Midnight. The manipulator had been off my hand for several hours, and it
was obvious that my Mekstrom's was past the first joint and creeping up
towards the next. I eyed it with some distaste; as much as I wanted to
have a fine hard body, I was not too pleased at having agony for a
companion every time the infection crossed a joint. I began to wonder
about the wrist; this is a nice complicated joint and should, if
possible, exceed the pain of the first joint in the ring finger. I'd
heard tell, of course, that once you've reached the top, additional
torture does not hurt any greater. I'd accepted this statement as it was
printed. But now I was not too sure that what I'd just been through was
not one of those exceptions that take place every now and then to the
best of rules.
I was still in a dark and disconsolate mood. But I'd managed to eat, and
I'd shaved and showered, and I'd hit the hay because it was as good a
place to be as anywhere else. I could lie there and dig the premises
with my esper.
There were very few patients in this building, and none were done up
like the character in the Macklin place. They moved the patients to some
other part of the grounds when the cure started. There weren't very many
nurses, doctors, scholars, or other personnel around, either.
Outside along one side of a road was a small lighted house that was
obviously a sort of guard, but it was casual instead of being formal and
military in appearance. The ground, instead of being patrolled by human
guards (which might have caused some comment) was carefully laid off
into checkerboard squares by a complicated system of photobeams and
induction bridges.
You've probably read about how the job of casing a joint should be done.
I did it the same way. I dug back and forth, collecting the layout from
the back door of my building towards the nearest puff of dead area. This
coign of safety billowed outward from the pattern towards the building
like an arm of cumulus cloud and the top of it rose like a column to a
height above my range. It sort of leaned forward but it did not lean far
enough to be directly above the building. The far side of the column was
just like the rear side; even though I'm well trained, it always
startles me when I perceive the far side of a smallish dead area. I'm
inclined like everybody else to consider perception on a line-of-sight
basis instead of on a sort of all-around grasp.
I let my thinker run free. If I could direct a breakout from this joint
with a lot of outside help, I'd have a hot jetcopter pilot come down the
dead-area column with a dead engine. The Medical Center did not have any
radar, probably on the proposition that too high a degree of security
indicated a high degree of top-secret material to hide. So I'd come down
dead engine, land, and wait it out. Timing would have to be perfect,
because I, the prisoner, would have to make a fast gallop across a
couple of hundred yards of wide open psi area, scale a tall fence topped
with barbed wire, cross another fifty yards into the murk, and then find
my rescuer. The take off would be fast once I'd located the 'copter in
the murk, and everything would depend upon a hot pilot who felt
confident enough in his engine and his rotorjets to let 'em go with a
roar and a lift without warmup.
During which time, unfortunately for all plans, the people at The
Medical Center would have been reading my mind and would probably have
that dead patch well patrolled with big, rough gentlemen armed with
stuff heavy enough to stop a tank.
Lacking any sort of device or doodad that would conceal my mind from
prying telepaths, about the only thing I could do was to lay here in my
soft bed and daydream of making my escape.
Eventually I went to sleep and dreamed that I was hunting Mallards with
a fly-rod baited with a stale doughnut. The only thing that bothered me
was a couple of odd-looking guys who thought that the way to hunt
Mallards was with shotguns, and their dress was just as out of taste as
their equipment. Who ever hunted ducks from a canoe, dressed in
windbreakers and hightopped boots? Eventually they bought some ducks
from me and went home, leaving me to my slumbers.
* * * * *
About eight in the morning, there was a tentative tap on my door. While
I was growling about why they should bother tapping, the door opened and
a woman came in with my breakfast tray. She was not my nurse; she was
the enamelled blonde receptionist.
She had lost some of her enamelled sophistication. It was not evident in
her make-up, her dress, or her hair-do. These were perfection. In fact,
she bore that store-window look that made me think of an automaton,
triggered to make the right noises and to present the proper expression
at the correct time. As though she had never had a thought of her own or
an emotion that was above the level of very mild interest. As if the
perfection of her dress and the characterless beauty of her face were
more important than anything else in her life.
But the loss of absolute plate-glass impersonality was gone, and it took
me some several moments to dig it out of her appearance. Then I saw it.
Her eyes. They no longer looked glassily out of that clear oval face at
a point about three inches above my left shoulder, but they were
centered on me from no matter what point in the room she'd be as she
went about the business of running open the blinds, checking the this
and that and the other like any nurses' helper.
Finally she placed my tray on the bed-table and stood looking down at
me.
From my first meeting with her I knew she was no telepath, so I bluntly
said, "Where's the regular girl? Where's my nurse?"
"I'm taking over for the time," she told me. Her voice was strained;
she'd been trying to use that too-deeply cultured tone she used as the
professional receptionist but the voice had cracked through the training
enough to let some of her natural tone come through.
"Why?"
Then she relaxed completely, or maybe it was a matter of coming unglued.
Her face allowed itself to take on some character and her body ceased
being that rigid window-dummy type. "What's your trouble--?" I asked her
softly. She had something on her mind that was a bit too big for her,
but her training was not broad enough to allow her to get it out. I
hoped to help, if I could. I also wanted to know what she was doing
here. If Scholar Phelps was thinking about putting a lever on me of the
female type, he'd guessed wrong.
She was looking at me and I could see a fragment of fright in her face.
"Is it terrible?" she asked me in a whisper.
"Is what terrible?"
"Me--Me--Mekstrom's D--Disease--" The last word came out with a couple
of big tears oozing from closed lids.
"Why?" I asked. "Do I look all shot to bits?"