"I'm going to get it if I need it," she said, soothingly.
Zen could hear the occasional crunch of boots behind them. West was keeping silent. He did not seem to be in a hurry.
Zen started to speak to Nedra. The thought of what he wanted to say was dim in his mind and he could not quite find words for it but he knew that it had something to do with a wish that the world were different and that the human race were not trying to destroy itself. Why should he be wishing this? The reason for his thinking became a little clearer. He was wishing the world were different so that he might make love to this nurse under conditions that would permit this love to bear other fruit than frustration, despair, and death.
He found himself wishing that a vine-covered cottage existed somewhere, a place where a man and a woman might live in peace and reasonable security, raising some kids who could play on a mountain slope that was not saturated with atomic radiation.
"Here is the first aid station," the nurse said. "And—"
"And what?" he asked her when she did not continue.
She gave his arm a squeeze. "And thank you for the dream," she whispered.
As Kurt Zen turned startled eyes toward her, wondering how she had known what he had been dreaming, her face seemed to dissolve in a gray mist.
He plunged, unconscious, to the ground at her feet.