“Thanks, Abbot, I can manage now,” said Titus, heart pounding as Abbot worked over him. He struggled to his feet to shed his suit. “Go help someone who needs it.”

“What were you doing out there,” hissed Abbot.

“My job, what else!” snapped Titus. In a very non-regulation move, he pushed the suit’s torso down to dangle over the legs, as if it were a pair of wholly flexible overalls. Abbot began to object, but H’lim tugged at his sleeve, moving off to help clean up someone who had vomited.

With a scowl directed back over his shoulder at Titus, Abbot went, but cloaking his words, he added, “It doesn’t matter what you were doing. The probe’s gone now.”

Watching them, Titus was struck by the way H’lim’s ministrations were accepted. He sat back down, pulling his feet out of the suit’s attached boots. He’d worked his right foot up to the knee when the lock opened and a woman was brought in on a stretcher, stifling screams. It was the electrician Titus had relieved in the probe.

Her leg was broken. Two corpsmen converged on her to cut the suit away and start an IV. All the suitcutters were in use, so they employed powered metal snips, awkward and dangerous if she moved. She bit the rim of her suit collar and tried her best to remain still, but it wasn’t good enough, and nobody had come yet with medication.

After their third failure, H’lim plunged across the room and lifted the snips from the corpsman’s grasp. “Let me,” he said, without Influence.

The electrician readily accepted his help, but she was unable to remain still. H’lim reached for her face, Influence gathering about him like a rising sun. Titus almost came off his crate, one leg in his suit, the other bare, but swallowed his protest when the room fell silent. H’lim murmured, “Let me take the pain away. Please, we’ve got to stop the bleeding or you’ll die.”

She glanced at her audience, and Titus followed her gaze to see Colby coming through the hatch. Defiantly, the electrician told H’lim, “All right, but just for a moment.”

Titus was certain that, concentrating as he was, H’lim was unaware of Colby. Though the power H’lim raised was stunning, his touch was delicate enough not to derange the suggestible human nor to disturb Abbot’s work on her.

Her eyes closed and tranquility altered her face to that of a young girl. H’lim wielded the clumsy tool with fine precision, excising her arm for the IV, then exposing the tattered mess, that had been her leg. Everyone there knew what H’lim considered nourishment, and not a one saw a hint of anything on his face but clinical detachment as he wrapped a tourniquet and announced, “It’s not as bad as it looks. Only two breaks. They should be able to save the leg.” To the corpsman who had finally seated the IV, he added, “If the surgeons doubt it, have them call me.

Before he could answer, a nurse arrived with a shot for the patient and H’lim released his hold on her mind. As he turned away, Colby moved up to challenge H’lim. “You are under injunction not to use your power.” The Brink’s guards, who had watched from a distance, snapped to.

H’lim met her gaze unwaveringly. “If my life is forfeit, then so be it. I acted as required by an oath and ethic older and more honored than your Hippocratic Oath. And I did, Dr. Colby, gain her express permission first.”

“As I recall, permission wasn’t a factor in our agreement, nor have you ever represented yourself as a medical practitioner.” Her awareness of the onlookers was clear in her stance and tone.

“The divisions of labor you practice are not universal, Dr. Colby. My field is the integrity of the physical body, in health, in illness, in reproduction, and in trauma, regardless of species or planet of origin. Were it not so, I could not have learned your biological notation system so quickly, could I? But this is the seventieth, or maybe eightieth such system I’ve encountered, and at least the hundredth physiological variant. I could repair that woman’s leg as easily as I could grow her a new one.” His expression hardened. “Therefore, I am not free to ignore her plight”

Colby’s eyes flicked about the room, and what she saw there gave her pause. H’lim had won. “There is still the matter of manipulating her mind with your power. You gave your word you would not do such things.”

H’lim also directed his attention to the audience, aware that they had politics and morale to consider. “At the time of that discussion, neither of us was considering such an emergency. You’re not a sadist, Dr. Colby. Had I asked your permission, you would have granted it.” He raked the humans’ faces with a measuring glance. “Would you prefer to find that you were harboring an alien life form so devoid of compassion that he would withhold succor because his first thought was for his selfish fears?”

Masterful, thought Titus, but he talks like a textbook when gets nervous. And H’lim was scared, there was no doubt of that.

Surreptitiously studying her audience, Colby announced, “Your-patient will be thoroughly tested. If we find you’ve done anything but relieve pain, your life will be forfeit.”

“Then I have nothing to worry about.” Which was true, Titus reflected as Colby strode out the door.

Everyone started to breathe again. A corpsman clapped H’lim on the back and set him to wrapping a sprained ankle. From the tone as the buzz of conversation rose again, Titus knew that H’lim had just passed the final test. The station no longer considered him inhuman or a menace. If they can accept him, maybe they can accept us-eventually. Abbot caught Titus’s gaze, and Titus knew his father was thinking the same thing-only to him, it was an alarming thought.

As more casualties came through, Titus pitched in to help Abbot and H’lim. Inea joined them, and for a while, Titus savored what it could be like to have a family again.

Later, he found out that not only had the secessionists hit the probe hangar with several bombs-others having gone wild and dug new craters in the landscape-but two of the W. S. ships defending Project Station had crashed into each other, raining deadly fragments. One dome had been breached, and was currently airless, the survivors trapped in the lower levels behind pressure seals, rescue workers trying to get to them and their casualties.

This was why there was so little help for the probe workers. Meanwhile, one of the blockaders’ ships had crashed nearby, and a party had been dispatched to search for survivors. However they might regard the secessionists’ politics, they wouldn’t let anyone suffocate. Not that they’d be thanked, considering the quarantine.

“Besides,” observed a woman carrying a welder’s helmet, “they might know something worth learning. H’lim could get it out of them.”

Titus didn’t like the enthusiastic response to that, but H’lim’s attitude reassured him. The human mind was off limits to him, he told them, and that meant all humans. “Besides,” he pointed out, “you don’t need me. You have Dr. de Lisle and her colleagues. They are difficult to lie to.”

Four days later, rescues completed, they paused before launching the repair effort to hold the mass funeral. Colby’s oration concluded with a promise to revise evacuation plans and to increase disaster drills. She bolstered their courage by pointing out that when Earth finally realized what H’lim had yet to offer, the war would end. After the day of intense grieving, life returned to something resembling normality. But now there was no further need for Titus’s department. There would be no probe to target or track.

Late that night, while Abbot and H’lim were working in H’lim’s lab, ostensibly on a project for Colby, Titus let himself into H’lim’s apartment using a borrowed maintenance key. He hid Abbot’s transmitter where neither H’lim nor Abbot would ever look, inside a casserole dish heaped in the back of a kitchen cabinet with pots and pans. He didn’t even tell Inea for fear she’d telegraph the guilty knowledge to H’lim, who was becoming all too wise in human ways.