roar of the motor. He tried to force his legs to jump, but they were
frozen in terror. The heavy mass came straight for him, its treads
churning like great teeth reaching for him.

Then it hit, squarely on top of him. Something ripped and splattered and
blacked out in an unbearable welter of agony.

Dave Hanson came awake trying to scream and thrusting at the bed with
arms too weak to raise him. The dream of the past was already fading.
The horror he had thought was death lay somewhere in the past.

Now he was here--wherever here was.

The obvious answer was that he was in a normal hospital, somehow still
alive, being patched up. The things he seemed to remember from his other
waking must be a mixture of fact and delirium. Besides, how was he to
judge what was normal in extreme cases of surgery?

He managed to struggle up to a sitting position in the bed, trying to
make out more of his surroundings. But the room was dark now. As his
eyes adjusted, he made out a small brazier there, with a cadaverous old
man in a dark robe spotted with looped crosses. On his head was
something like a miter, carrying a coiled brass snake in front of it.
The old man's white goatee bobbed as he mouthed something silently and
made passes over the flame, which shot up prismatically. Clouds of white
fire belched up.

Dave reached to adjust his glasses, and found again that he wasn't
wearing them. But he'd never seen so clearly before.