He was still fuming when he met Gibby for coffee at 11:00. “I spilled it,” he said. “I’m sorry, but if she doesn’t know we’re onto her now, she’s an imbecile.”
Gibby looked stricken. “I thought she gave me a funny look when she checked out the drawer with me a little while ago. And you know, there haven’t been any complaints all evening. But she didn’t seem scared. She kept giving me that weird little grin of hers. Patronizing, almost.” The girl stirred her coffee in silence for a moment. “Oh, Ned, why did you have to do it that way?”
Thompson shook his head, “I couldn’t help myself. Of all the vicious—” He broke off helplessly. “Gibby, Margaret Conway has had the Bad Disease for a long time, and she’s put up a real fight, right from the first. I just couldn’t stand around and know what was happening and let that creature get away with it. Not with Margaret. If it blows off the lid, it blows off the lid. I’m sorry.”
Gibby shrugged. “I just hope it doesn’t do worse than that. If she stays, she’s going to get her stuff — somehow. But if she can’t withhold it from the patients, what can she do?” She dug into her handbag and produced a small envelope. “I filched this out of her handbag this evening. Took it from a pillbox holding a dozen or more just like it.”
Ned rolled the tiny dead-white tablet out on his palm, and whistled. “It sure looks like the real stuff. But it could be nitroglycerine or atropine or half a dozen other things that aren’t narcotic—”
“It could be M.S. that she’s just stolen, too,” said Gibby. “You’re the doctor. How do you tell?”
Ned dropped the envelope in his pocket. “I’m not sure,” he said. “But don’t worry. We’ll find out.”
At 3:00 a.m. they called him to see Mr. Wilcox. “He’s had a bad night ever since we came on,” the night floor nurse said on the phone. “First he had some trouble breathing, and now he’s complaining of chest pain—”
Ned sighed and slipped on his clothes in the dark. The corridor in the quarters was dim; as he stood waiting for the elevator he tried to shake away sleep and orient his thinking. George Wilcox had been doing well — but so soon after a coronary anything could happen. On Fourth he found the man moaning quietly, his face ashen, one hand to his chest.
“When did it start, George?”
“Couple of hours ago, Doc. I thought maybe I could sweat it out, but it’s getting worse. Took a couple of my nitroglycerine like I used to, but it didn’t ease up a bit.”
“Well, this isn’t a job for nitroglycerine.” Ned listened to his chest and checked his blood pressure, then attached the electrocardiograph leads. After a few moments he rolled up the tracing.
“Can you give me something for it, Doc? It’s really hurting.”
“We’ll take care of that, don’t worry. This will probably pass — the tracing doesn’t look bad at all.”
It didn’t look good, either. Ned could not tell whether the changes indicated fresh damage or merely an extension of the old — an expert reading in the morning would tell that; but George Wilcox was in trouble. Back at the nursing station Ned made a note on the chart and wrote orders with the night nurse peering over his shoulder.
“He gets sick with M.S., you know,” the nurse said.
“So he does. We’d better make this a hundred milligrams of Demerol, and put him in the oxygen tent for the rest of the night. We’ll see how he looks in the morning.”
In the intern’s quarters he sat staring at the clock, and out at the growing light in the East. He was wide-awake now. With a disgusted sigh he went out to the lounge and poured himself a cup of coffee.
Presently he took the white tablet Gibby had given him out of his pocket and stared at it. It looked like a sixth-grain tablet of morphine sulphate. But there was no mark to distinguish it from non-narcotic drugs like nitroglycerine, used for relief of the pain of angina pectoris — or atropine, given pre-operatively to reduce secretions. The Narcotics Bureau could analyze it, of course, and tell them what it was — but that might take weeks, and even then it would be evidence that had been illegally obtained...
He stared at the tablet, and then suddenly popped it under his tongue. He waited for a few moments. Nothing happened. Then his fingers began to tingle as a feeling of warmth crept down his arms and legs. He felt suddenly light-headed as he stood up. In the mirror his face was flushed, his pupils large and black.
He didn’t have a blood pressure cuff on, but he knew what it would show. The tablet was not morphine sulphate. Nitroglycerine. A vascular dilator, used by patients with angina pectoris to ease the pain of their hungry heart muscle. About as dangerous as a shot of good whiskey, and not even remotely as narcotic.
He shrugged in disgust and went back to bed.
He was tired the next day, and by afternoon he felt it in every bone. It was a day of heavy admissions, with too many little decisions to make, too much rapid thinking-deciding-forgetting-reconsidering-remembering-checking which is the intern’s work. When Endicott relieved him at 5:30 he drove downtown to supper, took in a very dull movie, and was back at the hospital by nine, determined to sleep and angry because he was still wide-awake.
Instead of sleeping he read, or pretended to read, but his mind kept coming back in anger and bafflement to the thin brown nurse on the Fourth floor.
How was she getting her drugs?
He had checked with Gibby when he returned, and heard what he had dreaded hearing. No significant complaints. A tight, patronizing smile on Davis’s lips — and no sign of any narcotics withheld.
But something more fundamental lay deeper: why did she do it? That was the question that was so baffling, the thing that made it so sickening and shameful. What she was doing was cruel and vicious, certainly, but it was not the cruelty of meanness. It was not cruelty for the sake of cruelty. It was, ultimately, the cruelty of selfishness — utter, abysmal, soul-consuming selfishness. She glutted herself at the expense of the pain and need of others. She drank, and in drinking fouled the spring. But surely she had not always been that way. What strange door in her mind had opened and started her need? The door of idle curiosity? Of bitterness and hunger? The hope of filling ever-so-briefly some gaping well of loneliness? Of brightening for a few moments some barrenness of life? Perhaps... but how much more lonely she was now, how much more barren! She must have fought it once — fought to close the door. Now she no longer fought — she fed on it. Now she didn’t care about the pain and need of others...
And that, of course, was what made her so dangerous. She didn’t care any more. Normal restraints of common humanity had been sidetracked, somehow. They didn’t apply to her any more. That was why she couldn’t simply be sent away.
And always you knew she’d be back, someday. Another face, another body, but she’d be back—
He growled at himself and picked up the phone, even though it was barely 10:00. “Got the chow hall open, Gibby? Be a good girl, huh? I’m starving.”
He met her in the basement corridor, and there was trouble in her eyes. Her blonde hair was rumpled, her cheeks very red. She looked close to tears. “I don’t like this, Ned. I’m beginning to get scared.”
“No complaints, eh?”
“Nothing.” She pushed back a stray forelock wearily. “I pushed this thing, and now I’m afraid it’s getting out of control. Maybe we should have fired her, right at the start, just got rid of her and forgotten the whole mess.”
“It won’t go away just because we close our eyes, Gibby. You know that.”
“But what can we do?”
“Watch and wait.”
“That’s what scares me. What are we waiting for?”