Up the Walls of the World

Chapter 3

Doctor Daniel Dann is on his life way too. But he is not merry.

He finishes dating and signing the printouts from Subject R-95, thinking as usual that they don’t need an M.D. on this asinine project. And telling himself, also as usual, that he should be glad they do. If he decides to go on existing.

Subject R-95 is wiping imaginary electrode-paste out of his hair. He is a husky, normal-looking youth with a depressed expression.

“All the dead aerosols,” he remarks tonelessly.

Nancy, the assistant technician, looks at him questioningly.

“Great piles of them. Mountains,” R-95 mutters. “All the bright colored aerosol cans, all dead. You push them but they don’t spray. They look fine, though. It’s sad.”

“Was that what you received?” Nancy asks him.

“No.” R-95 has lost interest. It’s only another of his weird images, Doctor Dann decides. R-95 and his twin brother R-96, have been with Project Polymer three years now. They both act stoned half the time. That makes Dann uneasy, for the best of reasons.

“Doctor! Doctor Dann!”

The front-office girl is rapping on the cubicle glass. Dann goes out to her, ducking to make sure he clears the substandard doorway.

“Lieutenant Kirk has cut his leg open, Doctor! He’s in your office.”

“Okay, Nancy , hold the last subject. I’ll be back.”

Dann lopes down the corridor, thinking, My God, a genuine medical emergency. And Kendall Kirk—how suitable.

In his office he finds Kirk crouched awkwardly in a chair, holding a bloody wad of paper towel against his inner thigh. His pant leg is hanging cut and sodden.

“What happened?” Dann asks when he has him on the table.

“Fucking computer,” Kirk says furiously. “What’d it do to me? Is—Am I—”

“Two fairly superficial cuts across the muscle. Your genitals are okay if that’s what you mean.” Dann investigates the trouser fabric impressed into the wound, meanwhile idly considering the fury in Kirk’s voice, the computer room, and, obliquely, Miss Omali. “You say a computer did this?”

“Ventilator fan-blade blew off.”

Dann lets his fingers work, visualizing the computer banks. Motors somewhere behind the lower grills, about thigh level, could be fans. It seems bizarre. Much as he dislikes Kendall Kirk, the man has come close to being castrated. Not to mention having an artery sliced.

“You were lucky it wasn’t an inch one way or the other.”

“You telling me.” Kirk’s voice is savage. “Does this mean stitches?”

“We’ll see. I’d prefer to make do with butterfly clamps if you’ll keep off the leg awhile.”

Kirk grunts and Dann finishes up in silence. At this hour of the morning his hands move in pleasing autonomy—maximum blood level of what he thinks of as his maintenance dosage. A normal working day. But the accident is giving him odd tremors of reality, not dangerous so far. He dislikes Kendall Kirk in a clinical, almost appreciative way. Specimen of young deskbound Naval intelligence executive: coarse-minded, clean-cut, a gentleman to the ignorant eye. Evidently not totally impressive to his seniors or he wouldn’t be assigned to this ridiculous project. Since Kirk came, ah, on board, Project Polymer has begun to exhibit irritating formalities. But old Noah loves it.

He sends Kirk home and goes back to release the remaining subject. En route he can’t resist detouring past Miss Omali’s computer room. The door is, as usual, closed.

The last subject is T-22, a cheery fiftyish blue-haired woman Dann thinks of as The Housewife: she looks like a million TV ads. For all he knows she may be a lion-tamer. He does not compare her to the one housewife he has known intimately and whom he hopes never to think of again.

“I’m just dying to know how many I got right, Doctor Dann!” T-22 twinkles up at him while he detaches her from Noah’s recording rig. “Some of the letters were so vivid. When will we know?”

Dann has given up trying to persuade her that he’s not in charge. “I’m sure you made a fine score, Mrs.—uh…”

“But when will we really find out?”

“Well, it, ah, the data go through computation first, you know.” Vaguely he recalls that this test has something to do with coded messages and multiple receivers, redundancy. No matter. Noah’s so-called telepathic sender is at some secret Navy Place miles away. Kirk’s doing; he seems to have friends in the intelligence establishment. Part of his charm.

Dann bids farewell to The Housewife and ducks out, nearly running over Noah. Doctor Noah Catledge is the father of Polymer and all its questionable kin. He skips alongside down the corridor, taking two steps to Dann’s long one.

“Well Dan, we’re about to make you earn your keep any day now,” Noah burbles. He seems unusually manic.

“What, are you going to publish?”

“Oh, heavens no, Dan. We’re much too classified. There will be some controlled internal dissemination of course, but first we have the formal presentation to the Committee. That’s where you come in. I tell you I’m damn glad we have highly qualified people to certify every step of the procedure this time. No more stupid hassles over the paradigm.” He swats up at Dann’s back in his enthusiasm.

“What have you actually got hold of, Noah?” Dann asks incuriously.

“Oh, my!” Noah’s eyes beam with hyperthyroid glee. “I really shouldn’t, you know.” He giggles. “Dan, old friend, the breakthrough!”

“Good work, Noah.” Dann has said it a dozen times.

“The breakthrough…” Noah sighs, dream-ridden. “We’re getting multiple-unit signals through, Dan. Solid. Solid. Redundandcy, that’s the key. That’s the golden key! Why didn’t I think of it before?”

“Congratulations, Noah. Great work.”

“Oh—I want you to be ready to leave town for a couple of days, Dan. All of us. The big test. They’re actually giving us a submarine. Don’t worry, you won’t be in it, ha ha! But I can’t tell you where we go. Navy secret!”

Dann watches him bounce away. What the hell has happened, if anything? Impossible to believe that his pop-eyed tuft-haired little gnome has achieved a “breakthrough” in whatever he thinks he’s doing here. Dann refrains from believing it.

He turns into his office, considering what he knows of Project Polymer. Polymer is Noah’s last, forlorn hope; he has spent a lifetime on psi-research, parapsychology, whatever pompous name for nothing. Dann had met him years back, had watched with amused sympathy as the old man floundered from one failing budgetary angel to the next. When his last university funding dried up, Noah had somehow wangled a small grant out of the National Institute of Mental Health, which had recently expanded into Polymer.

It was in the NIMH days that he asked Dann to join him, after the—after the events which are not to be recalled. The old man must have realized Dann couldn’t bear to go back to normal practice. Not even in a new place. Something, god knows what, had held Dann back from suicide, but the idea of coming close to normal, living people—was—is—insupportable. Rough sympathy lurks under Noah’s grey tufts; Dann is grateful in a carefully unfelt way. The impersonal nonsense of Parapsychology, this office and its crazy people, have been a perfect way to achieve suspended animation. Not real, not a part of life. And never to forget Noah’s narcotics locker and his readiness to try any psychoactive drugs.

Dann’s work has turned out to be absurdly simple, mainly hooking Noah’s subjects onto various biomonitoring devices and certifying the readouts, and serving as house doctor for Noah’s tatty stable of so-called high-psi subjects. Dann neither believes nor disbelieves in psi powers, is only certain that he himself has none. It was a quiet, undemanding life with a handy-dandy prescription pad. Until Polymer and Kendall Kirk came along.

How the hell had Noah connected with the Department of Defense? The old man is smart, give him A for dedication. Somehow he’d ferreted out the one practical application of telepathy that the D.O.D. would spring for—a long-wanted means of communicating with submerged submarines. Apparently they actually tried it once, and the Soviets have reported some results. Always unreliable of course. Now Noah has sold the Navy on trying biofeedback monitoring and redundancy produced by teams of receivers. The project has always seemed to Dann exquisitely futile, suitable only for a madman like Noah and a dead man like himself.

But it seems his underwater tranquility is about to be disturbed. Dann will have to go somewhere for this crazy test. Worse, he’ll have to support Noah before that committee. Can he do it? Dread shakes him briefly, but he supposes he can; he owes something to Noah. The old man was stupid enough to use his unqualified mistress for the previous medical work and was accordingly pilloried. Now he has the highly-qualified Doctor Dann. The highly irregular Doctor Dann. Well, Dann will come through for him if he can.

He finds himself still shaking and cautiously supplements his own psychoactivity with a trace of oxymorphone. Poor Noah, if that comes out.

The afternoon is passing. Thursdays are set aside for screening potential subjects. This time there are two sets of twin girls; Noah is strong on twins. Dann takes their histories, dreamily amused by their identical mannerisms.

The last job is the regular check on E-100, a bearded Naval ensign who is one of the Polymer team. E-100 is a lot younger than he looks. He is also tragic: leukemia in remission. The Navy has barred him from active duty but Noah has got him on some special status. E-100 refuses to believe the remission is temporary.

“I’ll be back at sea pretty soon now, right Doc?”

Dann mumbles banalities, thankful for the dream-juice in his bloodstream. As E-100 leaves, Dann sees Lieutenant Kirk limp by. Devotion of duty, or what? Well, the cuts aren’t serious. What the devil went on in that computer room, though? Fans flying off? Incredible. The lesions aren’t knife cuts, say. Vaguely stimulated, Dann suspects events having to do with a certain tall, white-coated figure. Kendall Kirk and Miss Omali? He hopes not.

He is packing up for the day when his door moves quietly. He looks around to find the room is galvanized. Standing by his desk is a long, slim, white-and-black apparition. Miss Margaret Omali herself.

“Sit down, please—” Lord, he thinks, the woman carries a jolt. Sex…yes, but an unnameable tension. She’s like a high-voltage condenser.

The apparition sits, with minimal fuss and maximal elegance. A very tall, thin, reserved, aristocratic poised young black woman in a coarse white cotton lab coat. Nothing about her is even overtly feminine or flamboyant, only the totality of her shouts silently, I am.

“Problems?” he asks, hearing his voice squeak. Her hair is a short curly ebony cap, showing off the small head on her long perfect neck. Her eyelids seem to be supernaturaly tall and Egyptian. She wears no jewelry whatever. The flawless face, the thin hands, stay absolutely still.

“Problem,” she corrects him quietly. “I need something for headaches. I think they must be migraine. The last one kept me out two days.”

“Is this something new?” Dann knows he should get her file but he can’t move. Probably nothing in it anyway; Miss Omali was transferred to them a year ago, with her own medical clearance. Another of Noah’s highly qualified people, degree in computer math or whatever. She has only been in Dann’s office once before, for the October flu shots. Dann thought her the most exotic and beautiful human creature he had ever laid eyes on. He had immediately quarantined the thought. Among other reasons—among many and terminal other reasons—he is old enough to be at least her father.

“Yes, it’s new,” she is saying. Her voice is muted and composed, and her speech, Dann realizes, is surprisingly like his own middleclass Western white. “I used to have ulcers.”

She is telling him that she understands the etiology.

“What happened to the ulcers?”

“They’re gone.”

“And now you have these headaches. As you imply, they could be stress-symptoms too. If it’s true migraine, we can help. Which side is affected?”

“It starts on the left and spreads. Very soon.”

“Do you have any advance warning?”

“Why, yes. I feel… strange. Hours before.”

“Right.” He goes on to draw out enough symptomatology to support a classical migraine picture: the nausea, the throb, the visual phenomena, the advance “aura.” But he will not be facile—not here.

“May I ask when you had your last physical checkup from your own doctor?”

“I had a PHS check two years ago. I don’t have a personal doctor.” The tone is not hostile, but not friendly either. Mocking?

“In other words, you haven’t been examined since these started. Well, we can check the obvious. I’ll need a blood sample and a pressure reading.”

“Hypertension in the black female population?” she asks silkily. Hostility now, loud and clear. “Look, I don’t want to make a thing of this, Doctor. I merely have these headaches.”

She is about to leave. Panicked, he changes gear.

“Please, I know, Miss Omali. Please listen. Of course I’ll give you a prescription to relieve the pain. But you must realize that headaches can indicate other conditions. What if I sent you out of here with a pain-killer and a pocket of acute staph infection? Or an incipient vascular episode? I’m asking the bare minimum. The pressure reading won’t take a minute. The lab will have a white count for us Tuesday. A responsible doctor would insist on ah EKG too, with our equipment here it would be simple. I’m skipping all that for now. Please.”

She relaxes slightly. He hauls out his sphygnomamometer, trying not to watch her peel off the lab coat. Her dress is plain, severely neutral. Ravishing. She exposes a long blue-black arm of aching elegance; when he wraps the cuff onto it he feels he is touching the limb of some uncanny wild thing.

Her pressure is one-twenty over seventy, no problem. What his own is he doesn’t like to think. Is there an ironic curve on those Nefertiti lips? Has his face betrayed him? When he comes to draw the blood sample it takes all his strength to hold steady, probing the needle in her femoral vein. Okay, thank God. The rich red—her blood—comes out strongly.

“Pressure’s fine. You’re what, twenty-eight?”

“Twenty-five.”

So young. He should be writing all this down, but some echo in her voice distracts him. Pain under that perfect control. The ghost of the doctor he once was wakes in him.

“Miss Omali.” He finds his old slow smile, the gentle tone that had been open sesame to hurts. “Of course this isn’t my business, but have you been under some particular stress that could account for the emergence of these headaches?”

“No.”

No open sesame here. He feels chilled, as if he’d poked at some perilous substance.

“I see.” Smiling, busying himself with the handy prescription pad, burbling about his job being to keep them healthy and how much better to get at causes than to take drugs for symptoms. The hypocrisy of his voice sickens him. She sits like a statue.

“Drop in Tuesday morning for the lab report. Meanwhile, if you feel one starting, take these right away. It’s a caffeine-ergotarnine compound. If the pain develops anyway, take this.” Angry with everything, he has not given her the morphine derivative he’d planned but only a codeine compound.

“Thank you.” Her lab coat is over her arm like a queen’s furs. Exit queen. The office collapses in entropy, intolerably blank.

Dann throws everything out of sight and heads out, stopping at the second floor to leave her blood sample in the medical pickup station. Her blood, rich, bright, intimate. Blood sometimes affects him unprofessionally.

When he comes out of the building doors he glimpses her again. She is bending to step into a cream-colored Lincoln Continental. The driver is a golden-skinned young woman. Somehow this depresses him more than if it had been a man. How rich, how alien is her world. How locked to him. The cream Mark IV vanishes among ordinary earthly cars. Drop dead, Doctor Dann.

But he is not depressed, not really. It was all unreal. Only very beautiful. And there is Tuesday morning ahead.

The thought continues to sustain him through his evening torpors, his numb night: a silver fishling in the dead sea of his mind. It is still with him as he goes through the Friday morning test routines.

The subjects are excited about the forthcoming Big Test. Noah has told them they will go in a Navy plane, and Lieutenant Kirk makes an officious speech about security. Six will go: the Housewife, the tragic Ensign, R-95 (who is sullen with worry because his twin is going out in the submarine), two girls whom Dann thinks of as the Princess and the Frump, and K-30, a dwarfish little man. Dann wants only to ask who else is going; he does not dare. Surely they won’t need a computer wherever this silly place is. He feels vaguely sorry for Noah when all this will end, as it must, in ambiguous failure. Perhaps there will be enough ambiguity to save his face.

The morning’s results are very bad.

As he is debating lunch, or more accurately ritalin-and-lunch, his phone rings.

“What? I can’t hear you.”

An almost unrecognizable weak whisper.

“Miss Omali? What’s wrong?”

“I didn’t get… prescriptions… filled yet. I… need them.”

“The headache? When did it return?”

“Last… night.”

“Have you taken anything for it?”

“Seconal… two… no good. Vomiting so…”

“No, Seconal won’t help. Don’t take anything else. I’ll get something to you at once. Give me your address.” As soon as he says it he’s horrified. She may live fifty miles away, maybe in some dangerous black place no one will deliver to.

The whisper is directing him to the Woodland City complex right on the Beltway.

He has checked his pocket kit and is down in the parking garage before he realizes he intends to bring it to her himself.

It takes two drugstores to get what he wants, drugs which he no longer dares to keep on hand. Woodland City turns out to be about as exotic as the Congressional Library. Twenty-five minutes from her call he is striding down a long motel-elegant corridor, looking for Number 721. The doors are wood-painted steel.

At his second knock 721 opens a crack and stops with a chain-rattle.

“Miss Omali? It’s Doctor Dann.”

A thin black hand comes out the crack, pale palm up.

“… Thank you.”

“Won’t you let me in, please?”

“… No.” The hand remains, trembling faintly. He can hear her breathe.

Suspicion flares in him. What’s in there? Is she alone? Is this some ploy, is he a fool? The hand waits. He hears a retching catch in her breath. Maybe she’s afraid to let a strange man in.

“Miss Omali, I’m a doctor. I have here a controlled narcotic. I cannot and will not hand it over like this. If you’re, ah, worried, I’ll be gald to wait while you telephone a friend to come.”

Oh God, he thinks, what if it’s a man friend? But suddenly a woman is right behind him, calling, “Marge?”

It’s the golden-skinned woman from the car, grocery bags in her arms, staring at him suspiciously under a wild afro.

“Marge,” she calls again. “I’m back. What’s going on?”

Vague sound from behind the door—and then it slams, the chain rattles, and the door swings wide open. Inside is an empty confusion of blowing white gauzy stuff. An inner door closes.

The woman walks past him into the windy room, looking at him hostilely. Dann looks back, hoping that his grey hair, the plain unfashionable grey suit on his tall frame, will identify him as harmless. The June wind is blowing long white and grey curtains into the room like cloudy flames. Dann explains himself. “I gather you’re a friend of hers?”

“Yes. Where’s the medicine?”

Dann brings out the packet, stands there holding it while a toilet flushes offstage. Then the inner door opens and she is holding the door-jamb, peering at him with a wet white towel held to her forehead.

Her long robe is plain grey silk, crumpled and sweat-stained. What he can see of her face is barely recognizable, grey and wizened with pain. The lower lip is twisted down, the beautiful eyelids are squeezed to slits. The towel’s water runs down her neck unheeded. She is holding herself like one enduring a beating; it hurts him to look. He rips open the packet.

“This is in suppository form so you won’t lose it by vomiting. You know how to use them?”

“Yes.”

“Take two. This one is to stop the pain and this one will control the nausea.”

She clasps them in a grey shaking palm. “How…long?”

“About thirty minutes, you’ll start to feel relief.” As detachedly as he can, he adds, “Try to place them far up so the spasms won’t dislodge it.”

She vanishes, leaving the door ajar. Through it he can see another white-grey room. Her bedroom. Disregarding her friend’s hard stare he walks in. More white gauzy stuff but the windows are closed. Plain white sheets, twisted and sodden. A white basin among the wet pillows. On the bedstand is the Seconal bottle bright red amid the whiteness. He picks it up. Nearly full and the date over a year old. Okay. He opens the night-table drawer, finds nothing more.

The woman has followed him in and is straightening the bedclothes, watching him mockingly.

“You finished?”

“Yes.” He walks back to the windy living room. “I’m going to wait until the medication takes effect.” In fact he has had no such ridiculous intention. He sits down firmly in a white tweed chair. “What I’ve given Miss Omali is quite strong. I want to be sure she’s all right. She appears to be alone here.”

The woman smiles at last, appearing instantly quite different.

“Oh, I understand.” The tone is sarcastic but friendlier. She puts the bags down and closes the windows: the drapes fall limp. As she puts milk away in a corner icebox Dann notices that she is conventionally pretty, despite a minor dermatitis. “Yeah, Marge is too alone.”

The bathroom door opens, a voice whispers, “Samantha?”

“Get her to lie down flat,” Dann says.

The woman Samantha goes in, closing the door. Dann sits stiffly in the white chair, remembering how he had once sat in the apartment of a minor Asian dictator during his military service. The man had been troubled by agonizing hemorrhoids and his aides had been very trigger-happy. Dann had never heard of any of them again.

Samantha comes back through picking up her groceries. “I live down the hall. How come you make house calls?”

“I was just leaving for the day. We try to keep the staff healthy.”

She seems to get some message, looks at him more cordially. “I’m glad somebody cares. I’ll be back later,” she says in final warning and goes out.

Left alone in the now-quiet room, Dann looks about. It’s sparely elegant, shades of white, severe fabrics; it would have been chillingly bleak if it had not been hers. None of the cryptic African art he had expected. He knows he is being a fool, the woman is perfectly healthy aside from more dehydration. Will he be missed at the office? Friday, not much on. No matter. No matter, too, that he has missed his, ah, lunch… A fool.

He picks up a grey periodical, The Journal of Applied Computer Science, and sits trying to puzzle out what an algorithm is.

When he hears retching from the bedroom he taps and goes in. She is lying hooped around the basin like a sick crane, producing nothing but phlegm. Her eyes meet his, sick and defiant. He makes an effort to project his good grey doctor image. It is extraordinary to see her lying down. In her bed.

Afterwards he takes the basin from her, rinses it and brings it back, fills the water glass on her bedstand.

“Try to drink some even if it doesn’t stay down.”

Her chin makes a regal, uncaring gesture; she sinks back onto the wet pillows. He goes out to wait again. He is being an incredible jackass, a lunatic. He doesn’t care. He picks up a paperback at random. The Sufi, by one Idries Shaw. He puts it down, unable to care for ancient wisdom. The clean, spartan room awakens some hurt in him. A poem by someone—Aiken? The scene was pain and nothing but pain. What else, when chaos turns all forces inwards to shape a single leaf?

He doesn’t know about the leaf, only about the pain. The carefully neutral colors she lives in, the bare forms, her controlled quietness, all speak to him of one who fears to awake uncontrollable pain. It doesn’t occur to him that anyone could miss this. He is a crazy, aging man who has missed his lunch.

When he looks in on her again there is a wondrous change. Her face is smoothing out, beauty flowing back. Chemical miracle. The eyelids are still clenched, but she exudes awareness. Daringly he sits on the plain bedroom chair to watch. She doesn’t protest.

When her throat moves he holds a fresh glass of water to her.

“Try.”

She takes it, her hooded eyes studying him from remote lands. The water stays down. He is absurdly happy. How long since he has had a bed patient? How long since he has sat by a woman’s bed. Don’t ask. Never ask— For the first time in how long he feels no need of his own chemical miracle. A sensation he identifies fearfully as life is creeping into him. It doesn’t hurt yet. Don’t trust it. Don’t think about it, it will go away. Unreality, that’s the key, as Noah would say.

His gaze has been resting on her half-shut eyes, a quiet, impersonal communion. Quite suddenly the last wrinkles smooth out, the dark gaze opens wide. She takes a deep breath, relaxing, smiling in wonder. He smiles back. To his pleasure, her eyes look into his. An instant of simple joy.

“It’s really gone.” She moves her head experimentally, sighs, licks her dry lips, still gazing at him like a child. Her hand gropes out for the water glass. He sees he has stupidly put it too far away, and moves to hand it to her.

As his hand nears it he freezes.

The water glass is moving. In an instant it slides nearly six inches toward her across the table top.

His hand jerks high away from the uncanny thing, he makes a sound. The glass stops, is nothing but an ordinary water glass again.

He stands staring down at it, frightened to death. So this is how it starts—Oh Christ, Oh Christ. One too many chemicals in my abused cortex. Slowly he picks up the glass and gives it to her.

As she drinks, a wild idea occurs to his terrified mind. Impossible, of course, but he can’t help asking.

“You aren’t, ah, are you one of Doctor Catledge’s subjects, too?”

“No!”

Harsh, disdainful negative; all rapport fled. Of course she’s not, of course people can’t move things. The only thing that moved was a potential difference across a deranged synapse in his own brain. But it was so real, so mundane. A glass simply sliding. It will happen again. How long will he be able to control it?

He stares into his brain-damaged future hearing her say coldly, “I don’t know what you mean.” Her eyes are bright with opiate animation. “I don’t want anything to do with that. Nothing at all. Do you understand?”

The extraordinary anger of her voice penetrates his fright.

Did something really happen, something more than himself? She’s afraid. Of what?

“Oh, God damn, God damn it,” she whispers, fumbling for the basin. The water comes back up.

Dann takes it away, his mind whirling with impossibilities. When he brings it back he says carefully, “Miss Omali. Please. I don’t know how to say this. I thought I saw—something move. I have reason to be concerned about myself. My, well, my sanity. Forgive me, I know how this sounds. But by any chance did you see—did you see it too?”

“No. You must be crazy. I don’t know what you mean.” She turns her head away, eyes closed. Her lips are trembling very slightly.

He sits down, weak with the excitement swelling in his chest. She knows. Something really happened. It wasn’t me. Oh, God, oh God, it wasn’t me. But how? What?

The long frail body lies silent under the sheet, the pure profile Still but for that imperceptible tension-tremor. She can do something, he thinks. She moved that glass. What did Noah call it, telekinesis? Doesn’t exist, except for Poltergeist nonsense in disturbed children. Statistical ambiguities with dice. Nothing like this, a glass of water sliding. Miss Omali, magician. The anger, the denial have convinced him entirely. She wants to hide it, not to be a “subject.” He understands that entirely, too.

“I won’t tell,” he says gently. “I didn’t see a thing.”

Her face snaps around to him, closed and haughty.

“You’re out of your mind. You can go now, I’m quite all right. Thanks for the stuff.”

The rebuff hurts him more than he thought possible. Foolish Doctor Dann. Sighing, he gets up and collects his kit. The lovely moment is gone for good. Better so; what business has he with joy?

“Remember to keep drinking all the liquids you can. I’ll have your lab report Tuesday.”

Cold nod.

As he turns to go the phone rings. Oddly, she doesn’t seem to have a bedroom extension.

“Shall I get it?”

Another nod. When he picks it up a man’s voice says loudly, “Omali? Why weren’t you in the office today?”

It’s Kendall Kirk.

Dismayed, Dann stares at her through the doorway, saying, “Kirk? Kirk? This is Doctor Dann speaking. Do you have a message for Miss Omali?”

She shows no reaction, certainly no pleasure.

“What?” Kirk says thickly. He sounds a trifle drunk. “Who’re you? Where’s Omali?”

“It’s Doctor Dann from your office, Kirk. Miss Omali has just had an, ah, neurovascular attack. I was called in.”

The dark profile on the pillows seems to relax slightly. Is he handling this right?

“Oh, is she sick?”

“Yes. She’s under medication, she can’t get up.”

“Well, when’s she coming in? The computer’s fucked up.”

“Monday at the earliest, depending on whether or not she’s fit. We’re waiting for the lab report Tuesday.”

“Oh. Well, tell her there’s a wad of stuff to run.”

“You can tell her when you see her. She’s not well enough now.”

“Oh. You coming back?”

“Probably not, Kirk. I have an outside patient to see.”

Kirk hangs up.

Reluctantly, Dann turns to go. “Goodbye again. Please call me if you need me, I’m leaving my number here.”

“Goodbye.”

Just as he’s closing the door he hears her call huskily, “Wait.”

The speed with which he’s back by her bedside appalls him. She studies him, frowning up from under her hand.

“Oh hell. I wish I could tell about people.”

“We all wish that.” Tentatively he smiles.

Unsmiling, she finally says in a very low voice, “You’re not crazy. Don’t tell anyone or I’ll magic you.”

Too astounded to grasp anything, Dann says “I won’t. I promise.” And sits down weak-legged.

“It’s your business, isn’t it, to tell Doctor Catledge?”

“No. Friend Noah’s project means nothing to me. In fact, I don’t believe in it—that is, I didn’t.”

She gazes at him distrustfully, hopefully, the great brown eyes inhumanly beautiful.

“I won’t ever do anything you don’t want me to—ever,” he says like a schoolboy. It’s true.

She smiles slightly. The eyes change, she leans back. “Thank you.”

They are allies. But he knows even now that he is not allying himself with anything like joy.

“Your friend Samantha said she’d stop by. Will she make you some dinner?”

“She’s so good to me. With five kids, too.” The drug is animating her face, making her talkative. He should go. Instead, he brings another glass of water and hands it to her, unaware that his face speaks tenderness.

“I believe I’ve seen her drive you home.”

She nods, holding the glass in incredibly delicate long dark fingers. “She works in the photo lab on the third floor. She’s been a good friend to me… but we don’t have much in common. She’s a woman.”

Pain is in the room again. To divert her he asks the first idiot thing in his head.

“You prefer men friends?”

“No.”

He chuckles, father to child. “Well, that doesn’t leave much, does it? Whom do you have something in common with, if I might ask?”

“Computers,” she says unexpectedly, and actually laughs aloud. The sound is coldly merry.

“I don’t know much about computers. What are they like, as friends?”

She chuckles again, not so harshly.

“They’re cool.”

She means it, he realizes. Not slang—cool. Cold, lifeless, not capable of causing pain. How well he knows it.

“Have you always liked—?” He stops with his mouth open. He has no telepathic abilities, none whatever, but the pain in the room would fell an ox. Carefully, quietly, he says to his hurt child, “I like cool things too. I have some different ones.”

Silence, pain controlled to stillness. He can’t bear it.

“Maybe someday you’d like to see some of mine,” he plunges on. “You could probably see them from the roof here, if this place has a sun deck. We could take Samantha too.”

The distraction works. “What do you mean?”

“Stars. The stars.” He smiles. He has done more smiling in the past ten minutes than in years. Insane. Delighted, he sees her diverted, puzzled face open. Friendship trembles between them.

“Now you have to rest. The drugs are making you feel energetic but you’ll feel sleepy soon. Sleep. If you still have any pain in four hours, take one more set of these. If it doesn’t go then, call me. No matter what time.”

“You’re going to see your outside patient,” she says, dreamily now.

“There isn’t any outside patient.” He smiles. “I don’t see anyone anymore.”

He closes her door very gently, sealing away her beauty, his moment of life. Out, back to his unreal world. Samantha passes him in the hall.

She does not call him that night. She does not call all the dreary weekend. Of course not, he tells himself. Migraines pass.

Monday morning be finds that she has returned to work. The computer room stays shut. Everything is back to normal. At lunchtime he experiments with a new form of hydromorphone, and calls the lab to expedite her blood analysis report. It’s ready; all factors normal there too.

Toward closing time he catches one glimpse of her over Noah Catledge’s shoulder. Does something silent fly between them? He can’t tell.

Noah is telling him that the trip to the secret Navy installation is set for Thursday. They must be prepared to stay two nights. He cannot bring himself to ask if she will come along.

“We’ll assemble at the M.A.T.S. terminal at National, at oh-nine-hundred, Dan. The place is called Deerfield—Oh dear, I probably shouldn’t have said that, it’s classified.”

“I won’t tell anyone, Noah,” he says gently, an echo aching in some obsolete part of him.