"Maybe it was the paper. Makes me run a temperature every morning, too!"
"Oh, doctor, you do say the funniest things!"
"Nothing funnier than this case. Total amnesia, as best we can judge by his lucid moments. And his clothes don't help us—must've been on his way to a fancy-dress party. Or maybe I should say fancy-undress!"
"Oh, doctor!"
"Don't tell me nurses can blush. Never did when I was an intern—and you can't say they didn't get a chance! But this character here ... not a blessed bit of identification on him! Riding some kind of newfangled bike that got smashed up.... Better hold off on the solid food for a bit—stick to intravenous feeding."
He'd had this trouble before at ritual dinners, Vyrko finally recalled. Meat was apt to affect him badly—the trouble was that he had not at first recognized those odd strips of oily solid which accompanied the egg as meat.
The adjustment was gradual and successful, in this as in other matters. At the end of two weeks, he was eating meat easily (and, he confessed, with a faintly obscene non-ritual pleasure) and equally easily chatting with nurses and fellow patients about the events (which he still privately tended to regard as mummified museum pieces) of 1948.
His adjustment, in fact, was soon so successful that it could not continue. The doctor made that clear.
"Got to think about the future, you know. Can't keep you here forever. Nasty unreasonable prejudice against keeping well men in hospitals."