Aurelia nodded.
“Excellent. Let us begin.”
Nylund wheeled in a cart that held a row of ampules and vials.
“Where is Boggs?” asked Thompson. “He wanted to be here too.”
“I told his secretary,” said Dr. Barth. “He’ll be here any minute.”
Someone fixed a basket of encephalograph wires into position over Gavein’s head, and someone else attached EKG electrodes to him.
Dr. Barth prepared another injection. “You left the needle in the vein?” he asked the nurse.
She said yes.
“What’s this?” asked Siskin.
“The first dose. In five minutes I give the next. After another five, the last.”
Slowly he pressed the contents of the syringe into Gavein’s vein. The monitor that recorded Gavein’s life signs started beeping quietly.
Gavein grew lighter, brighter somehow. His surroundings took on color, and things weaved even more than they had with the sedative. Dr. Barth’s nose increased to ludicrous proportions. Thompson’s meaty face gleamed pink and more and more resembled the snout of a pig. Gavein looked at Siskin: the man’s thin face was surrounded by a halo of flame. Making a great effort, Gavein saw that it was only the man’s red hair. By straining his mind and focusing, he could reduce the hallucinations.
“Where are the notes?” Bogg’s voice rang like a bell.
The answer didn’t reach Gavein’s ears.
“The next dose now,” said Dr. Barth, turning to Siskin. As he spoke, his tongue touched and moved the end of his extremely long nose, from left to right and back. Aurelia spread the white wings of her lab coat and took to the air, floating where the wall met the ceiling. The windows expanded and contracted, having assumed the outline of a woman’s lips. The curtains reminded Gavein of Ra Mahleiné’s uneven teeth. He looked more carefully at the fluttering figure in white and found that it wasn’t Aurelia at all but his wife. Ra Mahleiné looked good in a white dress and wings. Gavein felt Dr. Barth tugging with his fingers at a vein. No doubt the physician wanted to stick his nose in, to smell out the secret of why only those who had crossed the path of David Death died.
“He’s received the second dose. Everything is proceeding according to plan. I told you that this was the only way.”
Near the ceiling Gavein saw a dark shape beside Ra Mahleiné. He couldn’t focus on it. Finally he focused. It was himself floating next to her. He was in a black fake-leather jumpsuit with skulls embroidered on it. Each skull had glittering red gems for eyes. On the back of the jacket was the biggest skull, silver, and beneath it two crossed bones.
If I’m looking at myself from the front, how can I see what’s on my back? he wondered.
“His pulse is up, but the responses are all normal.”
His pulse was a small chubby cupid flitting about the room, faster and faster. From Ra Mahleiné’s eyes came yellow sunbeams. Gold in her eyes, he thought, means she’s angry.
“Stop breathing in so greedily, there won’t be air for others,” Ra Mahleiné barked. She was indeed furious. “Washing yourself in the shower, you splashed so much, I couldn’t sleep. You could have done it more quietly.”
Wilcox rushed past, all gray. And bent curiously, like a stork.
“Be careful he doesn’t suck out your veins,” Ra Mahleiné warned. “He’s collecting blood for Brenda, because she slit her wrists and it all came out.”
Wilcox straightened. He was extraordinarily tall and so wide he took up half the room. His face was like a piece of rumpled cloth, the eyes, nose, and mouth painted on.
“I think he’s still conscious,” Wilcox said. “He reacts to light.”
“Yes, senator,” said Dr. Barth, and with his tongue moved the tip of his nose from his left ear to his right. “But after the third dose now, he’ll sleep.”
A turtle rode around the room. On its shell stood little vials of alcohol and fluids: yellow, clear, and reddish. The shell was flat, the legs high, the feet wheels.
“Just don’t go and get a chill,” said Ra Mahleiné, shaking a finger. “They hardly covered you with a sheet.”
Wilcox sucked the blood from his vein.
If it’s for Brenda, Gavein thought, then I guess he can have a little.
Wilcox wiped his mouth with a sleeve and tied the vein in a looped knot.
“And after the third dose?” asked Siskin, whose head bounced on a spring as he looked at Gavein from a height.
The room pulsed and gave off rainbow rings. Inside the rings, as inside the frame of a painting, were Ra Mahleiné, Wilcox, himself in the black jumpsuit, Dr. Barth, Siskin, Thompson, and a white turtle with a cylindrical head.
“The pupils no longer react. He must be out.”
“This time, finally, we should succeed,” stated a hog in the voice of General Thompson. “So much effort, so many victims.”
“His field is narrowing now. When the body is completely without feeling, we give the gas,” hissed Dr. Barth.
“What is his Significant Name?” asked Wilcox. “Yacrod? Myzzt?”
“Aeriel.”
“So, then, there won’t be an operation?” Wilcox asked further, in the voice of Boggs.
It seemed to Gavein that he was a television set, showing all the action but unable to act himself.
“The autopsy,” said Dr. Barth with a grim chuckle, “will be very thorough.”
Gavein saw him through a thickening cloud and couldn’t tell if the man was still moving his nose from ear to ear.
“If he survives the gas, it will be a vivisection, not an autopsy.”
“That should take care of him, senator,” Siskin said. “We’ll leave the organs out, in the air, because he’s an Aeriel. To make sure he doesn’t come back.”
“What about his wife?” asked Wilcox.
“Still alive.”
“Is she Death too?”
“We’re not sure. Probably not, since she has cancer.”
The voices were coming from inside Gavein’s skull. They grew softer. It was harder for him to distinguish among the speakers. Only he, in the black jacket, said nothing. It was harder also to form thoughts. The gray mist before his eyes spread like mold. He felt no pain. His field of vision was the diameter of the face of a watch, and all the figures in it were dwindling. Soon it resembled a small metal ball, blinking with different colors as it hung in the darkness of outer space.
The ball began to rotate. To jump in all directions. Gavein felt a sharp, deepening pain. The ball meanwhile had floated away, far away. He lost consciousness.
54
When he woke, it was to two torments: the ache throughout his body and an awful tedium. He threw up once, twice, three times. There was nothing left to bring up, but his stomach muscles still spasmed. His heart hammered wildly. Then he drifted back into oblivion.
When he came to again, it was cold. He moved. He was partly covered with something, battered, naked. Vomit stank around him, but another smell bored into his nostrils. His eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and he saw it wasn’t completely dark. It was surprisingly easy to move his head. He brushed rubble from it, raising a cloud of dust, which made him sneeze several times. He tried changing position, but a thousand edges, corners, and the dust itself all began to claw at his skin.
He freed his left arm first. Slowly, methodically, he removed stone after stone, brick fragment after brick fragment. He was badly bruised but, in all the rubble and dust, had apparently sustained no serious injury. He dug himself out with new energy. It was hardest to extricate his right leg from under the gurney, which was locked in place by the mound of rubble. He wriggled out from under the mound carefully, so it wouldn’t fall on him.