Another spasm of dry coughing shook him, and when it was over the first hunger pang stabbed his stomach.
Hunger? They had said the intravenous feeding would prevent any symptoms of hunger.
Yes, Pauker, he reasoned, but the feeding was based on your metabolism tests and the assumption that your temperature was swinging between narrow limits. And it didn't account for the energy you are using coughing!
The chill grew deeper, sharper, and then he thought of the sleep narcotic. He concentrated on sleep, and finally as the cold increased he managed to slip into a shallow stupor. It was of mere seconds' duration, however. His sweat stopped, his skin dried and the heavy, wonderful warmth bathed him again. It was too delicious to waste on sleep.
The warmth soaked into his bones slowly, deliciously, but now the interval between his spasms of coughing grew shorter. The period of comfort was brief, for the coughing ran up his temperature, and now the hunger in his belly was beginning to become a source of major discomfort.
Then came the thirst. The excessive loss of body fluids slowly desiccated his tissues, and the thirst grew. And the power to perspire was lost to him, and the salt of his past heavy sweats caked in his pores and itched.
The incipient pneumonia was held in check by his extreme fever, but the hacking, dry cough continued, keeping him awake and painfully aware of the pleurisy pains.
The hunger, the thirst, the itch, the cough, the pain, the fever—the grating struggle for every breath through his tortured, parched throat.
Pauker was not religious, but he prayed to God for life, then he prayed to the devil for death, and as the kaleidoscope of pain neared the limits of his conscious endurance, he cursed the drugs that kept the spark of life alive inside his screaming body; he bent all his powers of concentration on a futile attempt to wrench his arm free of the miserly, intravenous needle; he tried holding his breath, swallowing his tongue, willing himself to oblivion. To no avail.
His last fully rational observation was to glare at the miniature chronometer, mounted above his face. It registered the elapsed time in days, hours and minutes.