"There, there, now," the woman was saying. "You're all right, Ronnie. You're all right. It was only a nightmare... a bad old nightmare...."
She was right. Only the nightmare hadn't ended. The nightmare was before his face, in her gargantuan features, in her motherly touch on his frail body, in the sight of the small, soft appendages that were his hands.
They were the hands of a boy of twelve. And Ron Carver was thirty years old.
Two men giants joined the woman at his bedside, and one of them forced a small speckled capsule past his resisting lips. Then his viewpoint became detached and distant, and a pleasurable drowsiness overcame him. He stretched out and shut his eyes, but he could still hear the worried tones of their speech.
"Dr. Minton warned us," one of the men said, lifting Ron's bony wrist and feeling for the pulse. "The boy has suffered some severe traumatic shock..."
Dr. Minton! Ron Carver's mind grasped the familiar name—the name of his own physician—gratefully. But his body gave no sign.
"Maybe we better call him," the woman said nervously. "I think he's still in the sick bay."
"Good idea."
In another moment, a familiar hairy face was floating over Ron's head like a captive balloon, a face grown grotesque in size.
"Doctor..." he said with his lips.