He lay and waited. His body was trembling but he heeded neither this nor its pain. He heard feet upon a stairway—and then the slight clicking sound of a doorhandle gently turned and a little, extra stirring of the air in the room, and then, hushed almost to a whisper, her voice.
“I
Otto moistened his lips with his tongue. He was going to speak—and then he would see her again and know whether it had been true, the tremendous, the vital importance of that recognition between them. He was afraid to find out—but he must. He said:
“Please, I am awake,” and waited without breathing while the light feet and the heavy approached the bed and then came into his sight.
He saw a man first—and his eyes went past the man and saw her—and he knew that it had been true. The dark eyes flickered over his, barely grazing his steady gaze—but it was enough. He found that his whole body had been taut, but now he relaxed it. He was breathing fast.
The doctor pulled up a chair and sat beside the bed and peered down at his patient. He said:
“Well, well. Feeling a little more like yourself, I see.” He put out a hand and felt for the pulse in Otto’s wrist. “You’re a very lucky young man—very lucky!”
And, after that first waking, after the realization that she was there and was real, time ceased to have its ordinary applications for him. It was not that he was unconscious for long periods, or delirious or drugged or out of his senses, although he may have been, for brief intervals, each and all of these. It was rather that, for him in his illness, time functioned upon a different basis from the normal: the earth went around the sun in vague rotation—but beyond that point ceased all similarity to time as he had known it. He was here, and his body was broken and sick: he was here, and while his body was mending, the dividing-lines of man-made time, those barrier-lines which mark off minutes and hours and days and weeks, all faded into nothingness: instead of a rigidly charted, ever-adding sequence of periods was just a round map of being. Things happened upon this map, haphazard and almost incessantly, but they marked no progression in any mathematical dimension; they were unco-ordinate fillings-in of the blankness of the map; fillings-in which would eventually complete the map and make him whole.
So he lay—and things happened and the fillings-in mounted and added and brought him ever nearer to recovery. But because the pressure of the time-chart had been removed from him, the happenings which made the fillings-in were each an individual problem or excitement or pleasure or suffering: they made no chain; they were unconnected units of Event, objective in the main but sometimes of his own engineering.
As, for instance, the question of drugs. They wished to give him drugs: they said that drugs would help his recovery by making sleep easier for him. They said this and much more—but he would not take the drugs, after they had once or twice been given to him, because he was afraid.
The fear was two-headed: he was afraid, equally, that with no command over himself he might in some way betray Nils Jorgensen and the Machine, and he was afraid, with a sick and different fear, of the pictures he might see. The pictures, as he found when they gave him morphia again that first time the doctor came, were worse even than the voices.
To win his fight for no drugs he had to have help, her help. He achieved it simply, by asking her for it. She was sitting in a deep chair by the window which faced the foot of his bed: she was reading, and the light of a shaded lamp cast its soft gold circle downwards and touched bright gleamings from the coiled smooth darkness of her hair.
He spoke—and she set down the book and rose and was beside him in a swift, graceful instant.
And he told her. He said:
“They must not give me drugs. The sleep is not good then.” His voice was laboured and the words were slow and heavy with the care of their selection. He said:
“Sleep with the drugs is bad. In my case. I am more tired after the sleep than before.”
He kept his eyes upon her face, but her eyes were guarded. She did not cast them down nor veil them studiedly—but they seemed, without any sign of deliberate avoidance, never to meet his for more than an instant far too short for any revelation. She said:
“I’ll tell the doctor,” and bent over him and touched his forehead lightly with fingers which were cool and impersonal. His skin was clammily wet with the sweat of horror and he wished that she had not touched it then. She brought him water to drink and straightened the twisted dressings upon his head and gave him a fresh pillow. She said no more than the four words—but there were no more drugs, despite skirmishings with the doctor after certain nights when pain had made it impossible for him to sleep. . . .