He’d initially voted to have it off, he’d told her, knowing quite a bit about the current state of prosthetics, a field being rapidly driven by America’s wars, with their massive improvements in rates of wound survival. But the surgeons the old man had gotten him to were chancers, he said, and he’d found himself infected by their eagerness to see what they could do, out at the very edge of the possible. This had caused her to weep again, and he’d held her, and made jokes, until it passed. And he’d been curious, too, about the officially nonexistent levels of expertise and technology he’d correctly assumed to be involved. Something demanding the temporary severing of certain nerves had been the least pleasant part of it, he’d said, and the recent procedures in Germany had been to reconnect those, so that he could now feel, increasingly, what Frank was feeling. Which, while not pleasant by any means, was far superior to previous disconnection, and absolutely essential in terms of getting back to walking.