He nearly missed it, seeing it only as he stepped over it. Stopping, he turned and looked back the way he had come. Ahead were the broad leaved trees that looked so much like Maples, the path over which he had come.
He started to turn—and the world turned topsy turvy around him. There was the white face of the girl through the windshield of a car, dropping away suddenly and rotating in a mad gyration until the face was upside down, and then was gone past him.
A dull booming sound exploded on his bewildered mind. Wild forces were tossing him about inside the car so rapidly that there was no way to tell which was up and which was down.
As abruptly as it began, it ended. In the dead silence he heard the screech of brakes. He wondered if it was the girl stopping her car to come back, but he didn't turn his head to look.
He was trying to reconcile the sequence of events brought by his senses. It was impossible. He had spent at least two hours walking up that path, watching the robot statue, and walking back down again to where he had first appeared.
Yet, if it had happened at all, it had happened in less than a split second, for events in the collision had taken up at the exact point where they had left off.
He opened his eyes and saw the creamy gloss surface of a ceiling and knew at once he was in a hospital. Without moving his head he let his fingers explore the clean smelling sheets, the hospital bed gown tied around his neck.
A footstep sounded. A nurse looked down at him with a quiet smile. "Feel all right?" she asked.
He dipped his head in an almost imperceptible nod. The nurse went away. There was a swish of wind as the door closed behind her, but he didn't bother to turn his head to look.