She did as she was told, leaving, for the two paces she traveled, two brief footprints of fire. She teetered on the board. Visibly, her hair began to stir.
“What’s happening to me?” she cried.
“You’re getting charged after all,” he said jovially but at this point she failed to appreciate the extension of even her own witticism.
She cried again, “What’s happening to me?”
“It’s all right,” he said consolingly.
He went to the bench and turned on a tone generator.
It moaned deep in the one to three hundred cycle range.
He increased the volume and turned the pitch control.
It howled upward and, as it did so, her red-gold hair shivered and swept up and out, each hair attempting frantically to gat away from all the others. He ran the tone up above ten thousand cycles and all the way back to a belly-bumping inaudible eleven. At the extremes her hair slumped but at around eleven hundred it stood out in, as she had described it, golliwog style. She could feel it.
He turned down the gain to a more or less bearable level and picked up the electroscope. He came toward her, smiling.
“You are an electroscope, you know that? And a living Van de Graaf generator as well. And a golliwog.”
“Let me down,” was all she could say.
“Not yet. Please hang tight. The differential between you and everything else here is so high that if you got near any of it you’d discharge into it. It wouldn’t harm you—it isn’t current electricity—but you might get a burn and a nervous shock out of it.” He held out the electroscope. Even at that distance—and in her distress—she could see the gold leaves writhe apart. He circled her, watching the leaves attentively, moving the instrument forward and back and from side to side. Once he went to the tone generator and turned it down some more.
“You’re sending such a strong field I can’t pick up the variations,” he explained and returned to her, coming closer now.
“I can’tmuch more1 can’t,” she murmured.
He did not hear or he did not care. He ‘moved the electroscope near her abdomen, up and from side to side.
“Yup. There you are,” he said cheerfully, moving the instrument close to her right breast.
“What?” she whimpered.
“Your cancer. Right breast, low, around toward the armpit.” He whistled. “A mean one, too. Malignant as hell.”
She swayed and then collapsed forward and down. A sick blackness swept down on her, receded explosively in a glare of agonizing blue-white and then crashed down on her like a mountain falling.
Place where wall meets ceiling. Another wall, another ceiling. Hadn’t seen it before. Didn’t matter. Don’t care.
Sleep.
Place where wall meets ceiling. Something in the way.
His face, close, drawn, tired—eyes awake, though, and penetrating. Doesn’t matter. Don’t care.
Sleep.
Place where wall meets ceiling. Down a bit, late sun-light. Over a little, rusty-gold chrysanthemums in a gold- green glass cornucopia. Something in the way again—his face.
“Can you hear me?”
Yes, but don’t answer. Don’t move. Don’t speak.
Sleep.
It’s a room, a wall, a table, a man pacing—a nighttime window and mums you’d think were alive but don’t you know they’re cut right off and dying?
Do they know that?
“How are you?”
Urgent, urgent.
“Thirsty.”
Cold and a bite to it that aches the hinges of ‘the jaws.
Grapefruit juice. Lying back on his arm while he holds the glass in the other hand.
O/i, no, that’s not …
“Thank you. Thanks very”
Try to sit up. The sheet—my clothes!
“Sorry about that,” he said, the mind—reader-almost-
“Some things that have to be done just aren’t consistent with pantyhose and a minidress. All washed and dried and ready for you, though—any time. Over there.”
