8

Jill tried to tell herself that Ben had gone charging off on another scent and simply had forgotten (or had not taken time) to let her know. But she did not believe it. Ben, incredibly busy as he was, owed much of his success, both professional and social, to meticulous attention to human details. He remembered birthdays and would rather have welched on a poker debt than have forgotten to write a bread-and-butter note. No matter where he had gone, nor how urgent the errand, he could have—and would have!—at least taken two minutes while in the air to record a reassuring message to her at her home or at the Center. It was an unvarying characteristic of Ben, she reminded herself, the thing that made him a lovable beast in spite of his many faults.

He must have left word for her! She called his office again at her lunch break and spoke with Ben’s researcher and office chief, Osbert Kilgallen. He assured her solemnly that Ben had left no message for her, nor had any come in since she had called earlier.

She could see past his head in the screen that there were other people in the office; she decided it was a poor time to mention the Man from Mars. “Did he say where he was going? Or when he would be back?”

“No. But that is not unusual. We always have a few spare columns on the hook to fill in when one of these things comes up.”

“Well . . . Where did he call you from? Or am I being too snoopy?”

“Not at all, Miss Boardman. He did not call; it was a statprint message, filed from Paoli Flat in Philadelphia as I recall.”

Jill had to be satisfied with that. She lunched in the nurses’ dining room and tried to interest herself in food. It wasn’t, she told herself, as if anything were really wrong . . . or as if she were in love with the lunk or anything silly like that.

“Hey! Boardman! Snap out of the fog—I asked you a question.”

Jill looked up to find Molly Wheelwright, the wing’s dietician, looking at her. “Sorry. I was thinking about something else.”

“I said, ‘Since when does your floor put charity patients in luxury suites?’”

“I didn’t know that we did.”

“Isn’t K-12 on your floor? Or have they moved you?”

“K-12? Certainly. But that’s not a charity case; it’s a rich old woman, so wealthy that she can pay to have a doctor watch every breath she draws.”

“Humph! If she’s wealthy, she must have come into money awfully suddenly. She’s been in the N.P. ward of the geriatrics sanctuary for the past seventeeen months.”

“Must be some mistake.”

“Not mine—I don’t let mistakes happen in my diet kitchen. That tray is a tricky one and I check it myself—fat-free diet (she’s had her gall bladder out) and a long list of sensitivities, plus concealed medication. Believe me, dear, a diet order can be as individual as a fingerprint.” Miss Wheelwright stood up. “Gotta run, chicks. I wish they would let me run this kitchen for a while. Hogwallow Cafeteria!”

“What was Molly sounding off about?” one of the nurses asked.

“Nothing. She’s just mixed up.” But Jill continued to think about it. It occurred to her that she might locate the Man from Mars by making inquiries around the diet kitchens. She put the idea out of her mind; it would take a full day to visit all the diet kitchens in the acres of ground covered by the sprawling buildings. Bethesda Center had been founded as a naval hospital back in the days when wars were fought on oceans; it had been enormous even then. It had been transferred later to Health, Education, & Welfare and had expanded; now it belonged to the Federation and was still larger, a small city.

But there was something odd about Mrs. Bankerson’s case. The hospital accepted all classes of patients, private, charity, and government; the floor Jill was working on usually had only government patients and its luxury suites were occupied by Federation Senators or other official guests able to command flossy service. It was unusual for a paying private patient to have a suite on her floor, or to be on her floor in any status.

Of course Mrs. Bankerson could be overflow, if the part of the Center open to the fee-paying public had no such suite available. Yes, probably that was it.

She was too rushed for a while after lunch to think about it, being busy with incoming patients. Shortly a situation came up in which she needed a powered bed. The routine action would be to phone for one to be sent up—but the storage room was in the basement a quarter of a mile away and Jill wanted the bed at once. She recalled that she had seen the powered bed which was normally in the bedroom of suite K-12 parked in the sitting room of that suite; she remembered telling one of those marine guards not to sit on it. Apparently it had simply been shoved in there to get it out of the way when the flotation bed had been installed for Smith.