The brown wool and the pantyhose and the shoes, on the chair.
He’s respectful, standing back, putting the glass next to an insulated carafe on the night table.
“What things?”
“Throwing up. Bedpans,” he said candidly.
Protective with the sheet, which can hide bodies bat Oh—not embarrassment.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Oh. I must have”
Shake head and he slides back and forth in the vision.
“You went into shock and then you just didn’t come out of it.”
He hesitated. It was the first time she had ever seen him hesitate over anything. She became for a moment an almost-mindreader.
Should I tell her what’s in my mind?
Sure, he should. And he did.
“You didn’t want to come out of it.”
“It’s all gone out of my head.”
“The pear tree, the electroscope. The injection, the electrostatic response.”
“No,” she said, not knowing. Then, knowing: “No!”
“Hang on,” he rapped and next thing she knew he was by the bed, over her, his two hands hard on her cheeks.
“Don’t slip off again. You can handle it. You can handle it because it’s all right now, do you understand that?
You’re all right.”
“You told me I had cancer.”
She sounded pouty, accusing.
He laughed at her, actually laughed.
“You told me you had it.”
“Oh, but I didn’t know.”
“That explains it, then,” he said in a load-off-my-baok tone. “There wasn’t anything in what I did that could cause a three-day withdrawal like that. It had to be something in you.”
“Three days!”
He simply nodded and went on with what he was saying.
“I get a little pompous once in awhile,” he said en-gagingly. “Comes from being right so much of the time.
Took a bit more for granted than I should have, didn’t I?
When I assumed you’d been to a doctor, maybe even had a biopsy? You hadn’t, had you?”
“I was afraid,” she admitted. She looked at him. “My mother died of it—and my aunt—and my sister had a radical mastectomy. I couldn’t bear it. And when you”
“When I told you what you already knew and what you never wanted to hear—you couldn’t take it. You blacked right out, you know. Fainted away. And it had nothing to do’ with the seventy-odd thousand volts of static you were carrying. I caught you.” He put out his aims where they were, on display, until she looked at them and saw the angry red scorch marks on his fore-arms and heavy biceps, as much of them as she could see from under his short- sleeved shirt. “About nine-tenths knocked me out too,” he said. “But at least you didn’t crack your head or anything.”
“Thank you,” she said reflexively and then began to cry. “What am .1 going to do?”
“Do? Go back home, wherever that is—pick up your life again, whatever that might mean.”
“But you said”
“When are you going to get it into your head that what I did was not a diagnostic?”
“Are you—did you—you mean you cured it?”
“I mean you’re curing it right now. I explained it all to you ‘before. You remember that now, don’t you?”
“Not altogether but—yes.” Surreptitiously (but not enough, because he saw her) she felt under it—he sheet for the lump. “It’s still there.”
“If I bopped you over the head with a bat,” he said with slightly exaggerated simplicity, “there would be a lump on it. It would be there tomorrow and the next day.
The day after that it might be smaller. In a week you’d still be able to feel it but it would be gone. Same thing here.”
At last she let the enormity of it touch her. “A one-shot cure for cancer”
“Oh, God,” he said harshly. “I can tell by looking at you that I am going to have to listen to that speech again.
