ng weaker--but
how could he tell for sure? He could feel nothing, there was no pain, no
muscular failure, no falling weakly to the ground. There were no muscles
left and he was on the ground already. It was a Herculean effort to keep
his eyes open, to listen as he had vowed he would. But that might be
only fatigue, the need for sleep. And shock! Of course. He had to be
suffering from shock, and from exposure, too. So if he didn't die of
starvation, and if some beast didn't devour him, and if whatever wounds
and injuries he had didn't do him in, he would probably die anyhow from
pneumonia.

The thought was almost a comforting one. It took him off the hook,
unburdened him of the need to worry about whether or not he lived. The
thing was out of his hands, and no stubbornness on his part was going to
do any good. He had prayed himself out before, prayed until the words of
the prayers were nothing but imbecilic mutterings and mumblings,
meaningless monosyllables swirling pointlessly and endlessly through his
tired brain. The thing was out of his hands. He--Andy Larson--he gave
up. He quit. He was nothing but a head that was hard and a body that was
dead. What right did he have thinking he had any control over what
happened to him? He was incapable of doing anything himself--he had to
wait until something happened to him. And he knew what was going to
happen. So that's what he'd do. He'd just wait.

* * * * *

He closed his eyes and saw Elsie, and before he realized he was going to
do it he was praying again, talking to God about Elsie, and then talking
to Elsie about God, and then back to God again and to Elsie again, and
he knew he was crying because he could taste the tears, and he knew he
was going to die because there wasn't anything else that could happen,
and he knew suddenly that he was mortally afraid. He could not lay
rigidly, tensely--there were no muscles to tighten. But the tension had
to go somewhere. He felt a numbness creeping up the back of his neck,
felt his eyes bulging as if they would burst, heard a roaring in his
ears. He opened his mouth, gasping, trying to breathe deeply, the
roaring in his ears reaching a crescendo and then breaking into a cold
sighing wind that loudened and softened with the regularity of a pulse
beat. He didn't know if he was awake or sleeping, dozing or dreaming,
dying or dead. But he heard Elsie.

She was calling him. Over the cold black nothingn