Read Millennium for Free Online Page B

needed was always at hand. Literally. They would reach without looking, and it would be there.
    They were
fast.
They sliced that wimp’s leg off and kicked it aside the instant it hit the floor. Meanwhile someone was extracting all the wimp’s teeth and plugging in new ones that would look just like mine. They hooked up the artificial leg, slashed the wimp here and there in the places where my skinsuit shows scars. They peeled the skin away from her face and began building it from beneath, then closed it again and applied the forced regenerators. It healed without a scar.
    But there were scars they wanted the wimp to have. The only way to make those is with a timepress field. When everybody was ready they plugged feedlines from big nutrient tanks into the wimp, connected her ureter and anus to evacuator lines, and jumped back.
    The blue glow of the Gate surrounded the wimp. It began to breathe so fast the chest was a blur. Its hair and fingernails grewvisibly. It used nutrient fluid so fast that it had to be pumped in, and it emitted urine in a pulsed, pressurized stream that hissed into a tank on the floor. In ten seconds it grew six months older. The scars healed normally.
    Then they pulled my jeans onto the wimp, inserted a funnel into its mouth and were about to pump it full of half-digested airline food when one of the workers looked at my face.
    I mean she
really
looked at it. She had looked right at me several times before but nothing had registered.
    Her eyes grew wide.
    When she managed to make them realize who it was they were duplicating, the whole team helped me peel out of the plastic skin.
    Things got a little hazy for a time.
    I remember looking down at the sleeping face that looked just like mine. Then they were pulling me away from it. There was a stout aluminum bar in my hands and a rip in the palm of my skinsuit from thumb to index finger. I had wrenched the bar loose from one of the examining machines.
    And I had sure made a mess of that wimp.
    I regret that. I really do. The thing had been wearing my jeans, and I never did get all the blood out of them.
    *    *    *
    The head of the wimp-building team trailed me all the way to the door.
    He kept trying to apologize and I kept ignoring him. If there was blame, it was mostly mine, but I didn’t want to say that. Like plugging into life-support equipment, I view apologizing as a dangerous vice that can take over your whole life if you give in to it. Inside, I was whipping myself severely for pulling a tyro stunt like leaving my squealer in the ready-room. Outside, I trust, I was at work and the man’s apologies simply got in my way.
    I had wasted five whole minutes in there. I would never know if those minutes were the margin between life and death for Pinky.
    I wasted fifteen more seconds just getting through the door.
    There were no procedures for it. The whole goat-sorting operation was designed to prevent anybody getting through easily. But with a few quiet, totally sincere death threats, I managed it. I raced up to Operations, told Lawrence to put every available operative on the search for Pinky’s stunner in the city from which the flight had originated—which I learned was Houston—got him to extend the bridge again, and…stepped…through the Gate.
    It was a shambles.
    They had looked just about every place it was possible to look, and they had not been gentle. The aisle was knee-deep in torn seat cushions. The carpet was ripped up. The contents of the galley were strewn from nose to tail of the plane. Tiny bottles of booze clinked underfoot.
    To make everything worse, the customized wimps began arriving.
    So much time had already been wasted that we had to hurry getting them placed. We seated a few and strapped them in, but most we just threw. We had our portapaks on full power, and we were
strong.
Instead of just enriched blood, adrenalin, and vitamins—the wake-up mixture—we were now getting an insane brew of hyper-drenalin,