here, if you want. You won't have to cope with the outside world until you're completely up to it."

She left as he continued to make a series of notations on the computer printouts in her folder, feeling somewhat relieved. Maybe the way she was feeling was normal for a grownup.

The next few days went by in a rush, yet everything seemed crystal clear around her. She decided that her memory was much better than it had ever been... No, that wasn't quite the way to put it. Her memory was no better than it had ever been, still recording in detail everything that she saw, heard, smelled, touched or thought... What she now had was perfect and immediate access to every one of those memories, even the oldest ones. She'd decided that it was kind of fun, lying in bed at night reliving things that had happened to her as a tiny baby, and even before. So that was what Daddy's voice had sounded like...

Her other senses seemed sharper, too. She still enjoyed drinking coffee, taking it now without cream or sugar, and she enjoyed the taste of most mixed drinks, but she was having a harder and harder time even standing the smell of somebody else's cigaret smoke, let alone smoking herself. As the effects of smoking left her body, the taste and smell of food was an everincreasing delight, and only her new, higher level of energy kept her from putting on too many unwanted pounds.

She drank in each new experience avidly over the next few days. She raced through novels and nontechnical books almost as fast as she could flip the pages without tearing them, and thoroughly enjoyed the responses of her body as she swam in the indoor pool or worked on her Aikido exercises in the tiny gym that Neal provided for employees. She had about decided that Dr. Worth's appraisal of her condition had been more than just a little conservative...

"How are you doing, Jewel?" She was dressed in a short yellowstriped terrycloth robe over crimson leotards and sandals, a towel around her shoulders, when Neal met her on the way back to her room after a brisk workout. He was wearing jeans and a Tshirt and as usual needed a shave, looking more like just one of the employees than the boss. "Are you getting along all right now that Mrs. Gordon has left?"

"I'm just fine," she replied, glancing shyly down at the parqueted floor of the corridor. "My memory's about back to normal, and I should be able to move back to my own apartment any time now."

"Well, we certainly don't want you to rush it." He was smiling down at her, and she couldn't seem to keep her eyes away from his lips. "It's already Thursday, so why don't you stay here another week or so, just to be sure. I'm shelving your old project until we have more time to figure out just what did go wrong. There's another project that I'm anxious for you to get started on, but it won't be ready until Monday or Tuesday at the earliest. Maybe not for another week or two."

"All right, Neal." His name seemed to leave a pleasant taste on her own lips, and she repeated it in her mind. Neal... , Neal Marten... "How can I help out until then? I'm feeling a bit guilty. Besides, I've been getting some odd looks, collecting my salary for just lazing around when everyone else is working their... their tails off around here."

"You might check out what's happening in Lab 9." He smiled at her choice of words, easily guessing what she'd been about to say. "Fred Jenkins can always use a little help with his record keeping, and his project ties in with the next one I'll be wanting you to work on. When you're done with that, just drop by my office and I'll find something else for you to do."