I remembered the last instant of regret as I put my arms before my face and threw myself sideways in a vain attempt at escape.
The funny thing is that escape attempt had worked. The bullet that had smashed my forearm must have been deflected enough by the bone to carom off my skull, instead of catching it point blank and drilling on through. All this had produced satisfactory quantities of blood and an immobile body on the floor. That had caused Angelina’s mistake, her only one. The boom of the gun in that tiny room, my apparent corpse, the blood, it must have all rattled the female side of her, at least a bit. She had to leave fast before the shots were investigated and she had not taken that extra bit of time to make sure.
“Lie down,” the doctor said. “I’ll give you an injection that will knock you out for a week if you don’t lie down!”
Only when he said this did I realize I was half sitting up in the stretcher and chuckling a particularly dirty laugh. I let myself be pushed down easily, since my chest was drenched in pain whenever I moved.
Right at that moment my mind began ticking over plans for making the most of the situation. Ignoring the pain as well as I could I looked around the ambulance, looking for a way to capitalize on the bit of luck that had kept me still alive while she thought I was dead.
We pulled up at the hospital then, and there was nothing much I could do in the ambulance except steal the stylus and official forms from the rack above my head. My right arm was still good, though it hurt like fire whenever I moved. A robot snapped the wheels down on my stretcher, latched onto it and wheeled it inside. As it went by the doctor he slipped some papers into a holder near my head and waved goodbye to me. I gave him back a gallant smile as I trundled into the butcher shop.
As soon as he was out of sight I pulled out the papers and scanned them quickly. Here lay my opportunity if I had enough time to grab it. There was the doctor’s report—in quadruplicate. Until these forms were fed into the machinery I didn’t exist. I was in a statistical limbo out of which I would be born into the hospital. Stillborn if I had my way. I pushed my pillow off onto the corridor floor and the robot stopped. He paid no attention to my writing and didn’t seem to mind stopping two more times to rescue the pillow, giving me time to finish my forgery.
This Doctor Mcvbklz—at least that’s what his signature reads like—had a lot to learn about signing papers. He had left acres of clear space between the last line of the report and his signature. I filled this with a very passable imitation of his handwriting. “Massive internal hemorrhage, shock …” I wrote, “died en route.” This sounded official enough. I quickly added “All attempts resuscitation failed.” I had a moment of doubt about spelling this jaw breaker, but since Dr. Mcvbklz thought there were two P’s in multiple he could be expected to muff this one too. This last line made sure there wouldn’t be any hanky-panky with needles and electric prods to jazz some life back into the corpse. We turned out of the corridor just as I slipped the forms back into their slot and lay back trying to look dead.
“Here’s a D.O.A., Svend,” someone called out, rustling the papers behind my head. I heard the robot rolling away, untroubled by the fact that his writing, pillow-shedding patient was suddenly dead. This lack of curiosity is what I like about robots. I tried to think dead thoughts and hoped the right expression was showing on my face. Something jerked at my left foot and my boot and sock were pulled off. A hand grabbed my foot.
“How tragic,” this sympathetic soul said, “he’s still warm. Maybe we should put him on the table and get the revival team down.” What a nosy, mealymouthed, interfering sod he was.
“Nah,” the voice of a wiser and cooler head said from across the room. “They tried the works in the ambulance. Slide him in the box.”
A terrifying pain lanced through my foot and I almost gave the whole show away. Only the fiercest control enabled me to lie unmoving while this clown grimly tightened the wire around my big toe. There was a tag hanging from the wire and I heartily wished the same tag was hung from his ear secured by the same throttling wire. Pain from the toe washed up and joined the ache in my chest, head and arm, and I fought for corpselike rigidity as the stretcher trundled along.
Somewhere behind me a heavy door opened and a wave of frigid air struck my skin. I allowed myself a quick look through my lashes. If the corpses in this chop shop were stashed into individual freezers I was about to be suddenly restored to life. I could think of a lot more pleasant ways of dying than in an ice box with the door handle on the outside. Lady Luck was still galloping along at my shoulder because my toe-amputator was dragging me, stretcher and all, into a good-sized room. There were slabs on all sides and a number of dearly departed had already arrived before me.
With no attempt at gentleness I was slid onto a freezing surface. Footsteps went away from me across the room, the door closed heavily and the lights went out.
My morale hit bottom at this moment. I had been through a lot for one day, and was thoroughly battered, bruised, contused and concussed. Being
