"I've seen the results, Jerry," I said.

Jerry stopped mid-dig, looked up at me from his small pit.  Actually he looked up and through me.  I waved a hand in his face.

One blink registered.  Then another.  "What!" he finally snapped.  His voice echoed across the sands, precipitating a sudden explosion of firetail swallows from a fissure in the roof of his nearby hacienda.

"The test results," I said.  Jerry's eyes and nostrils flared at me while his fingers steepled on his shovel's handle.  "Remember?"  I asked softly. 

Jerry sighed, waved a dismissive hand, and continued digging like a feverish farmer.  "Got too much work to do, Doc—this place is a mess."

Looking around, I could see that.  The encroaching dune field had nearly consumed everything in sight, including the local population of ironwoods and mesquites that I knew had once been there but were only hinted at now by vague, broken forms in the endless sand.  Jerry's hacienda, that de facto aviary, lay in ruin, its perma-plex siding fallen off in large sections and scattered, its windows broken and flooded with creeping razorvine.  A collection of forsaken wind chimes hanging along his decrepit front porch played to the whim of fitful desert breezes.

"Got to remove those two poplars over there," Jerry continued, pointing with a gushing hose now.  "Got to extend the bed another five meters before fall.  Got winter cabbage and squash to plant."

I knew that Jerry didn't have that kind of time; it was only early spring on St. Helena.

"It's getting late, Jerry," I said.  "We should talk about this.  Maybe it's time to shut off the water, too.  Central informed me that you've exceeded your water ration." I almost added the word "again."

Jerry dropped the hose, horrified.  "Will you look at that?"  He grabbed a hoe from the thicket of garden tools nearby.  "Damn razorvine is coming back."

I wanted to help, but as usual, the barren ground didn't offer up anything.  The discarded hose flooded another section of the garden, drowning the seedling radishes if I remembered correctly, while Jerry attacked the phantom razorvine.  My first instinct was to run back to the house and shut off the water main.  But I didn't.

"None of this is going to change the test results, Jerry," I said.

"Be careful."

"I beg your pardon?"

Jerry nudged his head at me.  "You're standing on the leaf lettuce."

I was standing on desert as far as the eye could see; but I moved anyway.

"And mind the strawberries."

Jerry's garden had gotten bigger.  I moved again.  A few, anguished seconds passed while Jerry pondered my new position.  He seemed satisfied.

"I've had tests before, Doc, and I've beaten them," he said, continuing his effort on the new hole at his feet.  "I want a second opinion."

"This is your third, Jerry, and these results are conclusive." I nudged the hose with my soiled boot to another section of the garden—to the Swiss chard, I think.  "You know that the best specialists are here on St.  Helena.  I'm afraid the degeneration is in its final stage."

Jerry stopped to spit.  "Damn specialists."

He resumed his attack with great, swinging strokes.  "This razorvine is a real pain in the ass.  You can't get rid of the stuff.  Got to kill its roots— that's the only way to stop it."

I stepped out of the way.  "I'm your doctor, Jerry.  You asked me to be honest when the time came.  Don't make this hard on yourself."

Jerry stopped again, stripped his shirt and mopped his face with it.  I gasped.  Deep, weeping wounds covered his chest.  Subcutaneous.  Some of the worst I had ever seen on a patient.  And the accompanying malnourishment was no better.  The pain must have been incredible but obviously not enough to stop his descent.  I vaguely realized that I should have been logging these new observations into my medpad. 

"Where the hell are your meds, Jerry?"

He wadded up the sweaty shirt and chucked it.  "I don't need meds, Doc— I was a colonel in the Ether Forces.  I've handled worse."

I sighed at his bravado.  "Fighting fire with fire, are we?  You know you can't outrun the degeneration with these tricks, Jerry.  And if the degeneration doesn't get you, the sunstroke will."

"Who said anything about running, Doc?"  He smiled as he defiantly jabbed his hoe into the ground.  "I'm making a stand right here."

"Well, at least let me look you over."

"I told you—" Jerry began, and then stumbled forward, his face contorting from the waves of pain gripping his body.

"You're having an attack!"  I said, offering my hand, but the old soldier, propping himself up with his hoe, waved me away.

"Back off, will you?  I can . . .  do this."

He wasn't in any condition to do 'this'.

"Come on, Jerry, let me talk you through it.  Remember how it keeps you grounded?"

At least he nodded.  After catching his breath, he closed his eyes as a dusty breeze fluttered through his thinning hair.  The pain was obviously still there, but he appeared to have a better grasp on it.

I approached him quietly, whispering, "Where are you?"

He gulped repeatedly before the words came out.  "I'm in a pod . . . in orbit around some ball with my platoon—a terrestrial in the Groombridge system, I think."

"And what are you?"

He licked his lips against the dry wind.  "My mind is stretching out via EM tether . . .  to a machine on the surface, some . . ."  His face moved around, searching, but his eyes remained closed.

I snapped my fingers repeatedly.  "Think about what it feels like, your mind and the machine together as one.  Remember that this is just the implant talking.  It's searching for a connection.  You're not on active duty anymore, so the mind is giving it one.  It's just a flashback; it's not real.  Just let the sensations flow in and out just like we talked about."

He nodded, slid down the hoe despite his rock hard grip.  The muscles on his arms undulated like creatures beneath skin too thin.  "I can feel my hands curling into tracks, my fingers cogs on so many wheels.  My lungs . . .  burn with combustibles.  I can taste the fuel oil and hydraulic fluid flowing inside of me . . .  feel the thud of the drive engines pushing me over the charred earth . . ."

He paused too long.  "And?"  I said.

"I'm a tank," he blurted.  "Omicron class."

"Go on," I said.  "Remember the technique.  Try to slow your breathing."

Jerry was nearly on the ground now, panting.  "The enemy . . .  they're on the far ridge . . . firing plasma shells at me."  He winced, eyes still closed.  "I return fire, but there's too many of them.  The ground . . .  the ground comes alive with their lighter, more agile attack drones.  My skin blisters in the gauntlet of their flame units."

His shoulders hunched as he dropped the hoe and collapsed.  Luckily, I caught his emaciated form, and despite the slightly higher than normal gravity of St. Helena, he weighed nothing in my arms.

"I'm hit!"  Jerry yelled, writhing in my arms.  "My CPU is down!  Ruptured volatiles spill from me the like innards from a gutted pig!  Oh, damn it hurts, Doc!"

"Easy does it, Jerry—remember to breathe."

Jerry shrugged me off, dropped to his knees, and struck the earth with his fists, sobbing.  I palmed a tranquilizer in my right hand and stooped next to him.  Just in case.  I wondered if he was still there.

"Jerry?"  I repeated myself a second time before he nodded.

"I'm okay," he said, looking up at me.  His eyes were half-open, two pinpoints of blue and bloodshot white.  There was some hint of relief floating around in them. 

"This attack was stronger, wasn't it?"

Jerry sighed.  "I've had worse, Doc.  This disease hasn't gotten me yet."

More stubborn bravado.  "I'm sorry, Jerry," I said.  "You deserve better than this."

Jerry spat the accumulated sand and froth from his mouth and sat up.  "I know, Doc," he said, and then waved his arms at the parched, ocher plain that rolled endlessly to an unforgiving sun.  "Forty acres and a mule, they called it.  Hard work and sunshine.  I got forty acres—I'll credit them that.  But I'm still waiting for that damn mule."

We both laughed but his quickly diminished.  "How many of us volunteered for the neural implants, Doc?" he asked, tapping the scar on the back of his neck.  "How many minds became remote machines for the sake of king and country?"

No one knew the number exactly.  Fifty, maybe sixty thousand.

"Right," Jerry said, knowing the answer.  "But it doesn't matter anymore, does it, Doc? The war is over and we are conveniently out of sight, hundreds of light-years from home with our . . .  disease."

"St. Helena was supposed to be a fresh start," I said.  I bit my lip for towing the company line.

Jerry shook his head.  "There were supposed to be a lot of things, Doc.  Neuropath protecting protocols and meds.  Therapies for the few expected cases of degeneration.  But none of that really worked.  Disease was a given from the get-go."

"I like to think that we tried, Jerry," I said, my empty hands outstretched.  All they seemed to be doing was catching ocher dust.

"Well, you didn't try hard enough."  Jerry studied his chest as if suddenly aware of the damage he had done. 

"It was war, Jerry, you know that."  I planted myself in the muddy earth.  The renegade hose had turned Jerry's garden into a rice paddy.  "The Scarabs were close to snuffing humanity out.  They had to be driven back."

"Stupid name," he said.  "Why bugs?  Why always bugs?  Right out of those oldie flat-films I used to watch as a kid.  You know, I never saw one of the damn things.  I often wonder what our remote mechanized units looked like to them."

I put an arm around him.  "You have bigger things to consider now, Jerry."

"I know."  Jerry nodded his head and looked around.  "I can see more razorvine creeping through.  The mud softens the soil just enough to expose their shoots.  Damn stuff is everywhere.  Worse than I thought."

"No, I'm talking about your options.  You're condition is not as bad as . . . the others.  Not yet, anyway."

The others were back at Central running around on all fours imitating the combat tanks they had spent the war tethered to.  Jerry was one, maybe two flashbacks away from joining them.  From there, the degeneration would progress into more disturbing manifestations.  And then death. 

"There are meds," I continued, "newer meds that can make you comfortable before the disease tightens its grip.  Let's stop the flashbacks-- stop you from becoming the nightmare.  Why don't we go back to Central?"

Unexpectedly, he buried his head into my bosom.  I nearly injected him.  His babbling was barely intelligible, but I heard the words "must" and "fight" again and again.  The word "never" also figured prominently.  He tugged at my trousers like a pleading child, and I felt his tears stream down my dusty hands, his desperate convulsions seize my body. 

"You can't ask me to do this, Doc," he said, catching his breath.  "You're asking me to face this battle as a vegetable, as another curious patient for study back at Central.  I won't be taken in the enemy's snare.  I want to meet this one head-on."

I released him and got up.  "I took an oath a long time ago to do no harm, Jerry," I said, looking for the tranquilizer in my empty hands.  It must have slipped at some point.  "I can't allow you to—"

"Isn't it a little late for that, Doc?"  Jerry interrupted, smiling.  "Besides, I've got too much work to do." A glazed over look appeared on his face as he conjured one more word: "Please?"

I absently slid my hand to the medpad on my waist, my soiled index finger coming to rest on its red panic button.  One push and a dozen orderlies would be dispatched to my location.  I understood my duty, but somewhere in my tightening chest between my mind and that finger, the signal was getting lost.  Jerry's eyes, water filled, trembled now in anticipation of that move, and I stood there in the evening breeze watching the sunset behind him, watching the brooding landscape become just as muddy as the ground beneath us.

"For once, Doc, do no harm," he whispered.  I'm sure that's what he said.

Staring at him, I nodded slightly but said nothing.  Precious little would be lost by letting him have his way.  He had already demonstrated how pain had staved off the degeneration.  Perhaps in the hours to come, these final hours of Jerry's life, he would show me even more.  Enough to warrant further research and produce treatments beyond our feeble palliatives.  Maybe even a cure.  I could only hope. 

Smiling, Jerry looked across his garden, then into his pit and back across his garden again.  He got up and darted to a new location, tracking mud up his fevered back as he went.  He dropped to his knees and began digging a new hole with his bare hands, those hands that had touched so many worlds for my sake, tackling what must have been a second flash of rogue razorvine. 

"I've beaten the prognosis before," Jerry said, digging relentlessly.  He repeated those words like a mantra without the slightest hint of compromise in his voice.

I lifted my Stetson momentarily and swept back my soaked hair.  "I think I'll stay for a while, if that's okay?"

Jerry huffed, wiped the sweat off his face with blistered hands.  Blood mixed with dirt across his cheeks like improvised camouflage.  "Suit yourself," he said, yanking over the hose to flood the pit.  "It's coming up everywhere—got to kill the roots."

Central would be furious, of course, but I didn't give a damn.  They could confiscate some of my water ration if necessary.  I left Jerry alone and watched him from a nearby dune, catching up on the observations that would be expected from me.  There were no radishes or strawberries, no leaf lettuce or Swiss chard.  And there certainly wouldn't be any winter cabbage and squash come fall.  The sky grew darker, and Jerry's pit only got deeper, murkier, leading down to nowhere.