Winter Moon

falling. He knew, then, that it was only a dream, but he couldn't wake

up when he tried. Falling and falling, always closer to death but

never quite there, falling and falling toward the jagged black maw of

the rocks, toward the cold deep gullet of the hungry sea, falling,

falling .

After four days of increasingly arduous therapy at Westside General,

Jack was transferred to Phoenix Rehabilitation Hospital on the eleventh

of June.

Although the spinal fracture had healed, he had sustained some nerve

damage.

Nevertheless, his prognosis was excellent.

His room might have been in a motel. Carpet instead of a vinyl-tile

floor, green-and-white-striped wallpaper, nicely framed prints of

bucolic landscapes, garishly patterned but cheerful drapes at the

window. The two hospital beds, however, belied the Holiday Inn

image.

The physical therapy room, where he was taken in a wheelchair for the

first time at six-thirty in the morning, June twelfth, was well

equipped with exercise machines. It smelled more like a hospital than

like a gym, which wasn't bad. And perhaps because he had at least an

idea of what lay ahead of him, he thought the place looked less like a

gym than like a torture chamber.

His physical therapist, Moshe Bloom, was in his late twenties, six feet

four, with a body so pumped and well carved that he looked as if he was

in training to go one-on-one with an army tank. He had curly black

hair, brown eyes flecked with gold, and a dark complexion enhanced by

the California sun to a lustrous bronze shade. In white sneakers,

white cotton slacks, white T-shirt, and skullcap, he was like a radiant

apparition, floating a fraction of an inch above the floor, come to

deliver a message from God, which turned out to be, "No pain, no

gain."

"Doesn't sound like advice, the way you say it," Jack told him.

"Oh?"

"Sounds like a threat."

"You'll cry like a baby after the first several sessions."

"If that's what you want, I can cry like a baby right now, and we can

both go home."

"You'll fear the pain to start with."

"I've had some therapy at Westside General."

"That was just a game of patty-cake. Nothing like the hell I'm going

to put you through."

"You're so comforting."

Bloom shrugged his immense shoulders. "You've got to have no illusions

about any easy rehabilitation."

"I'm the original illusionless man."

"Good. You'll fear the pain at first, dread it, cower from it, beg to

be sent home half crippled rather than finish the program--"

"Gee, I

can hardly wait to start."

"--but I'll teach you to hate the pain instead of fear it--"

"Maybe I

should just go to some UCLA extension classes, learn Spanish

instead."

"--and then I'll teach you to love the pain, because it's a sure sign

that you're making progress."

"You need a refresher course in how to inspire your patients."

"You've got to inspire yourself, Mcgarvey. My main job is to challenge

you."

"Call me Jack."

The therapist shook his head. "No. To start, I'll call you Mcgarvey,

you call me Bloom. This relationship is always adversarial at first.

You'll need to hate me, to have a focus for your anger. When that time

comes, it'll be easier to hate me if we aren't using first names."

"I hate you already."

Bloom smiled. "You'll do all right, Mcgarvey."

CHAPTER TWELVE.

After the night of June tenth, Eduardo lived in denial. For the first

time in his life, he was unwilling to face reality, although he knew it

had never been more important to do so. It would have been healthier

for him to visit the one place on the ranch where he would find--or

fail to find--evidence to support his darkest suspicions about the

nature of the intruder who had come into the house when he had been at

Travis Potter's office in Eagle's Roost. Instead, it was the one place

he assiduously avoided. He didn't even look toward that knoll.

He drank too much and didn't care. For seventy years he had lived by

the motto

"Moderation in all things," and that prescription for life

had led him only to this point of humbling loneliness and horror. He

wished the been-which he occasionally spiked with good bourbon--would

have a greater numbing effect on him. He seemed to have an uncanny

tolerance for alcohol. And even when he had poured down enough to turn

his legs and his spine to rubber, his mind remained far too clear to

suit him.

He escaped into books, reading exclusively in the genre for which he'd

recently developed an appreciation. Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury,

Sturgeon, Benford, Clement, Wyndham, Christopher, Niven, Zelazny.

Whereas he had first found, to his surprise, that fiction of the

fantastic could be challenging and meaningful, he now found it could

also be narcotizing, a better drug than any volume of beer and less

taxing on the bladder. The effect it her enlightenment and wonder or

intellectual and emotional anesthesia--was strictly at the discretion

of the reader. Spaceships, time machines, teleportation cubicles,

alien worlds, colonized moons, extraterrestrials, mutants, intelligent

plants, robots, androids, clones, computers alive with artificial