In the dim light that comes over the land just after sunset but before true dark, during one of those very few minutes that moviemakers call “the magic hour,” Vic Palfrey rose out of green delirium to brief lucidity.

I’m dying, he thought, and the words clanged strangely through his mind, making him believe he had spoken aloud, although he had not. He gazed around himself and saw a hospital bed, now cranked up to keep his lungs from drowning in themselves. He had been tightly secured with brass laundry-pins, and the sides of the bed were up. Been thrashing some, I guess, he thought with faint amusement. Been kicking up dickins. And belatedly: Where am I?

There was a bib around his neck and the bib was covered with clots of phlegm. His head ached. Queer thoughts danced in and out of his mind and he knew he had been delirious… and would be again. He was sick and this was not a cure or the beginning of one, but only a brief respite.

He put the inside of his right wrist against his forehead and pulled it away with a wince, the way you pull your hand off a hot stove. Burning up, all right, and full of tubes. Two small clear plastic ones were coming out of his nose. Another one snaked out from under the hospital sheet to a bottle on the floor, and he surely knew where the other end of that one was connected. Two bottles hung suspended from a rack beside the bed, a tube coming from each one and then joining to make a Y that ended by going into his arm just below the elbow. An IV feed.

You’d think that would be enough, he thought. But there were wires on him as well. Attached to his scalp. And chest. And left arm. One seemed to be plastered into his sonofabitching belly-button. And to cap it all off, he was pretty sure something was jammed up his ass. What in God’s name could that one be? Shit radar?

“Hey!”

He had intended a resonant, indignant shout. What he produced was the humble whisper of a very sick man. It came out surrounded on all sides by the phlegm on which he seemed to be choking.

Mamma, did George put the horse in?

That was the delirium talking. An irrational thought, zooming boldly across the field of more rational cogitation like a meteor. All the same, it almost fooled him for a second. He wasn’t going to be up for long. The thought filled him with panic. Looking at the scrawny sticks of his arms, he guessed he had lost as much as thirty pounds, and there hadn’t been all that much of him to start with. This… this whatever-it-was… was going to kill him. The idea that he might die babbling insanities and inanities like a senile old man terrified him.

Georgie’s gone courting Norma Willis. You get that horse your ownself, Vic, and put his nosebag on like a good boy.

Ain’t my job.

Victor, you love your mamma, now.

I do. But it ain’t —

You got to love your mamma, now. Mamma’s got the flu. No you don’t, Mamma. You got TB. It’s the TB that’s going to kill you. In nineteen and forty-seven. And George is going to die just about six days after he gets to Korea, time enough for just one letter and then bang bang bang. George is —

Vic, you help me now and put that horse in and that is my last word ON it.

“I’m the one with the flu, not her,” he whispered, surfacing again. “It’s me.”

He was looking at the door, and thinking it was a damn funny door even for a hospital. It was round at the corners, outlined with pop-rivets, and the lower jamb was set six inches or more up from the tile floor. Even a jackleg carpenter like Vic Palfrey could

(gimme the funnies Vic you had em long enough)

(Mamma he took my funny-pages! Give em back! Give em baaaack!)

build better than that. It was

(steel)

Something in the thought drove a nail deep into his brain and Vic struggled to sit up so he could see the door better. Yes, it was. It definitely was. A steel door. Why was he in a hospital behind a steel door? What had happened? Was he really dying? Had he best be thinking of just how he was going to meet his God? God, what had happened? He tried desperately to pierce the hanging gray fog, but only voices came through, far away, voices he could put no names against.

Now what I say is this… they just got to say… “fuck this inflation shit… ”

Better turn off your pumps, Hap.

(Hap? Bill Hapscomb? Who was he? I know that name)

Holy moly…

They’re dead, okay…

Gimme your hand and I’ll pull you up outta there…

Gimme the funnies Vic you had —

At that moment the sun sank far enough below the horizon to cause a light-activated circuit (or in this case, an absence-of-light-activated circuit) to kick in. The lights went on in Vic’s room. As the room lit up, he saw the row of faces observing him solemnly from behind two layers of glass and he screamed, at first thinking these were the people who had been holding conversations in his mind. One of the figures, a man in doctor’s whites, was gesturing urgently to someone outside Vic’s field of vision, but Vic was already over his scare. He was too weak to stay scared long. But the sudden fright that had come with the silent bloom of light and this vision of staring faces (like a jury of ghosts in their hospital whites) had cleared away some of the blockage in his mind and he knew where he was. Atlanta. Atlanta, Georgia. They had come and taken him away—him and Hap and Norm and Norm’s wife and Norm’s kids. They had taken Hank Carmichael. Stu Redman. God alone knew how many others. Vic had been scared and indignant. Sure, he had the snuffles and sneezes, but he surely wasn’t coming down with cholera or whatever it was that poor man Campion and his family had had. He’d been running a low-grade fever, too, and he remembered that Norm Bruett had stumbled and needed help getting up the steps to the plane. His wife had been scared, crying, and little Bobby Bruett had been crying too—crying and coughing. A raspy, croupy cough. The plane had been at the small landing strip outside of Braintree, but to get beyond the Arnette town limits they had had to pass a roadblock on US 93, and men had been stringing bobwire… stringing bobwire right out into the desert…

A red light flashed on over the strange door. There was a hissing sound, then a sound like a pump running. When it kicked off, the door opened. The man who came in was dressed in a huge white pressure suit with a transparent faceplate. Behind the faceplate, the man’s head bobbed like a balloon enclosed in a capsule. There were pressure tanks on his back, and when he spoke, his voice was metallic and clipped, devoid of all human quality. It might have been a voice coming from one of those video games, like the one that said “Try again, Space Cadet” when you fucked up your last go.

It rasped: “How are you feeling, Mr. Palfrey?”

But Vic couldn’t answer. Vic had gone back down into the green depths. It was his mamma he saw behind the faceplate of the white-suit. Mamma had been dressed in white when Poppa took him and George to see her for the last time in the sanny-tarium. She had to go to the sanny-tarium so everybody else in the fambly wouldn’t catch what she had. TB was catching. You could die.

He talked to his mamma… said he would be good and put in the horse… told her George had taken the funnies… asked her if she felt better… asked her if she thought she would be home soon… and the man in the white-suit gave him a shot and he sank deeper and his words became incoherent. The man in the white-suit glanced back at the faces behind the glass wall and shook his head.

He clicked an intercom switch inside his helmet with his chin and said, “If this one doesn’t work, we’ll lose him by midnight.”