been a healthy stump. The child might live for years, not knowing who he was or where he was, let alone why he was, watching people come and go like trees in the mist...
Lois was standing with her shoulders slumped, looking at the floor of the elevator car and radiating a sadness that squeezed Ralph's heart. He reached out, put a finger under her chin, and watched a delicate blue rose spin itself out of the place where his aura touched hers. He tilted her head up and was not surprised to see tears in her eyes.
"Do you still think it's all pretty wonderful, Lois?" he asked softly, and to this he received no answer, either with his ears or in his mind.
They were the only two to get out on the third floor, where the silence was as thick as the dust under library shelves. A pair of nurses stood halfway up the hall, clipboards held to white-clad bosoms, talking in low whispers. Anyone else standing by the elevators might have looked at them and surmised a conversation dealing with life, death, and heroic measures; Ralph and Lois, however, took one look at their overlapping auras and knew that the subject currently under discussion was where to go for a drink when their shift ended.
Ralph saw this and at the same time he didn't, the way a deeply preoccupied man sees and obeys traffic signals without really seeing them. Most of his mind was occupied with a deadly sense of deja vu which had washed over him the moment he and Lois stepped out of the ' elevator and into this world where the faint squeak of the nurses shoes on the linoleum sounded almost exactly like the faint beep of the life-support equipment.
Even-numbered rooms on your left,-odd-numbered rooms on your right, he thought, and 317, where Carolyn died, is up by the nurses' station. It was 317, all right-I remember. Now that I'm here I remember everything. How someone was always sticking her chart in the little pocket on the back of the door upside down. How the light from the window fell across the bed in a kind of crooked rectangle on sunny days. How you could sit in the visitor's chair and look out at the desk-nurse, whose job it is to monitor vital signs, incoming telephone calls, and outgoing pizza orders.
The same. All the same. It was early March again, the gloomy end of a leaden, overcast day, sleet beginning to spick-spack off the one window of Room 317, and he had been sitting in the visitor's chair with an unopened copy of Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in his lap since early morning. Sitting there, not wanting to get up even long enough to use the bathroom because the deathwatch had almost run down by then, each tick was a lurch and the gap between each tick and the next was a lifetime; his long-time companion had a train to catch and he wanted to be on the platform to see her off.
There would only be one chance to do it right.
It was very easy to hear the sleet as it picked up speed and velocity, because the life-support equipment had been turned off.
Ralph had given up during the last week of February; it had taken Carolyn, I who had never g yen up in her I'fe, a little longer to get the message.
And what, exactly, was that message? Why that, in a hard-fought ten-round match pitting Carolyn Roberts against Cancer, the winner was Cancer, that all-time heavyweight champeen, by a TKO.
He had sat in the visitor's chair, watching and waiting as her respiration long, sighing exhale, grew more and more pronounced-the the flat, moveless chest, the growing certainty that the last breath had indeed been the last breath, that the watch had run down, the train arrived in the station to take on its single passenger... and then another huge, unconscious gasp would come as she tore the next lungful out of the unfriendly air, no longer breathing in any normal sense but only lunging reflexively along from one gasp to the next like a drunk lurching down a long dark corridor in a cheap hotel.
Spickle-spickle-spackle-spackle: the sleet had gone on rapping invisible fingernails against the window as the dirty March day drew down to dirty March dark and Carolyn went on fighting the last half of her last round. By then she had been running completely on autopilot, of