Nurse Farrow straightened up from her work of loosening the straps on the manipulator. "Sorry," she said in a cool, crisp voice. "I didn"t know that. This is usually my job. It"s a rather delicate proposition, you know." There was a chill of professional rebuff in Farrow"s voice.
It was the pert white hat and the gold pin looking down upon the gray uniform with no adornment. Catherine looked a bit uncomfortable but she apparently had to take it.
Catherine tried lamely, "You see, Mr. Cornell is my fiancee."
Farrow jumped on that one hard. "I"m aware of that. So let"s not forget that scholars of medicine do not treat their own loved ones for ethical reasons."
Catherine took it like a slap across the face with an iced towel. "I"m sure that Dr. Thornd.y.k.e would not have let me take care of him if I"d not been capable," she replied.
"Perhaps Dr. Thornd.y.k.e did not realize at the time that Mr. Cornell would be ready for the Treatment Department. Or," she added slyly, "have you been trained to prepare a patient for the full treatment?"
"The full treatment--? Dr. Thornd.y.k.e did not seem to think--"
"Please," said Farrow with that cold crispness coming out hard, "As a nurse I must keep my own opinion to myself, as well as keeping the opinions of doctors to myself. I take orders only and I perform them."
That was a sharp shot; practically telling Catherine that she, as a nurses" helper, had even less right to go shooting off her mouth.
Catherine started to reply but gave it up. Instead she came over and looked down at me. She cooed and stroked my forehead.
"Ah, Steve," she breathed, "So you"re going for the treatment. Think of me, Steve. Don"t let it hurt too much."
I smiled thinly and looked up into her eyes. They were soft and warm, a bit moist. Her lips were full and red and they were parted slightly; the lower lip glistened slightly in the light. These were lips I"d kissed and found sweet; a face I"d held between my hands. Her hair fluffed forward a trifle; threatened to cascade down over her shoulders. No, it was not at all hard to lie there and go on thinking all the soft-sweet thoughts I"d once hoped might come true--
She recoiled, her face changing swiftly from its mask of sweet concern to one of hard calculation. I"d slipped with that last hunk of thinking and given the whole affair away.
Catherine straightened up and turned to head for the door. She took one step and caved in like a wet towel.
Over her still-falling body I saw Nurse Farrow calmly reloading the skin-blast hypo, which she used to fire a second load into the base of Catherine"s neck, just below the shoulder blades.
"That," said Farrow succinctly, "should keep her cold for a week. I just wish I"d been born with enough guts to commit murder."
"What--?"
"Get dressed," she snapped. "It"s cold outside, remember?" I started to dress as Farrow hurled my clothing out of the closet at me. She went on in the meantime: "I knew you couldn"t keep it entirely concealed from her. She"s too good a telepath. So while you were holding her attention, I let her have a shot in the neck. One of the rather bad things about being a Mekstrom is that minor items like the hypo don"t register too well."
I stopped. "Isn"t that bad? Seems to me that I"ve heard that pain is a necessary factor for the preservation of the--"
"Stop yapping and dress," snapped Farrow. "Pain is useful when it"s needed. It isn"t needed in the case of a pin p.r.i.c.king the hide of a Mekstrom. When a Mekstrom gets in the way of something big enough to damage him physically, then it hurts him."
"Sort of when a locomotive falls on their head?" I grunted.
"Keep on dressing. We"re not out of this jungle yet."
"So have you any plans?"
She nodded soberly. "Yes, Steve. Once you asked me to be your telepath, to complete your team. I let you down. Now I"ve picked you up again, and from here on--out--I--"
I nodded. "Sold," I told her.
"Good. Now, Steve, dig the hallway."
I did. There was no one there. I opened my mouth to tell her so, and then closed it foolishly.
"Dig the hallway down to the left. Farther. To the door down there--three beyond the one you"re perceiving now--is there a wheelchair there?"
"Wheelchair?" I blurted.
"Steve, this is a hospital. They don"t even let a man with an aching tooth walk to the toothache ward. He rides. Now, you keep a good esper watch on the hall and if anybody looks out while I"m gone, just cast a deep dig at their face. It"s possible that at this close range I can identify them from the perceived image in your mind. Although, G.o.d knows, no two people ever _see_ anything alike, let alone perceive it."
She slipped out, leaving me with the rec.u.mbent form of my former sweetheart. Her face had fallen into the relaxed expression of sleep, sort of slack and unb.u.t.toned.
#Tough, baby,# I thought as I closed my eyes so that all my energy could be aimed at the use of my perception.
Farrow was going down the hall like a professional heading for the wheelchair on a strict order. No one bothered to look out; she reached the locker room and dusted the wheelchair just as if she"d been getting it for a real patient. (The throb in my finger returned for a parthian shot and I remembered that I _was_ a real patient!) She trundled the chair back and into my room.
"In," she said. "And keep that perception aimed on the hallway, the elevator, and the center corridor stairs."
She packed me with a blanket, tucking it so that my shoes and overclothing would not show, doing the job briskly. Then she scooped Catherine up from the floor and dropped her into my bed, and then rolled Catherine into one of those hospital doodads that hospitals use for male and female alike as bedclothing.
"Anyone taking a fast dig in here will think she"s a patient--unless the digger knows that this room is supposed to be occupied by one Steve Cornell, obviously male. Now, Steve, ready to steer?"
"Steer?"
"Steer by esper. I"ll drive. Oh--I know the way," she told me with a chuckle. "You just keep your perception peeled for characters who might be over-nosy. I"ll handle the rest."
We went along the hallway. I took fast digs at the rooms and hall ahead of us; the whole coast seemed clear. Waiting for the two-bit elevator was nerve wracking; hospitals always have such poky elevators. But eventually it came and we trundled aboard. The pilot was no big-dome. He smiled at Nurse Farrow and nodded genially at me. He was probably a blank, jockeying an elevator is about the top job for a non-psi these days.
But as the elevator started down, a doctor came out of one of the rooms on the floor below. He took a fast look at the indicator above the elevator door and made a dash to thumb the b.u.t.ton. The elevator came to a grinding halt and he got on.
This bothered me, but Farrow merely simpered at the guy and melted him down to size. She made some remark to him that I couldn"t hear, but from the sudden increase of his pulse rate, I gathered that she"d really put him off guard. He replied in the same unintelligible tone and reached for her hand. She held his hand, and if the guy was thinking of me, my name is Sing Hoy Low and I am a Chinese Policeman.
He held her hand until we hit the first floor, and he debarked with a calf-like glance at Nurse Farrow. We went on to the ground floor and down the lower corridor to the end, where Farrow spent another lifetime and a half filling out a white cardboard form.
The superintendent eyed me with a sniff. "I"ll call the car," she said.
I half-expected Farrow to make some objection, but she quietly nodded and we waited for another lifetime until a big car whined to a stop outside. Two big guys in white coats came in, tripped the lever on back of the wheelchair and stretched me out flat and low-slung on the same wheels. It was a neat conversion from wheelchair to wheeled stretcher, but as Farrow trundled me out feet first into the cold, I felt a sort of nervous chill somewhere south of my navel. She swung me around at the last minute and I was shoved head first into the back of the car.
Car? This was a full-fledged ambulance, about as long as a city block and as heavy as a battleship. It was completely fitted for everything that anybody could think of, including a great big muscular turbo-electric power plant capable of putting many miles per behind the tail-pipe.
The door closed on my feet, and we took off with Farrow sitting right behind the two big hospital attendants, one of whom was driving and the other of whom was ogling Farrow in a calculating manner. She invited the ogle. Heck, she did it in such a way that I couldn"t help ogling a bit myself. If I haven"t said that Farrow was an attractive woman, it was because I hadn"t really paid attention to her looks. But now I went along and ogled, realizing in the dimmer and more obscure recesses of my mind that if I ogled in a loudly lewd perceptive manner, I"d not be thinking of what she was doing.
So while I was pleasantly occupied in ogling, Farrow slipped two more hypos out from under her clothing. She slipped her hands out sidewise on the backs of their seats, put her face between them and said, "Anybody got a cigarette, fellows?"
The next that took place happened, in order of occurrence, as follows:
The driver grunted and turned his head to look at her. The other guy fumbled for a cigarette. Driver poked at the lighter on the dash, still dividing his attention between the road and Nurse Farrow. The man beside him reached for the lighter when it popped out and he held it for her while she puffed it into action. Farrow fingered the triggers on the skin-blast hypos. The man beside the driver replaced the lighter in its socket on the dash. The driver slid aside and to the floor, a second before the other hospital orderly flopped down like a deflated balloon.
The ambulance took a swoop to the right, nosed down into a shallow ditch and leaped like a shot deer out on the other side.
Farrow went over the back of the seat in a flurry and I rolled off of my stretcher into the angle of the floor and the sidewall. There was a rumble and then a series of crashes before we came to a shuddering halt.
I came up from beneath a pile of a.s.sorted medical supplies, braced myself against the canted deck, and looked out the wind-shield. The trunk of a tree split the field of view as close to dead center as it could be.