The analgesia was absorbing, or it had been absorbed. My throat felt as if a tack were stuck in it. A stinging sensation--hardly noticeable (to the properly-hypnotizing cortex). One could scarcely expect a lavish use of clinical techniques for blocking off the mere prick of a biopsy. Still--it would be inconvenient to be reminded by my own flesh, prematurely, of what it had fallen heir to. There was stir enough in my gray matter on the topic, already; no additional goad was needed. We death-dreaders--we victims of the marvels of science--souped up to the last ganglion by every advertisement, billboard, radio commercial, lecture, and editorial--by damned near every syllable we read or hear--to live to enjoy things (rather than to stand ready to die for the sake of ideas) are poorly prepared for carcinoma--for whatever your equivalent may be. Or--was I afraid, not so much of dying as of the manner? Get busy, I said to myself; you'll have plenty of time to savor these notions. Or--was I even afraid? Shocked, rather? Work. There's the drug you need, boy. I lay back on the divan, smoking. George T. Death. I knew him of old. In several guises. I remembered the year I was ten, the year I had appendicitis, then peritonitis, then general blood poisoning. Sometimes, at night, the pain of my body, the pain of my tube-filled, pus-lathered guts will come back to me. And the smell. The fever. The thirst. They didn't believe in giving you liquids, then--not any--and I know what it's like to be on the Sahara without a drop to drink--and your viscera opened up, in the bargain. I know. Father came to the hospital during one of the spells of consciousness. His eyes were desperately gentle. "How's the fight, son?" "Am I going to die?" "You're pretty sick, son." I laughed a little with my curdled belly. Too soon to answer, _You're telling me._ Nineteen-twelve. That was what I meant. "But--will I die?" His tender passion became tenderer still. "Would you be afraid to, son?" "No." "Do you believe in God?" "Of course." "Want to live--still?" _Still_, he had said. He could see--what I could only feel. "Yes." "Then--fight." That time I looked right smack into George T. Death's eye sockets and fought. But I was a kid then--and kids are brave if they have brave parents. In some ways, my father is the bravest man I've ever known; in others, a coward. Who's different? Who's different without being more coward? There was the time in Warsaw. My half brother Ted and I had finished our tour of Russia and come shaken across the Polish frontier--like two unconvinced readers of Dante who had gone there ourselves to be sure which part was poetry and which was accurate reporting. We found out. Our Dante was a good journalist.