Джон Макдональд - S*E*V*E*N

He sat beside her and took her hands and swallowed a rising thickness in his throat, blinked, swallowed again, and said in a pebbly voice, “I’m sorry, Sylvie. Dave hasn’t got enough heart muscle left to run a toy train. And there’s not one damned thing we can do about it or for it.”

She pulled her hands free and lunged against him, and he held her in his big arms and patted her as she strained at the first great hard spasmodic sob and got past it and in about two or three minutes pulled herself back to a control and a forlorn stability he knew she would be able to maintain.

She dabbed her eyes and blew her nose and said, “Today sometime?”

“Probably.”

“Tell them you’ve given permission for me to stay in there with him, will you?”

“Of course. I’ll be in every once in a while.”

“And thank your dear gal for taking over our tribe, Sam. Sam? Do you think he’ll know I’m... I’m there with him?”

First, he thought, you throw the stone, and then you throw the lump of sugar. No point in telling her that death had occurred, that Dave, as Dave, was long gone and that the contemporary miracles of medical science were keeping some waning meat alive, in the laboratory sense of the word.

“From everything we can learn and everything we can guess, Sylvie, I feel certain that he’ll be aware of you being there, holding his hand.”

When the first gray light of the morning made the shape of the window visible, he dressed quickly and went out. He guessed that they would not be expecting him to leave that room so soon after arriving.

There were shadows of night still remaining in the empty streets, so that even though he knew his way and walked swiftly, the city seemed strange to him.