#

I had sort of drifted away. When I came back, Brenda was bending over me. Considering her height, she had a long way to bend.

"How'd you find me?" I asked her.

"I'm a reporter, remember? It's my business to find things out."

I thought of several cutting replies, but something about the look on her face made me hold them back. Puppy love. I had vague memories of how badly that could hurt, when it wasn't returned.

And to give her her due, she was improving. Maybe she would be a reporter, some day.

"You needn't have bothered. It's not like I'm badly hurt. The head injuries were minimal."

"I'm not surprised. It would take a lot to hurt your head."

"The brain wasn't injured at . . ." I stopped, realizing she had just taken a jab at me. It had been pretty feeble, it hardly qualified as a joke -she might never master that skill-but it was something. I grinned at her.

"I was going to stop by Texas and bring that doctor . . . what was it you called him?"

"Sawbones. Pillroller. Quack. Caulker. Nepenthe. Leech. Lazarmonger."

Her smile grew a little glassy; I could see her filing the terms away for later research.

I was smiling, but the truth is, even with current medical practices, being paralyzed from the waist down is a frightening thing. We have an entirely different attitude toward our bodies than most humans down the ages, we don't fear injury and we can turn off pain and we generally treat flesh and bone as just items to be fixed, but when things are badly wrong something in the most primitive level of our brain stands up on its hind legs and howls at the Earth. I was having a galloping anxiety attack that the painkiller plugged into my medulla wasn't dealing with at all. I have no idea if Brenda realized this, but her presence at my bedside was strangely comforting. I was glad she was there. I took her hand.

"Thanks for coming," I said. She squeezed my hand, then looked away.

#

Eventually the planned casualties stopped streaming in, and a team of medicos assembled around me. They plugged me in to a dozen machines, studied the results, huddled, and murmured, just as if what they thought really mattered, as if the medical computer was not entirely in control of my diagnosis and treatment.

They came to a decision, which was to turn me onto my stomach. I surmised they had concluded it would be easier to reach my broken spine that way. I'd better not ever hear medicos called overpaid blood-monkeys again.

They began to carve. I couldn't feel it, but I could hear some really disgusting sounds. You know those wet-muck special-effect sounds they use in the movies when someone's being disemboweled? They could have recorded them right over my broken back. At one point something thumped to the floor. I peered over the edge of the bed: it looked like a raw soup bone. It was hard to believe it had once belonged to me.