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torture. Our lads and lassies would not have taken prisoners even if I had so ordered. But I did not attempt to. I want you to know that you are held in high esteem by your colleagues. Including the many who have never met you and whom you are unlikely ever to meet.”
    Boss reached for his canes, struggled to his feet. “I’m seven minutes over the time your physician told me I could visit. We’ll talk tomorrow. You are to rest now. A nurse will be in to put you to sleep. Sleep and get well.”
    I had a few minutes to myself; I spent them in a warm glow. “High esteem.” When you have never belonged and can never really belong, words like that mean everything. They warmed me so much that I didn’t mind not being human.

IV
    Someday I’m going to win an argument with Boss.
    But don’t hold your breath.
    There were days when I did not lose arguments with him—the days he did not visit me.
    It started with a difference of opinion over how long I was going to have to remain in therapy. I felt ready to go home or back to duty, either one, after four days. While I didn’t want to get into a dockside fight just yet, I could take light duty—or a trip to New Zealand, my first choice. All my hurts were repairing.
    They hadn’t been all that much: lots of burns, four broken ribs, simple fractures left tibia and fibula, multiple compound fractures of the bones of my right foot and three toes of my left, a hairline skull fracture without complications, and (messy but least disabling) somebody had sawed off my right nipple.
    The last item and the burns and the broken toes were all that I recalled; the others must have happened while I was distracted by other matters.
    Boss said, “Friday, you know that it will take at least six weeks to regenerate that missing nipple.”
    “But plastic surgery for a simple cosmetic job would heal in a week. Dr. Krasny told me so.”
    “Young woman, when anyone in this organization is maimed in line of duty, she will be restored as perfectly as therapeutic art can achieve. In addition to that our permanent policy, in your case there is another reason, compelling and sufficient. We each have a moral obligation to conserve and preserve beauty in this world; there is none to waste. You have an unusually comely body; damage to it is deplorable. It must be repaired.”
    “Cosmetic surgery is all right, I said so. But I don’t expect to have milk in these jugs. And anybody in bed with me won’t care.”
    “Friday, you may have convinced yourself that you will never have need to lactate. But esthetically a functional breast is very different from a surgery-shaped imitation. That hypothetical bedmate might not know…but you would know and I would know. No, my dear. You will be restored to your former perfection.”
    “Hmm! When are you going to get that eye regenerated?”
    “Don’t be rude, child. In my case, no esthetic issue obtains.”
    So I got my tit back as good as ever or maybe better. The next argument was over the retraining I felt I needed to correct my hair-trigger kill reflex. When I brought up the matter again, Boss looked as if he had just bitten into something nasty. “Friday, I do not recall that you have ever made a kill that turned out to be a mistake. Have you made any kills of which I am unaware?”
    “No, no,” I said hastily. “I never killed anybody until I went to work for you and I haven’t made any that I didn’t report to you.”
    “In that case all of your killings have been in self-defense.”
    “All but that ‘Belsen’ character. That wasn’t self-defense; he never laid a finger on me.”
    “Beaumont. At least that was the name he usually used. Self-defense sometimes must take the form of ‘Do unto others what they would do unto you but do it first.’ De Camp, I believe. Or some other of the twentieth-century school of pessimistic philosophers. I’ll call up Beaumont’s dossier so that you may see for yourself that he belonged on everyone’s