Well check the visitors’ ward and the corridor. Maybe she had enough. The main ward is usually a shock for first- time visitors.”
Michelle turned and looked out through the glass to the waiting room, but Susan was not there either.
The display screen on the computer flashed: Sample 323 B4
terminated. 0310 Feb. 26. Cause of death: cardiac arrest. STOP.
“Well if she came here for Berman, she’s too late,” said Karen without feeling,
“She’s not in the visitors’ ward,” said the guard, activating a series of switches. “And she’s not in the corridor. It’s not possible.”
Michelle got up from the chair, her eyes staying on screen 15 until she was at the door. “Calm down. I’ll locate her.” Michelle turned to the nurse at the computer. “Maybe you should try to call the director again. I think we’d better get rid of this girl.”
Thursday, February 26, 5:20 P.M.
As soon as Michelle left the main ward, Susan had removed the Xeroxed copies of the Jefferson Institute floor plans she had folded in her notebook. She oriented herself from the entrance, traced their route to the main ward, and then checked the routes for gaining access to the second floor. She saw two choices. There was a stairway from MG or an elevator from M Comp R. Susan glanced down at the key in the lower right hand corner. MO stood for morgue; M Comp R was the main computer room. Susan quickly decided that the stairs would be safer than the elevator, she thought that the computer room might well be occupied.
She walked toward the far end of the ward, where there was a conventional door, and tried the knob. It turned and Susan opened the door into the corridor beyond. It seemed to be quite dark; then she remembered the goggles. She took them off and put them in her uniform pocket. The corridor was like the others she had seen, starkly white with the illumination coming through the floor. At either end of the corridor was a large mirror, and its multiple reflections made the corridor seem infinitely long.
There were no sounds and no one in sight. Susan checked the floor plan, which indicated that the morgue and the stairs were to the right She closed the door to the ward behind her. Moving quickly, she made her way down to a door at the end of the corridor. There were no markings on the door, but at least it too had normal hardware. Susan tried the knob; the door was unlocked.
As silently as possible, she opened the door, just a few inches at a time.
She could see the tiles of the near wall. Then she began to see the upper part of a stainless steel dissecting table. A corpse lay naked on it. Susan heard some voices and a laugh, followed by the sound of a scale.
“So much for the lungs. How much should we say the heart weighed?”
said one of the voices.
“Your turn to guess,” laughed the other.
Nudging the door an inch more, Susan could just glimpse the head of the corpse. She squinted, then felt weak. It was Berman.
Letting the door close without a sound, Susan stood in the doorway for a few deep breaths. She felt slightly nauseated but it passed. She realized that she had very little time. The elevator.
Susan’s pause in the doorway had been perfect timing. The TV scanner behind the one-way mirror finished its five-second scan as Susan stepped back into the corridor. It would resume its scan in ten seconds.
She hurried back into the main ward and reached the doorway to the computer room. Hesitantly she tried it. It too was unlocked. She opened the door about ten inches and looked into the room. To her relief, it seemed unoccupied. As she pushed the door farther she could see a fantasy of computer consoles, input-output equipment, and tape storage systems.
A movement in the far corner near to the ceiling caught Susan’s eye.
She recognized it immediately. It was a TV monitor camera. As its unhurried pan brought its lens toward Susan, she ducked back and closed the door. When she guessed that the camera had panned past, she whipped open the door and began to run the length of the room, to the elevator. But her timing was off; she would be spotted by the TV camera on its return sweep. Susan dived behind a computer console only halfway to her destination.
She had to work her way down the rest of the room, from console to console, trying to avoid the roving eye of the camera. Making a dash for the elevator, she pressed the button frantically. Susan could hear the machinery start up inside the shaft. The elevator was on another floor.
The TV camera reached the end of its arc and started back. Susan pressed the elevator button several times in succession. The sound of the elevator machinery stopped, the doors quivered and then began to open. Susan glanced up at the TV camera before rolling around the edge of the elevator door, groping for the “close” button. The door closed but Susan had no idea if she had been observed or not The elevator was cavernous and correspondingly slow. There were only three burtons. She pressed the button for floor two and felt the machine begin to ascend. The floor plan for the second floor showed that the ORs were at the extreme opposite end of the building from the elevators. A long hall stretched from the elevators back to the OR area.
Both the eighth and ninth doors to the right led into the OR complex.
When the elevator stopped and the doors opened, Susan stayed inside with her finger poised over the “door- close” button. No one in sight. The corridor was similar to those of the first floor except that the doors were more deeply recessed. The ceilings carried tracks for the trolleys.
As the elevator doors began to close Susan plunged down the corridor, mentally checking off the number of doorways she had passed. Suddenly, in the distance, Susan saw a man driving a miniature forklift loaded with units of whole blood. He appeared to emerge from an intersecting corridor. She half-skidded, half-ran into one of the recessed doorways, crashing up against the wall, her breath coming in gasps. She listened.
The sound of the machine receded. She peered into the corridor. Empty.
She pushed off and reached the ninth door.
She waited until her breath returned to a semblance of normal before cracking the door and checking the room. She slipped in quickly.
She was in a dressing room. A partially smoked cigarette lay in an ashtray, its smoke curling up in the still air. An open doorway led to a bath area. Susan could hear the sound of a shower going.
Michelle reentered the control room. Her sense of ennui had disappeared. Her mouth was set, but her eyes moved incessantly. Like the guard, she was now very nervous.
That girl has literally evaporated. She couldn’t have walked out, could she?” asked Michelle.
“Impossible. There’s no way the front door, or any outside door for that matter, can be opened without me activating the door release.” The guard was still switching from scanner to scanner.
“I think we’d better give direction another call. This affair could get serious,” said the nurse at the computer console.
“I don’t understand it. We have these monitors placed in all the key areas. She’s got to be in some doorway,” said the guard.
“She’s not in a doorway. I went all the way through to the main ward.
What about the elevator?”
“That’s a thought,” said the guard. “If she does get upstairs there could be big trouble. I’m going to secure the building and activate all the automatic locking mechanisms on all stairway doors and electrify the perimeter fence. I’ll hold the general alarm until direction is reached.”
Michelle moved to a red telephone. “This is absurd, really! Totally unnecessary. Why was she allowed in by herself without a group?”
Swinging doors opened from the dressing rooms to the OR receiving area. Susan stepped into it. Here the appearance was more traditional.
The lighting came from fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling alongside the omnipresent tracks for the patient trolleys. There was a faint glow that Susan remembered from the main ward, and she guessed there was an ultraviolet component to the light. The floor was of white vinyl, the walls surfaced in white ceramic tile.
The OR reception area was not large. In the center was an empty desk.
There were apparently four operating rooms, two on each side, with ancillary rooms between. Susan’s
