Doorways in the Sand. Chapter 10, 11, 12
Chapter 10
As the cablelike vines or tentacles seized me, thigh and shoulder, hoisting me into the air to a position where, wrenching my neck, I was afforded a view of the thing’s massive trunk, down to where it emerged from the tub of slime in the center of the room, I reflected, as the enormous Venus’s-flytrap type blades snapped open, revealing a reddish interior, that while it may be true that most accidents are caused by carelessness, I could in no way be held responsible this time. Since my departure from the hospital I had been a model State Department employee, totally circumspect in thought and deed.
As it paused for an instant, perhaps debating the best disposition of the alkaloids my excess nitrogen would provide, the past couple of days flashed before me. No more than that, as I was still fresh on the earlier portions of my life from the last time I had been about to die.
I don’t know whether it was that certain smile or morbid curiosity that manipulated me next. Doctor Drade had wanted to keep me hospitalized for further observation, despite the prima facie evidence of my healed chest. I disappointed him, however, and checked out around five hours after Nadler and Ragma had departed. Hal picked me up and drove me home.
Declining an offer to dine with Hal and Mary, I retired early that evening, first calling Ginny, who now seemed anxious to resume life where we had been interrupted at it back in my undergraduate days. We made a date for the following afternoon, and I turned in after a brief constitutional about the neighborhood rooftops.
Troubled, my sleep? Yes. External security there was, to the extent of a pair of drowsy coplike stakeouts I had spotted from above while taking the air. Inside, though, I shuffled my deck of distresses and dealt myself bad hand after bad hand until I was cleaned out, mercifully, before six bells.
From then to morning was nine hours long for me and interspersed with short features, none of which I could get a pin through afterward, save for the smile. I awoke knowing what I had to do and immediately set about rationalizing it so that it would not seem like another compulsion. And after a time I decided that perhaps it was not. Really, anyone would be curious about the place where he almost died.
So I phoned Hal and tried to borrow his car. Mary was using it, though. However, Ralph’s was available and I hiked over and picked it up.
It was a crisp, clear morning with a hint of balminess to come. Driving seaward, I thought of my new job and of Ginny and of the smile. The job was to outlast the current difficulty, Nadler had assured me, and the more I considered it the more it seemed that it might be worthwhile. If you have to do something, it is fortunate if it can be something interesting, something more than a little enjoyable. All those races out there, somewhere, concerning which we now knew next to nothing-I was going to have an opportunity to mine the unknown, hopefully to fetch forth something of understanding, to consider the exotic, to transform the familiar. I realized, suddenly, that I was excited at the prospect. I wanted to do it. I had no illusions as to why I had been hired, but now that I had my foot between door and jamb I wanted to push by the present obstructions and have a go at the real work. It seemed, just then, that alien anthropology (well, xenology, more correctly, I suppose) was really the sort of thing for which I had been preparing myself all along, in my own eclectic way. I chuckled softly. In addition to being excited, it occurred to me that I might be happy.
Having grown a bit more used to doing things in reverse, I found that driving a stereoisocar was not all that difficult. I came to a proper halt at every POTS sign, and once I got out into the country there were very few traffic distractions. In fact, the only thing that had given me any trouble at all since the reversal was shaving. My traumatized nervous system had responded to the imaged reversal of a front-back reversal by jittering my hand to a bloody halt and waiting for me to dust off the electric shaver. This done, it was still a peculiar experience, but with the removal of the hazard it, repaid me with confidence and a reasonably clean face.