I entered the green-walled room and took off all my clothes but my shorts. I unpacked the typewriter-paper box that held the pages of my serial. I set up a card table and put my portable machine on a corner of it. I gathered up cigarettes, an ashtray, Kleenex for my spectacles, pencils, and my pen.
I had used the soft hair, high breasts and haunted eyes of—of what in hell was her name?—Yvonne Prentiss—as a barricade. Now, it dissipated. The sad look in her eyes was gone; her smile, like the Cheshire Cat's—that was gone. And the Ghoul came out from where it had been.
I had expected it would.
I said hello to the Ghoul.
I knew the bastard.
George T. Death.
The analgesia was absorbing, or it had been absorbed. My throat felt as if a tack were stuck in it. A stinging sensation—hardly noticeable (to the properly-hypnotizing cortex). One could scarcely expect a lavish use of clinical techniques for blocking off the mere prick of a biopsy. Still—it would be inconvenient to be reminded by my own flesh, prematurely, of what it had fallen heir to. There was stir enough in my gray matter on the topic, already; no additional goad was needed.
We death-dreaders—we victims of the marvels of science—souped up to the last ganglion by every advertisement, billboard, radio commercial, lecture, and editorial—by damned near every syllable we read or hear—to live to enjoy things (rather than to stand ready to die for the sake of ideas) are poorly prepared for carcinoma—for whatever your equivalent may be.
Or—was I afraid, not so much of dying as of the manner?
Get busy, I said to myself; you'll have plenty of time to savor these notions.