Dark as Day by Charles Sheffield

for the day. You just come in tomorrow, so we can recover the PO if that hasn’t happened naturally.”
    “It’s not me. I’m worried about somebody else who came in at the same time as I did, and he hasn’t come out.”
    “Is he your—”
    “He’s a close friend. We’re flying out together.”
    “I’m sorry, if he isn’t a relative or partner we’re not supposed to give out medical information.”
    “I just want to be sure that there’s no problem.”
    He looked at Jan, hesitated, and said, “Oh, all right. You know what they say, rules are made to be broken. Wait here for a minute.”
    “I really appreciate this.”
    “But don’t follow me in, or I’ll get into real trouble.”
    He vanished through another door, again labeled NO ENTRANCE. Jan was left waiting again, but not for long. The blond man reappeared, together with a woman in a blue uniform.
    The woman said, “I’m Christa Matloff, and I’m the director of this facility. Fritz says that you are a close friend of Mr. Sebastian Birch?”
    “Yes. Is he all right?”
    “He’s fine, so far as we can tell, but we’re still doing tests on him. How long have you known Mr. Birch?”
    “Just about all my life.”
    “Good. Do you have a few minutes?”
    “As much time as you want.”
    “Wonderful. If you would just come with me.” Christa Matloff led the way through the no entrance door. Jan followed, wondering why they bothered to put up signs if everyone ignored them. She had rather expected to see Sebastian, but once through the door the other woman turned left and led the way to a private office whose walls carried an odd mixture of pre-war artwork and detailed color diagrams of the human anatomy. She gestured to Jan to take a seat.
    “Let me repeat what I said earlier. Mr. Birch is all right. In fact, unless the Peristaltic Observer finds a problem, I’d say he’s in excellent health.”
    “But we came in this morning. I was finished ages ago.”
    “I’m sure. Normally, the tests take less than half an hour. In Mr. Birch’s case, we discovered something rather odd—not an illness, let me reassure you of that. But something. That’s why I want to ask you about Mr. Birch’s background. Where did you first meet, and how often have you seen him since then?”
    Something, but not an illness? Then what? Something to do with Sebastian’s ability to imagine cloud patterns that had not yet happened?
    Christa Matloff seemed like a down-to-earth type, not somebody who enjoyed mystery for its own sake. Jan did her best to give a concise but full answer. She suspected that it would not be enough.
    * * *
    Jan and Sebastian were probably not the same age, but in a sense they had been born on the same day. There must have been years of life that preceded that, two or three of them before Jan’s first memory. But for her, life began with a ride in a low-flying aircraft, cradled by a dark-skinned woman who stroked her hair and told her that everything was all right now. Sebastian was on the woman’s other side, snuggled close.
    The aircraft flew in long, slow circles. Jan, staring out of the window, saw dark, cindered land and still waters. Once she caught sight of something moving, a brown-and-white form that slithered and lurched toward a rounded heap of earth. The aircraft banked, Jan saw a flash of flame, and the mottled object was gone. On the ground where the creature had been lay a black outline of ash. The woman hugged her closer. She said, to herself or to Jan or to someone else in the aircraft—Jan would never know which— “Another damned teratoma. How many of them can they be?”
    Teratoma. The word meant nothing. It was not until years later that Jan understood the term and realized what must have happened. The aircraft that had rescued her and Sebastian was based at Husvik, on South Georgia Island. It had flown many thousands of kilometers, up across the equator from latitude 55 degrees south, to take part in the first post-war