measures of himself into Rachael, and just when the last rush of his
seed had streamed from him, the spill of wind was also depleted, flowing
away to other corners of the world.
In time he withdrew from her, and they lay on their sides, facing each
other, heads close, their breath mingling. Still, neither spoke nor
needed to, and gradually they drifted toward sleep again.
He had never before felt as fulfilled and contented as this. Even in
the good days of his youth, before the Green Hell, before Vietnam, he
had never felt half this fine.
She slept before Ben did, and for a long pleasant moment he watched as a
bubble of saliva slowly formed between her parted lips, and popped.
His eyes grew heavy, and the last thing he saw before he closed them was
the vague-almost invisible-scar along her jawline, where she had been
cut when Eric had thrown a glass at her.
Drifting down into a restful darkness, Ben almost felt sorry for Eric
Leben, because the scientist had never realized love was the closest
thing to immortality that men would ever know and that the only-and
bestanswer to death was loving. Loving.
crushed capillaries was leeched from the tissues. When he was awake, he
could feel fragments of his broken skull pressing insistently into his
brain, even though medical wisdom held that tissue of the brain was
without nerve endings and therefore insensate, it was not a pain as much
as a pressure, like a Novocaine-numbed tooth registering the grinding
bit of a dentist’s drill. And he could sense, without understanding
how, that his genetically improved body was methodically dealing with
that head injury as surely as it was closing up its other wounds. For a
week he would need much rest, but during that time the periods of stasis
would grow shorter, less frequent, less frightening.
That was what he wanted to believe. In two or three weeks, his physical
condition would be no worse than that of a man leaving the hospital
after major surgery. In a month he might be fully reeovered, although
he’d always have a slightr even pronouncedHtepression along the right
side of his skull.
But mental recovery was not keeping pace with the rapid physical
regeneration of tissues. Even when awake, heartbeat and respiration
close to normal, he was seldom fully alert. And during those brief
periods when he possessed approximately the same intellectual capacity
he had known before his death, he was acutely and dismally aware that
for the most part he was functioning in a robotic state, with frequent
lapses into a confused and, at times, virtually animalistic condition.
He had strange thoughts.
Sometimes he believed himself to be a young man again, recently
graduated from college, but sometimes he recognized that he was actually
past forty. Sometimes he did not know exactly where he was, especially
when he was out on the road, driving, with no familiar reference points
to his own past life, overcome by confusion, feeling lost and sensing
that he would forever be lost, he had to pull over to the edge of the
highway until the panic passed. He knew that he had a great goal, an
important mission, though he was never quite able to define his purpose
or destination. Sometimes he thought he was IN THE ZOMBIE ZONE For part
of the night he lay fully clothed on the bed in the cabin above Lake
Arrowhead, in a condition deeper than sleep, deeper than coma, his body
temperature steadily declining, his heart beating only twenty times a
minute, blood barely circulating, drawing breath shallowly and only
intermittently. Occasionally his respiration and heartbeat stopped
entirely for periods as long as ten or fifteen minutes, during which the
only life within him was at a cellular level, though even that was not
life as much as stasis, a strange twilight existence that no other man
on earth had ever known. During those periods of suspended animation,
with cells only slowly renewing themselves and performing their
functions at a greatly reduced pace, the body was gathering energy for
the next period of wakefulness and accelerated healing.
He was healing, and at an astonishing rate. Hour by hour, almost