I was trying to bring back some details of that when I fell asleep again, and woke to find Sir Westcott Shaw sitting in his favorite place at the end of the bed.

He was holding two apples in one paw (did the man live on them?) and nodded amiably to me when he saw my eyes were open.

“How are you feeling?”

“Terrible.” My ribs were killing me, and so was my right leg.

“Right. I thought you might be. I dropped your dose of painkillers in half.”

“You’re very kind.”

“I thought you ought to be as alert as possible for this session.”

“How’s Leo?”

“If you’ll give me a minute, I’ll tell you. But first off I want to ask you just a few questions. All right?”

“Whatever you like.” I didn’t try and hide my impatience.

He reached down and picked up a pad from the floor next to his feet, then fished out a stub of pencil from his inside jacket pocket. I looked again at the heavy boots, and the fat, banana-bunch fingers.

“Are you sure you’re a doctor and not a policeman?

He looked at me sympathetically. “Pain’s pretty bad, eh? I’ll keep this as short as I can, then we’ll give you a jab. I’ll start with the easy stuff. What’s your name?”

“It’s still Lionel Salkind.”

“Good. You’re saying that a sight better than you could this time last week. How old are you?”

“Thirty-seven — unless you’ve had me unconscious for a few more months and not told me about it.”

“Not this time. Now, I want you to think for a minute before you answer this one. I know your head hurts like hell, and I know we’ve bunged you full up with drugs. Try and allow for all that, and tell me, does your head feel normal?”

I tried. It didn’t. My thoughts ran in swooping, random patterns, dipping away from the question and back again. I had to concentrate on every word he said, and for the first time I realized I had been like this ever since I woke up after the accident.

“No,” I said at last. “My head feels funny.”

“I’m not surprised. Do you think you can describe it better — give it something more than saying it feels ‘funny’?”

“It reminds me of the way I feel when I speak French or German after a long time without using it. I have to grope around for what I want to say, looking for words. And when you speak to me I have to listen very hard to grasp what you’re getting at.”

“Good way of putting it.” He scowled down at the page, then stuck the pencil up behind his ear. “One more question, then I’ll talk for a while. What can you remember about your accident? Take your time, and tell it in any order you like.”

I had to work hard at answering that. So long as I didn’t try to pin events down closely, my memory seemed to be clear about what happened. But when I thought hard, events became confused and wandering. It was like trying to look at a very faint star. So long as you look a little away from it, your sensitive peripheral vision lets you see it. When you turn your attention to it directly, it just winks out of existence.

He showed no impatience as I went through my mental struggles, but when at last I spoke he leaned forward intently, nodding now and again. He said nothing until I described the two men who had entered the wreck and searched me and Leo for something, then he frowned and shook his head unhappily.

“That worries me. It sounds like pure hallucination from start to finish, I was hoping we wouldn’t run into any of that.”

“It’s not hallucination. I remember it clearly, and that’s just how it happened.”

He shrugged. “I’m sure that’s the way you remember it. The records say otherwise. The first people at the crash were a carload of farmers who saw the helicopter come down from a few fields away. They didn’t search you, and they brought you straight here. Just as well that they did. Half an hour later, and we’d have been able to do nothing for you. You had a close call.”

“But I’m telling you, it happened the way I said. We were searched.”

“I don’t want to beat that point to death — we can talk about it more later. I promised you some explanations today, and I think you’re well enough to take them. But it will take a few minutes. Stop me if this gets to be too much, or if you have trouble following what I’m saying, Otherwise, let me talk.”

He took a manila folder — he had been sitting on it — opened it, and started to read from it in a flat, toneless voice. The beginning was simple and unpleasant enough: my list of injuries when they logged me into the Emergency Room at Queen’s Hospital Annex in Reading .

Lionel Salkind, British subject.

Crushed right leg below the knee; broken tibia and fibula, compound fracture; broken patella; crushed talus, crushed navicular, broken metatarsals.

Broken right femur, compound fracture, with severed sartorius muscle. Crushed right testicle and epididymis.

Fractured eight, ninth, tenth, and eleventh ribs, penetrating the costal pleura and piercing the right lung.

Ruptured spleen.

Damaged right kidney, and severed renal artery.

If I had been feeling sick when Sir Westcott began his catalog, I grew sicker as he went on with it.

“Don’t just keep reading that,” I said to him, when be showed no signs of stopping. “Tell me what you can do about it.”

He waved his hand at me without looking up. “I’m keeping this as short as I can. There’s a lot of messy detail for all these that don’t help us at all. Let me get to the bad part. Here we are. Head injuries.”

Crushed right middle and inner ear and severed pharyngo-tympanic tube.

Crushed right mastoid, sphenoid, temporal and occipital bones, with fragment penetration of right frontal, temporal, and parietal brain lobes. Crushed cuneus and precuneus. Right cerebral cortex shows numerous lesions and approximately fifty percent tissue destruction.

He coughed. “Prognosis: terminal.”

Then he looked at me to see my reaction. I couldn’t speak, but the punch line of an old tall story would have been the thing to offer. “So what happened to you then, Bill?” “What happened to me? Why, I died, of course.”

Prognosis: terminal.

If you want a phrase guaranteed to send you over the edge into lunacy, there’s my candidate.

I gave a sort of hysterical titter. “What are you telling me? That I died and now I’m in Hell?”

“Nothing so sensational. Let me finish.” He pulled another sheet of paper from his folder. “Your brother.”

Leo Foss, United States subject. Broken pelvis.

Broken lower mandible, broken humerus.

Damaged and crushed liver, lacerated pancreas, lacerated stomach.

Shattered spinal column, crushed lumbar, thoracic, and cervical vertebrae, crushed medulla, severed spinal cord in cervical region.

He looked up at me. “There’s more, but it all tells the same story. Prognosis: terminal. For ten different reasons.”

At that point he laid down his folder, pulled an apple out of his pocket, and fished about for his clasp knife. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Was he going to settle in and munch one now, leaving Leo and me with our terminal prognoses while he had a mid-afternoon snack?

“You see,” he said — now he was deliberately opening the knife. “I knew I had a problem within five minutes of you being brought into the hospital. I could fix your broken leg, after a fashion. You’d not walk on that ankle, but I’d have taken it off at the knee, anyway. And I could have done a halfway decent job on your ribs and lung, too. You’d have had to manage on one kidney and one ear, but there’s plenty of people who do that, an’ get along very well with it. Only your very close friends would ever get to know that you only had one testicle, so that didn’t worry me, either. You see the problem? It was that smashed skull, and the damaged brain lobes. The right-hand side, in by the ear, that was a mess. It was all bubble-an’-squeak, no good to anybody. I might have been able to keep you alive for a couple of weeks, and that would have been it.”