The Select (23 page)

"She's on her way,
Lou,"
said a tinny voice.

"Right." Verran turned back to Tim.
"I've got to go. But I'll check up on you, buddy. If your story
checks out, okay. If not, you're in big trouble."

Tim watched him hurry down the hall,
then looked around. Women's Country was empty. Who would have
called security about a guy in Quinn's room? And how could anyone
possibly have known he was here?

Tim closed the door and wandered back
toward the spare bed.

Come to think of it, this Verran guy
had looked pretty damn surprised, as shocked to see Tim as Tim had
been to see him. Maybe more so. And why a flashlight and that other
weird-looking gadget? Not exactly equipment for confronting a
prowler.

What was he going to do with a
flashlight in Quinn's room?

Tim stepped over to the
window.

Something strange there.
Some—

"Damn!"

Sudden pain in the sole of his right
foot. Something had jabbed into it. Something sharp.

He dropped back onto the bed and
pulled his foot up where he could see it. Some sort of pin had
pierced his sock and was stuck in his sole. He pulled it out and
held it up to the light.

A little black thing, a flat, circular
hockey-puck-like nob, maybe a quarter inch across, stuck on a
straight pin. What was it? A tie tack? One of those old-fashioned
stick pins? He wondered if it was Quinn's. He doubted it. She wore
about as much jewelry as she did make up. And this thing didn't
look very feminine anyway.

Then he heard the key in the door
again. He hoped this time it was Quinn, not just because he didn't
want to deal with Louis Verran's homely puss again, not just
because his stomach was rumbling, but because he was hungry for the
sight of her. Images of her face—talking, eating, bending over her
books, concentrating as she wielded her scalpel—had been popping
into his head at all hours.

As she stepped into the room, the
sight of her sent a smile to his face and a wave of warmth through
him.

What have you done to me, Quinn
Cleary? he thought.

He said, "How were things at the
office today, dear?"

She smiled, but it was a half-hearted
smile, as if it were an effort. That wasn't like her.

"Something wrong?"

"Oh, nothing really," she said as she
slipped out of her lab coat. "I just had a bad run-in with Alston
over at Science a little while ago."

She told him about Ward C and the
patient almost slipping off the bed, and about the dressing down
she'd received.

"The ungrateful bastard," Tim said
when she'd finished. "That wasn't a fair or even a sane
reaction."

"Tell me about it. But you know, I got
the strangest feeling that he was almost as afraid as he was
angry."

Tim was angry too. And the heat of his
anger surprised him. He had an urge to find Alston and grab him by
his dinky string tie and teach him a thing or two about the proper
response to a young woman who tries to help a patient in
trouble.

Was he so angry because that young
woman was Quinn?

More evidence of how far she'd gotten
under his skin.

But he bottled the anger. Confronting
Alston was little more than an idle fantasy anyway.

"Forget about the creep," he told her.
"Let's go eat."

"I've lost my appetite," she said,
"but I'll keep you company."

Tim remembered the weird black stick
pin he'd found and held it out to her.

"By the way, is this
yours?"

She gave it barely a glance. "Nope.
Never seen it before. What is it?"

"Beats me. I found it on your floor,
over there by the window. Stuck me in the foot."

She looked at it again, more closely
this time, but no sign of recognition lit in her eyes. She
shrugged.

"Maybe one of the maids dropped
it."

Tim shrugged into his sport coat and
stuck the pin into the lapel, then he struck a pose.

"May I present the very latest in
men's accessories. Think it'll catch on?"

Quinn squinted at his lapel. "I can
hardly see it."

Tim glanced down. The tiny black
hockey puck was almost lost in the herringbone pattern.

"Oh, well. Another of my fashion
milestones down the drain."

Tim followed her out the
door.

*

About time, Verran thought as he
watched Brown and Cleary leave and head for the caf. I was
beginning to think they'd never leave.

He waited in the bushes until they
disappeared into the caf, then he slipped into the dorm and hurried
up to Broads' Country.

No one about. Quickly he unlocked 252
and closed the door behind him. He turned on the metal detector and
went immediately to the space between the window and the second
bed, where he'd hit the floor when Cleary had surprised him last
night. Slowly, carefully, he waved the business end of the detector
over the thick carpet, keeping a close eye on the needle in the
illuminated gauge in the handle.

It didn't budge.

He ran his fingers through the deep
pile. This was the most obvious area. It had to be here.

When his fingers found nothing, he
turned and crept across the room, carefully sweeping the detector
over the carpet all the way to the door.

The only flickers from the needle
turned out to be a penny and a dime.

Great. Just great. The detector was
working fine, but no bug.

Where the hell was it,
then?

NOVEMBER

Claropril (ACE-I) the new ultra-potent
ACE-inhibitor from Kleederman Pharmaceuticals, has captured a
20-percent share of the anti-hypertensive market a mere six months
after approval.

Modern Medicine

THE WORLD'S LONGEST
CONTINUOUS

FLOATING MEDICAL BULL
SESSION

(II)

Tonight the session had wound up in,
of all places, Harrison's room.

"He's not as bad as we all thought,"
Tim said as he led Quinn down the hall of the north wing's first
floor. His sharp blue eyes were bright. He wasn't wearing his dark
glasses as much as he used to. She preferred him this way. "Of
course, he's hardly Mr. Warmth, either. Far from it, in fact. But
at least he's articulate."

Quinn glanced at her watch. She was
behind on her histology notes and had been in the middle of
bringing them up to date when Tim had popped in and dragged her
away to the bull session.

"Come on, Quinn," he'd said. "You need
a break. Take five and add your two cents to the session. It could
use some new blood."

"But my notes—"

"You want to crack like that guy
Prosser who disappeared without a trace a couple of years ago?
There's more to medicine than histology, you know."

"But if I don't pass the rest won't
matter."

"You'll pass."

She'd come along because she realized
Tim was right. She would pass. Just passing had never been good
enough for her and still wasn't, but she did need a break. Between
classes, labs, studying, and working with Dr. Emerson, she was
beginning to feel a bit frazzled. She'd thought about quitting the
lab job, but the work was getting more interesting now and she
found the extra money came in handy for the sundries The Ingraham
didn't provide.

Eight people were in Harrison's room.
Quinn and Tim made it ten. They greeted Quinn with hellos but they
had a cheer for Tim when he came through the door. He clearly had
become a mainstay of these sessions. She marveled at his ability to
make friends with almost anybody. And envied it.

"Tim, you're just in time." It was
Judy Trachtenberg. Didn't she ever study? "Harrison here is going
radical on us. He thinks chiropractors ought to be included in the
tiering of care."

"Tiering?" Quinn said.

They quieted and looked at
her.

"Tiers of eligibility," Tim told her.
"You know. Alston mentions it every so often."

"Oh, right," Quinn said. Somewhere
along the line Dr. Alston had turned tier into a verb: to tier.
Last week he'd asked the class to assume a limited amount of
medical resources, then directed them to create two sets of tiers:
the first set listing levels of care in descending order of
sophistication, the second set dividing the population into groups
in descending order of their value to society. Quinn had found it a
chilling exercise, but she'd considered it no more than that: an
exercise in ethics. The bull session semed to be taking it
seriously.

"What do you think?" Harrison said.
Quinn wondered if anybody knew his first name. "Yes or no on the
back crackers?"

"Definitely yes," Tim said.
"Acupuncturists too. We've got to find a tier for every therapy if
this is going to work."

Quinn waited for the zinger, the gag
line that would turn around what he'd just said. But it never
came.

"All right," Judy said. "Where to we
lump them?"

"With the physical therapists," Tim
said. "Take away all their mumbo-jumbo and look at what they do:
physical therapy."

Quinn watched and listened in shock.
"I thought you were against any kind of rationing," she
said.

"I was," Tim said.

"Well, what happened?" Quinn realized
that although she and Tim did a lot of talking, the future
structure of healthcare delivery was not a topic of conversation.
She had no idea he'd come around 180 degrees.

"That was before I
realized the full scope of the problem. The day is coming when
there won't be enough care to go around. And that means some people
are going to have to make do with lower levels of care. Tiering is
the only way to decide who gets what, Quinn. The
only
way."

She heard murmurs of agreement and saw
heads nodding in agreement all around the room.

"What are you saying? Someone gets
past a certain age and we throw them to the wolves?"

"Nothing so blunt as
that," Harrison said. "Age should not be the sole criterion.
Overall value to society should be considered. Of course, the older
you are, the fewer years you have left—
ipso facto
, your chances of
contributing much are reduced. Plenty of people of all ages
contribute nothing. The homeless, the drunks, the addicts are the
most obvious, but there are others, less obvious. People we never
see, shut-ins who sit at home and do nothing. Should some couch
potato on welfare get a coronary bypass while a hard-working
mechanic who's the father of three has to go on working with chest
pain? I don't think so."

"I don't think so either. But who's
going to decide who gets stuck in which tier? Who's going to
arbitrate human value?"

"You can bet we'll have something to
say in it," Tim said. "Especially those of us who go into primary
care. We'll be deciding who gets referred and who
doesn't."

"But this tiering idea, this dividing
people up and stacking them in order of how useful they are is
so...cold." She turned to Tim. "What about compassion? Remember how
we talked about finding a CPT code number for
compassion?"

"Yeah," Tim said softly, his eyes
suddenly distraught. "I remember. Trouble is, I don't know how I
forgot."

Quinn didn't know what it was, but
something in Tim's eyes unsettled her.

THIRTEEN

Quinn had a few moments so she
wandered across the lab to where Dr. Emerson was reading a journal
article. He looked up at her approach and smiled.

"Taking a break?" he said.

Quinn nodded. "My computer's tied up
with some number crunching on that reuptake program. It'll be
another ten minutes or so till it's done."

"Very good." He nodded and returned to
his article.

"Uh, Dr. Emerson," Quinn said, not
sure of how to broach this. She'd rehearsed her opening all last
night and most of today, but still she felt awkward. "Can I ask you
a strange question?"

"Sure," he said, still reading. "Go
ahead. I've always liked strange questions."

"What's going on here?"

He looked up at her over the tops of
his reading glasses.

"I'd think you'd know the answer to
that by now. We're putting 9574 through—"

"No. Not here in your lab. I mean in
the school. In The Ingraham. What's going on here?"

Dr. Emerson put the journal down and
removed his reading glasses. He stared at her.

"I'm not quite sure I'm following you,
Quinn."

She dropped into the seat opposite
him. "I'm not sure I'm following me either. It's all so vague." She
groped for the right words, the appropriate analogy, but came up
empty. "It's just that everybody here at The Ingraham seems to
think alike, seems to have the same point of view."