Turning to the next page of her notes, Helen told Philips that Cornelia Rogers from Typing had called in sick again making it the ninth day absent this month. She'd managed to be ill for at least seven days each month for the five months she'd been working for neuroradiology. Helen asked what Philips wanted to do about it.
Philips wanted to have the girl beat up, quartered, and thrown into the East River. "What would you like to do?" he asked, controlling himself.
"I think she should be given notice."
"Fine, you handle it."
Helen had one last comment before heading for. the door: Philips had to give a 1 P.M. lecture on the CAT scanner to the current group of medical students. She was about to leave when Philips stopped her. "Listen, do me a favor. There's an in-patient named Lynn Anne Lucas. See that she gets scheduled this morning for a CAT scan and polytomography. If there's any trouble, just say it's a special request of mine. And tell the technicians to give me a call just before they do the procedures."
Helen wrote down the message and left. Martin went back to the two charts. It was encouraging that both young women had neurological symptoms, especially since multiple sclerosis was specifically listed as a possibility in Katherine Collins' case. In the case of Ellen McCarthy, Philips checked to see how often seizures were a part of the clinical picture of multiple sclerosis. Less than ten percent, yet they did occur. But why had both girls been suddenly lost to follow-up? Martin couldn't help worrying that he was going to have difficulty getting them in for X rays if they had transferred their care someplace else, maybe even to another city.
Just then Helen buzzed him to say that the resident was ready for him in the cerebral angiography room. Philips put on his lead apron with the faded Superman logo, picked up Collins' and McCarthy's charts and walked out of his office. Stopping at Helen's desk, he asked her to track the two patients down and encourage them to come in for some free diagnostic X rays. He wanted Helen not to frighten the young women, but to make sure they understood it was important.
Downstairs he found Denise waiting for him. She had showered, washed her hair, and changed her clothes; it had been a miraculous thirty-minute transformation. She no longer looked tired and her light brown eyes sparkled above her surgical mask. Philips would have loved to have touched her, but instead let his eyes linger for an extra second on hers.
She had already done enough angiograms so that he just acted as her assistant. There was no conversation as she deftly handled the catheter, threading it up inside the patient's artery. Philips watched carefully, ready to make suggestions if he thought they were needed. They weren't. The patient was Harold Schiller, who'd been CAT scanned the day before. As Philips had guessed, Mannerheim had ordered a cerebral angiogram probably in preparation to operate, although clearly the case was inoperable.
An hour later the case was all but done.
"I tell you," whispered Martin, "you're getting better than I and you've only been doing it a few weeks." Denise blushed but Martin knew she was pleased. Leaving her to finish, he told her to buzz when the next case was ready to go. He wanted to finish scanning the skull films on his alternator, then begin to set up running the old films through Michaels' computer. He reasoned that if he could run a hundred a day he could go through the whole master list in a month and a half. He also thought that he could give Michaels the discrepancies as they surfaced so that perhaps by the time he finished, Michaels would have the bugs out of the program. If that were the case, they'd have something to present to the unsuspecting medical world by July.
But as Philips rounded the corner outside his office, Helen ambushed him with disappointing news. She'd had no luck with any of his requests. Lynn Anne Lucas could not be CAT scanned or X-rayed because she'd been transferred during the night to New York Medical Center. As far as Katherine Collins and Ellen McCarthy were concerned, she'd traced both of them to the university. They were both listed as undergraduates. However, Collins could not be reached because she'd allegedly run away a month ago and was considered a missing person. Ellen McCarthy, on the other hand, was dead. She'd had a fatal auto accident on the West Side Highway two months ago.
"Jesus Christ!" said Philips. "Tell me you're joking."
"I'm sorry," said Helen. "That's the best I could do."
Philips shook his head in disbelief. He'd been so sure that he'd get at least one case out of the three to examine. He stepped into his office and stared blankly at the far wall. His compulsive personality wasn't accustomed to dealing with such reversals.
He pounded his fist against his open hand so that the sound echoed in the room. Then he paced, trying to think. Collins was out. If the police couldn't find her, how could he. McCarthy? If she'd been killed she must have been taken to a hospital. But which? And Lucas… at least she'd been taken to New York Medical Center where he had a good friend, instead of Bellevue. If it had been Bellevue, he would have had to give up.
Philips told Helen to see if she could find out why Lynn Anne had been transferred and then asked her to put a call through to Dr. Donald Travis at New York Medical Center. He also asked her to see if the police knew where Ellen McCarthy had been taken after her accident.
Still distracted, Philips forced himself to concentrate on the skull films in front of him. They were all normal in respect to their texture. When he went out to Helen's desk, she had little good news. Dr. Travis was tied up and would have to call back. She hadn't been able to find out much about Lucas because the nurse on duty at the time went home at 7 A.M. and could not be reached. The only positive information she had was that Ellen McCarthy had been taken back to the Med Center after her accident.
Before Philips could ask her to track down that lead, a maintenance man appeared with an enormous trolley piled with boxes, paper and other debris. Without a word, he pushed it into Philips' office and began unloading the material.
"What the hell?" asked Philips.
"That's the supplies from the storeroom you said to have put in here," explained Helen.
"Shit," said Philips as the man stacked the supplies along the wall. Philips had the uncomfortable feeling that events were slipping out of his control.
Sitting down amidst the chaos, Philips dialed Admitting. He felt his mood deteriorating further as the phone rang interminably on the other end of the line.
"Have a moment?" called William Michaels. He'd leaned in through Philips' open door, his cheerful grin in direct contrast to Martin's scowl. Then his eyes swept around the room in total disbelief.
"Don't ask," said Philips, anticipating some smart comment.
"My God," said Michaels. "When you work, you don't mess around."
At that point someone finally answered the phone in Admitting, but it was a temporary receptionist who transferred Martin to someone else. That person only handled admissions, not discharges or transfers, so Philips was switched again. Only then did he learn that the person he had to speak to was on a coffee break, so he hung up, frustrated with bureaucracy, saying, "Why didn't I become a plumber?"
Michaels laughed, then asked how Philips was doing with their project. Philips told him that he'd had most of the X rays pulled, indicating the pile with his hand. He told Michaels that he thought he could run them all in a month and a half.
"Perfect," said Michaels. "The sooner the better, because the new memory storage and association system we've been working on is proving better than we'd dreamed. By the time you finish we'll have a new central processor to handle the debugged program. You have no idea how good it's going to be."