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your step.” We’d had a couple of deaders that way.
     
    “Sorry, Corporal. I’m bushed. Just got my feet tangled up.”
     
    “Yeah, just watch it.” He got back up all right, and he and his partner placed the sheet and went back to get another.
     
    I kept my eye on Singer. In a few minutes he was practically staggering, not easy to do in that suit of cybernetic armor.
     
    “Singer! After you set that plank, I want to see you.”
     
    “Okay.” He labored through the task and mooched over.
     
    “Let me check your readout.” I opened the door on his chest to expose the medical monitor. His temperature was at two degrees high; blood pressure and heart rate both elevated. Not up to the red line, though.
     
    “You sick or something?”
     
    “Hell, Mandella, I feel okay, just tired. Since I fell I been a little dizzy.”
     
    I chinned the medic’s combination. “Doc, this is Mandella. You wanna come over here for a minute?”
     
    “Sure, where are you?” I waved and he walked over from poolside.
     
    “What’s the problem?” I showed him Singer’s readout.
     
    He knew what all the other little dials and things meant, so it took him a while. “As far as I can tell, Mandella...he’s just hot.”
     
    “Hell, I coulda told you that,” said Singer.
     
    “Maybe you better have the armorer take a look at his suit.” We had two people who’d taken a crash course in suit maintenance; they were our “armorers.”
     
    I chinned Sanchez and asked him to come over with his tool kit.
     
    “Be a couple of minutes, Corporal. Carryin’ a plank.”
     
    “Well, put it down and get over here.” I was getting an uneasy feeling. Waiting for him, the medic and I looked over Singer’s suit.
     
    “Uh-oh,” Doc Jones said. “Look at this.” I went around to the back and looked where he was pointing. Two of the fins on the heat exchanger were bent out of shape.
     
    “What’s wrong?” Singer asked.
     
    “You fell on your heat exchanger, right?”
     
    “Sure, Corporal—that’s it. It must not be working right.”
     
    “I don’t think it’s working at all,” said Doc.
     
    Sanchez came over with his diagnostic kit and we told him what had happened. He looked at the heat exchanger, then plugged a couple of jacks into it and got a digital readout from a little monitor in his kit. I didn’t know what it was measuring, but it came out zero to eight decimal places.
     
    Heard a soft click, Sanchez chinning my private frequency. “Corporal, this guy’s a deader.”
     
    “What? Can’t you fix the goddamn thing?”
     
    “Maybe...maybe I could, if I could take it apart. But there’s no way—”
     
    “Hey! Sanchez?” Singer was talking on the general freak. “Find out what’s wrong?” He was panting.
     
    Click. “Keep your pants on, man, we’re working on it.” Click. “He won’t last long enough for us to get the bunker pressurized. And I can’t work on the heat exchanger from outside of the suit.”
     
    “You’ve got a spare suit, haven’t you?”
     
    “Two of ‘em, the fit-anybody kind. But there’s no place...say…”
     
    “Right. Go get one of the suits warmed up.” I chinned the general freak. “Listen, Singer, we’ve gotta get you out of that thing. Sanchez has a spare suit, but to make the switch, we’re gonna have to build a house around you. Understand?”
     
    “Huh-uh.”
     
    “Look, we’ll make a box with you inside, and hook it up to the life-support unit. That way you can breathe while you make the switch.”
     
    “Soun’s pretty compis...compil...cated t’me.”
     
    “Look, just come along—”
     
    “I’ll be all right, man, jus’ lemme res’...”
     
    I grabbed his arm and led him to the building site. He was really weaving. Doc took his other arm, and between us, we kept him from falling over.
     
    “Corporal Ho, this is Corporal Mandella.” Ho was in charge of the life-support unit.
     
    “Go away, Mandella. I’m