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 attention was attracted by muffled sounds from the first OR. Light coming through a small window suggested that an operation was in progress.
A dark window in the door of the adjacent ancillary room suggested that it was empty. Susan walked over, peered in, and stepped into the darkness.
This service room was dimly lit through a window of a door leading to the occupied OR.
Susan waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. Slowly the objects in the room took form. There was a central table supporting several large objects from which emanated a low-pitched continuous noise. Counter tops ran around the room. In the left counter top there was a large sink. Immediately to her right she could see the form of a gas sterilizer.
As quietly as possible, Susan opened the cabinet beneath the sink, and with her hands she ascertained that there would be enough room to squeeze in if necessary. She then returned to the hall door and ran her fingers along its edge until she found the knob and depressed the lock. Then she paused and listened to make sure there had been no change in the pattern of noises from the OR. Susan looked at the objects on the central table, but the light was too poor to distinguish them.