Page:Fantastic Volume 08 Number 01.djvu/20

 he put me back in the womb. ..

It was very pleasant in the womb.

I lay there for a long time, coiled up fetally (fatally?—no, there was nothing to be afraid of here) and stark naked. Naked as a newborn babe, naked as a unborn babe with only a gossamer covering of lanugo to protect it. But there was no need for protection because this was the womb. It was dark and it was red, and the walls were soft and moist and rubbery and there was a faint and far-off murmuring which soothed and sated me.

I wasn’t afraid to think now, wasn’t afraid to remember. Although I didn’t have too much to recall. Here I was, back in the womb, yet my actual memories didn’t extend back past my thirtieth birthday.

My thirtieth birthday—that was the night I’d rolled the car over.

That was the night I’d been driving to Vegas; at least they surmised it had been my destination, for why else would I be racing across the desert in an open convertible with four thousand dollars in cash in the glove-compartment?

That’s the amount they found when they found me—or, rather, when he found me. For it was Dr. Carl Wagram who, en route from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, pulled his car over to the side of the road and discovered me lying there in the ditch with half the convertible crushing my body. I’d suffered compound fractures of both arms and both legs, my skull had been smashed, and yet I was still able to scream. I must have been screaming for half an hour before he came along.

Even now—even here in the womb, where nothing could harm me—I still didn’t care to dwell on what happened. Actually, it all came to me via second-hand report, because when Wagram arrived I slipped down into the merciful oblivion of concussion-induced coma. And there I stayed for the next ten days, while Wagram accompanied me to the nearest town, supervised the work of the doctor who put the casts on me, represented me in the police investigation which followed, and finally—after two surgeons flew out from L.A., examined my head injuries, and pronounced my condition hopeless and my brain-damage so extensive as to render the case inoperable—chartered a private plane and flew me 20 FANTASTIC