VII
THE THING WAS wearing drifting white robes and stretching out its white arms to me and whispering my name. I couldn't see its face clearly. I tried to wake up and found that I was awake. That didn't seem right, somehow. Apparitions ought to stick to dreams where they belong.
It was still there in the middle of the room, illuminated only by the kickback of the yard lights outside, as much as could penetrate the drawn blinds. I'd been sleeping heavily a moment before, and I wasn't thinking very lucidly, I guess. I just knew that I didn't believe in ghosts, and that I had no midnight mistresses in the place, and that tricks were sometimes played here in the name of training and analysis, to see how fast you could react.
I went for the white thing before it could come for me. I lunged out of bed low, cut it down, wrapped it up, and pinned it to the floor. It was dressed in some material that was coarse to the touch; the idea of a shroud came to mind. The hell with that. Somebody was playing games, and they could damn well go play them somewhere else. Then I felt the weak, panicky struggles and heard the frightened breathing and I knew at last what I had. I let go and got up and turned on the light, feeling foolish and angry.
"Jesus Christ, Skinny," I said. "Don't tell me you walk in your sleep on top of everything else."
She was huddled on the floor, kind of tangled in a Navajo rug. I thought she was crying, but the face she turned up to me was dry. The eyes were dry. They were perfectly enormous, and the odd yellow light was in them. She shrank away as I stepped forward to help her rise. I stopped.
"Relax," I said disgustedly. "I figure a hundred pounds for the legal raping size. You're still safe by at least ten pounds. What the hell are you doing here, anyway?'
She didn't answer, of course. I went over to my suitcase, found the sandals and dressing gown I hadn't bothered to unpack earlier, and put them on. When I turned again, she was standing up. They'd given her some kind of a crude, straight, sleeveless cotton gown that reached the floor. So much for my dream of drifting robes. It wasn't the sexiest garment in the world, but it had a kind of convent simplicity that went well with the thin face. and the big eyes and the chopped-off hair. She could have been a martyr on the way to the bonfire.
She said, "Don't leave me here."
I stared at her for a moment. It was a perfectly good human voice. Well, I should have known she had one somewhere.
"Please don't leave me here," she said clearly.
I drew a long breath. "I haven't the slightest intention of leaving you here," I said. "This happens to be my room and I'm still way behind in my sleep. I'm booting you out into the hall this minute, unless you come up with a very good reason to the contrary, fast."
"I mean this place. I don't want to stay here."
"Why not?"
The big eyes watched me, but they were no longer yellow. They only went yellow when she was scared or mad, I decided. These were gray eyes. If they'd only blinked occasionally, they would have been nice sensible eyes. When she spoke, her voice was quite sensible, too.
"Don't be silly," she said. "It's a glorified funny farm, that's why not! And I'm the newest, cutest inmate, and I'm just going to love it here if they have to kill me to make me. Well, I don't love it! I think it's perfectly horrible. Everybody feels so goddamn sorry for me, except you!"
The blasphemous adjective went oddly with her saintly, ascetic appearance, barefooted in the rough white nightie.
"What makes you think I'm not sorry for you?" I asked, startled.
She said, "Because I know perfectly well you think I'm a clumsy little idiot who caused everybody a lot of trouble by botching up a perfectly simple job and getting caught so some people had to get shot rescuing her and others had to get blisters on their hands carting her to safety!" She got it all out in one rush of words while I stared at her. Then she said, "Of course, you're perfectly right."
I didn't know what to say to that. She watched me unblinkingly, waiting. It was funny-in a sense I'd known her for well over a week, but she hadn't really been a person until this moment. She'd just been some damaged government property for which I'd been more or less responsible, off and on. And now that she'd become a person, she wasn't at all the person I'd expected. Before either of us spoke, there were footsteps in the hail.
"There's a light," said the voice of the big nurse I'd seen earlier.
"Please!" Sheila hesitated and stepped forward quickly. It was obviously the bravest thing she'd done in her life, but she managed to force herself to touch me, to take my hand gingerly and turn it over so the half-healed blisters showed. She looked up at my face and whispered, "Please! Why did you bother to carry me out of the jungle, if you were just going to leave me in a dreadful place like this?"
Then they were at the door, and she let go my hand and shrank back guiltily, as if caught committing a monstrous perversion.
"Oh, there you are, honey," said the big nurse. "Don't you know you had us all worried, disappearing like that?"
She was an imposing figure in a striped seersucker dressing gown, with her hair in curlers. She'd apparently been called out of bed by the night nurse, a stout little woman trying to disguise her profession in a costume of brightly printed shirt and shorts.
"We're a naughty girl," said the smaller woman. 'We promised nursie we'd go right to sleep."
"Don't scold her, Jonesy. It's hard the first night in a strange place, isn't it, honey?" The big nurse smiled brightly. "We know you didn't mean to cause trouble, dearie. You were just looking for a familiar face, weren't you, honey? Now you come with us and we'll give you something to make you sleep."
She gave me a hard look that said I hadn't heard the end of this. They all went out of the room. Sheila never looked my way. I didn't sleep as well the second half of the night as I had the first; in fact, after a while I got up again and went through the stuff on the desk. In the morning I reported to. the office according to instructions.
The orthopedic surgeon they had in the place-Stern wasn't a scalpel-type doctor-was named Jake Lister. He was about six feet tail and about six feet wide and he'd played pro football to pay for his medical education. He had big white teeth in a black face, and long black fingers that could be gentle and sensitive as a musicians, but weren't always.
"Ouch!" I said. "Why don't you just pull it off and take it over to the lab for examination? I'll wait here, holding a hanky over the bloody stump."
Lister grinned and straightened up. "Nothing wrong with you that a little exercise won't cure, man. You've been sitting on your behind too much, that's your trouble." He went on to prescribe a series of squat-downs and push-ups to be performed, it seemed, continuously day and night.
"That's fine," I said. "When do I sleep and eat?"
"Ah, hell," he said. "Why do I waste my breath? Any time one of you sinister characters gets a little seniority, he's suddenly too proud to do simple exercises. I tell you what, you go over to the gym three times a day as long as you're here and have the Dago give you an hour's workout with the foils or sabers. No epйe, mind you, that's too precise and static. The hell with form. Just mix it up fast and sloppy. If Martinelli's busy, you practice lunging against a wall until your tongue's hanging out. That ought to take the kinks out of your quadriceps femoris."
He went out, leaving me alone hi the examining room behind Stern's office. I'd been told to wait for the top man himself, and if I knew my medical bureaucrats, it was going to be a long wait. They've got to put us field men in our places, even if we do get to call them by their first names. I took my time pulling on my pants therefore, and I could have taken more. After I'd waited fifteen minutes, a prim young woman came in and told me Dr. Stern had been taken suddenly busy and wouldn't be able to see me this morning. He was terribly sorry, she said. I said I shared his grief; and I went over to the gym and made arrangements with Martinelli, the edged-weapons trainer.