“Yes.”
“I am prepared to do the same for your chest wound. You should be able to leave here this evening.”
“That would be most welcome. Then what?”
“Then you have only to remain out of trouble for a few days. This can be achieved either by locking you up or by keeping you under reasonable surveillance, with the understanding that you will seek to avoid troublesome situations. I assume you would prefer the latter.”
“You assume correctly.”
“Then fill out the papers. I am going to warm up the unit and put you to sleep shortly.”
Which is what happened.
Later, as they were preparing to leave-all the medical gear and Standard Forms stashed, Nadler in his shades, Ragma back in harness-Ragma turned and said to me, almost too casually, “By the way, now that we have achieved something of an understanding, would you care to tell me why you got yourself reversed?”
And I was about to. There seemed no reason for withholding any of that slice of affairs, now that we were together in this thing, so to speak. I decided that I might as well tell him.
I opened my mouth, but the words did not assemble themselves and emerge properly. I felt a tiny constriction in my throat, a certain thickness at the base of my tongue and a spontaneous flexion of various facial muscles as I smiled faintly, nodded slightly and then said, “I’d rather go into that a bit later, all right? Say tomorrow or the next day?”
“All right,” he said. “No great urgency. When the time comes, we can reverse the reversal. Rest now, eat everything they give you and see how you feel. Mister Nadler or I will be in touch later in the week. Good afternoon.”
“So long.”
“We’ll be seeing you,” Nadler said.
They left the door slightly ajar behind them. I did not doubt for a moment that I still lacked the entire story. But then, so did they. I had just been willing to level with them and my body had handed me a brace of roods. I found this especially frightening because in some ways it reminded me of my experience on the bus ride home. I could still see the marks of concern on the old man’s brow as he asked me if I were feeling all right. Was it a similar thing that had taken me just now, a bizarre repercussion on my nervous system? An effect of the reversal? The timing was so smooth, though … I did not like it at all. Nothing I had ever come across in my checkered study of man and his manifold ways seemed of assistance at that moment.
President Eliot, we got problems.