sirens were wailing on the road up
the hill. Police, firemen, and an ambulance swarmed over the scene. The
firemen went to work on the flaming car with practiced efficiency; the
police clustered around Paul Brennan and extracted from him a story that
had enough truth in it to sound completely convincing. The doctors from
the ambulance took charge of Jimmy Holden. Lacking any other accident
victim, they went to work on him with everything they could do.

They gave him mild sedation, wrapped him in a warm blanket, and put him
to bed on the cot in the ambulance with two of them watching over him. In
the presence of so many solicitous strangers, Jimmy's shock and fright
diminished. The sedation took hold. He dropped off in a light doze that
grew less fitful as time went on. By the time the official accident
report program was over, Jimmy Holden was fast asleep and resting
comfortably.

He did not hear Paul Brennan's suggestion that Jimmy go home with him,
to Paul Brennan's personal physician, nor did Jimmy hear the ambulance
attendants turn away Brennan's suggestion with hard-headed medical
opinion. Brennan could hardly argue with the fact that an accident victim
would be better off in a hospital under close observation. Shock demanded
it, and there was the hidden possibility of internal injury or concussion
to consider.

So Jimmy Holden awoke with his accident ten hours behind him, and the
good sleep had completed the standard recuperative powers of the healthy
child. He looked around, collecting himself, and then remembered the
accident. He cringed a bit and took another look and identified his
surroundings as some sort of a children's ward or dormitory.

He was in a crib.

He sat up angrily and rattled the gate of the crib. Putting James Quincy
Holden in a baby's crib was an insult.

He stopped, because the noise echoed through the room and one of the
younger patients stirred in sleep and moaned. Jimmy Holden sat back and
remembered. The vacuum that was to follow the loss of his parents was not
yet in evidence. They were gone and the knowledge made him unhappy, but
he was not cognizant of the real meaning or emotion of grief. With almost
the same feeling of loss he thought of the _Jungle Book_ he would never
read and the Spitz Planetarium he would never see casting its little star
images on his bedroom ceiling. Burned and ruined, with the atomic energy
kit--and he had hoped that he could use the kit to tease his f