Free The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Four by Randall Farmer Page A

paranoid.  Her hair was a wig
and she was dressed as a female factory worker.  Smudges covered her face, she
had an M-16 slung over her right shoulder, and as she walked she clanked, or
her small backpack clanked.  Extra ammo.  A great deal of extra ammo.
    What, did she expect he would visit a potentially
hostile Arm armed?
    At least she was past her pawnshop pistol phase.
    As he set up the mirrors, the easels and a small TV
table for his notes, an armed man walked out of the shadows toward them.  Hank
froze, but Keaton didn’t.  She signaled with one finger, and the man followed, to
stand beside Hank’s Mercedes.  Blocking the driver’s side door of the
Mercedes.  He, too, carried a walkie-talkie, and proved Hank’s guess about
Keaton hiring other thugs correct when he talked to one of them on the
walkie-talkie.
    “Ma’am,” he said.  “You aren’t the first Arm to suffer
from these particular muscle issues.  I can help.”
    “Fine.  Give me the magic pill or injection and get the
hell out of here,” Keaton said.
    “It’s not that simple, ma’am.”
    She strode up to him and looked him in the eye.  “How
so?”  He didn’t know how she did so, but she, at just over five feet tall, was
about the most intimidating human being he had ever met, and he had met some
real winners in his day.
    Was this the Arm equivalent of the Focus lie-detector
trick?  If so, she needed practice.  “It’s based on knowledge, and you can cure
yourself with an appropriate change in diet and exercise.”
    Keaton relaxed.  “Huh.”  She looked at his set up.  “Who
the fuck are these idiots?
    “The picture on the left is a standard male muscle
anatomy chart,” he said.  “Male, because, well, they don’t make any female
anatomy charts with the right muscle proportions.  On the center easel is a
blown up and annotated photograph of Focus Abernathy” who wouldn’t have been at
all amused to find out he had this with him today, when he visited “and the
next easel over has a blown up and annotated photograph of a more recently
transformed Focus who goes by the name of Mother.”  Mother wore considerably
more clothes.  Focus Abernathy had been willing to strip down to her panties
and bra, quite proud of the way she looked.  He hadn’t gotten Mother to reveal
more than her arms and legs.
    “Huh again,” Keaton said.  “I hadn’t realized the
Focuses got the same shit body changes I have.”  She walked over to the
Abernathy poster and pointed to the ankles and wrists, then turned to the
standard anatomy poster.  “Joe the normal here’s muscles are different.”
    So much for his long prepared lecture.  Damn, but the
Arms were good at this sort of thing.  He had Doctors with twenty years of
experience miss these subtle changes until he showed them.  Twice.  “Not the
muscles, but the attachment points, where the muscle tendons attach to the
bones,” he said.  They tended all to be uniformly wider, and closer to the central
joints, which increased reaction times at the cost of reduced leverage and
strength.
    “This one,” Keaton said, pointing at the Abernathy
poster, “has more changes than this one.”  Pointing at the Mother poster.  Fully
engaged, her bad mood vanished.
    “Five years versus two years as a Focus,” Hank said. 
“Your changes are happening much faster, ma’am, because you’re an Arm and have
a much higher juice count.”  He watched her as she studied the diagrams.  “The
relevance of this to your problem is thus: all Major Transforms subtly remake
their bodies.  The problem with your painful joints is due to this remaking
process going haywire.  I found this hard to believe when I first discovered
this issue, but you’re growing muscle tissue inside your joints, what I term
muscle nodules.”
    “Huh,” Keaton said.  She circled around him and stuck
her head over his right shoulder.  Disquieting.  “Who had this problem before? 
One of your earlier