He dialed the number of the city VD clinic and asked for a printout on gonorrhea. He read it completely. This didn't ease his mind, either.

He had to take three happy-pills to get to sleep. And he dreamed... not happily.

He dreamed that five days had passed and the tip of his penis became inflamed. It was red and tender, at first causing irregular erections, then actual pain. When he urinated there was such intense smarting that he could not tolerate more than a few drops at a time—but there seemed to be gallons in his bladder, and they had to pour out. Then pus choked the conduit, popping out in grisly lumps when the frothing urine finally blasted its way through. The agony was hellish. There was brown blood in it now.

The pus lasted for three months, causing him to stand at the toilet for half an hour at a time without performing, then soiling his pants when he walked away with bursting bladder. He wet his bed at night, hardly noticing because of the other agony, and his constantly soaked buttocks and scrotum began to feel raw, too. He couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, couldn't work because of the viper's nest of pain in his groin. Then the inflammation began to spread.

It covered his bladder and his kidneys and his rectum, making every facet of elimination a continual torture. It invaded his prostate, his testes, his epididymis, rendering him sterile several times over, the hard way. Then it advanced to his mouth, interfering with eating, and his bones and joints, giving him arthritis. It infiltrated the lining of his body cavity and the valves of his heart. It poisoned his blood. It infected his eyes, making him painfully blind. Finally it penetrated to the membranes lining his spinal cord and the brain itself, and he knew he felt the onset of paralysis and insanity.