the planet savers
_Marion Zimmer Bradley has written some of the finest science
fiction in print. She has been away from our pages too long. So this
story is in the nature of a triumphant return. It could well be her
best to date._
By the time I got myself all the way awake I thought I was alone. I was
lying on a leather couch in a bare white room with huge windows,
alternate glass-brick and clear glass. Beyond the clear windows was a
view of snow-peaked mountains which turned to pale shadows in the
glass-brick.
Habit and memory fitted names to all these; the bare office, the orange
flare of the great sun, the names of the dimming mountains. But beyond a
polished glass desk, a man sat watching me. And I had never seen the man
before.
He was chubby, and not young, and had ginger-colored eyebrows and a
fringe of ginger-colored hair around the edges of a forehead which was
otherwise quite pink and bald. He was wearing a white uniform coat, and
the intertwined caduceus on the pocket and on the sleeve proclaimed him
a member of the Medical Service attached to the Civilian HQ of the
Terran Trade City.
I didn't stop to make all these evaluations consciously, of course. They
were just part of my world when I woke up and found it taking shape
around me. The familiar mountains, the familiar sun, the strange man.
But he spoke to me in a friendly way, as if it were an ordinary thing to
find a perfect stranger sprawled out taking a siesta in here.
"Could I trouble you to tell me your name?"
That was reasonable enough. If I found somebody making himself at home
in my office--if I had an office--I'd ask him his name, too. I started
to swing my legs to the floor, and had to stop and steady myself with
one hand while the room drifted in giddy circles around me.
[Illustration: The man in the mirror was a stranger.]
"I wouldn't try to sit up just yet," he remarked, while the floor calmed
down again. Then he repeated, politely but insistently, "Your name?"
"Oh, yes. My name." It was--I fumbled through layers of what felt like
gray fuzz, trying to lay my tongue on the most familiar of all sounds,
my own name. It was--why, it was--I said, on a high rising note, "This
is damn silly," and swallowed. And swallowed again. Hard.
"Calm down," the chubby man said soothingly. That was easier said than
done. I stared at him in growing panic and demanded, "But, but, have I
had amnesia or something?"
"Or something."
"What's my _name_?"
"Now, now, take it easy! I'm sure you'll remember it soon enough. You
can answer other questions, I'm sure. How old are you?"