The Select (2 page)

"No, and there never will be. Not with
me in charge," he said, flashing a lopsided grin. "It's my job to
make sure that anybody who's on this campus belongs here, and to
keep out anyone who doesn't. We never lock the labs, libraries, or
study halls. They're available to students around the clock. It's
my guarantee that as a student here you'll be able to walk anywhere
on this campus at any hour of the day or night and not give a
second thought to your personal safety. You'll have other things to
worry about." Another grin here. "Like your grades."

Nervous laughter from the Ingraham
hopefuls.

Quinn had noticed that the group was
pretty ethnically balanced. There'd never been many blacks in the
rural area where she'd grown up, but she'd become accustomed to
black faces everywhere at U. Conn. There were plenty here, along
with some Hispanics and Orientals. The Ingraham seemed color blind
but not sex blind: there were very few woment in the
group.

Mr. Verran led them past a guardhouse
that watched over a gate in the ten foot high fence that ran
around the campus.

"It's all public access beyond this
point," he said, gesturing to the looming eight story medical
center and its multi level parking lots, all gleaming white in
contrast to the masses of beige brick behind them, "but not the
campus. You need special ID to get on campus."

He led them on a quick tour of the
first floor of the medical center, reeling off facts about the
place as they trooped down the wide center corridor: 520 beds, 210
physicians on staff representing every specialty and subspecialty,
drawing patients from Washington, DC, Virginia, West Virginia,
Pennsylvania, and of course, Maryland. He whisked them past the
labs—hematology, special chemistry, virology, parasitology,
toxicology, cytology, and on and on—and past the radiology
department with its array of every imaging device known to man, and
skirted the bustling emergency room.

Quinn didn't understand
much of what she was shown—she knew it would take years of medical
school before she would
begin
to understand—but she'd learned enough from her
pre med courses and her outside reading to know that she had
entered a tertiary medical center working on the cutting edge of
medical technology.

As they were leaving the center, Quinn
heard the sound of an approaching aircraft. She turned with the
rest to see a MedEvac helicopter settling on the helipad. She
watched breathlessly as a group in whites ran from the hospital and
removed a patient on a stretcher.

"How great is this!" someone murmured
behind her. Quinn could only nod agreement.

They've got to take me, she
thought. I've
got
to go here.

Mr. Verran dragged them away from the medical
complex and back through the gate to the campus. At the entrance to
the Science Center, a motion detector opened the double sliding
glass doors for the group.

"All right," he said once they were
clustered in the lobby. "Everybody wait here while I make sure
they're ready for us upstairs."

Quinn watched him walk to the security
desk, centered in the lobby like an island in a stream, and speak
to the two blue uniformed security guards stationed there. It
occurred to her that they looked fairly young and fit, not like the
dumpy ex cops who passed as a security force at the U. Conn
campus where she'd spent the past three and a half
years.

She wondered why they needed this sort
of security—the ten foot high cyclone perimeter fence,
the guard posts at all the gates. She could see it in an inner
city—downtown Baltimore or D.C. maybe—but out here in the
woods?

Her musings were interrupted by Mr.
Verran's return.

"Okay," he said, clapping his hands and
rubbing them together. "They're ready for us. Take the elevators
and we'll reassemble on the third floor."

*

Quinn followed the rest of the tour in
a state of rapture. The Ingraham's five story hilltop complex
was a temple to the art and science of medical research. The third
floor was actually a miniature pharmaceutical plant, producing
experimental compounds for trials in the treatment of lupus and
cancer and AIDS.

They've got to take me, she
thought again. I've
got
to go here.

The fourth floor was a vivarium housing
the center's experimental animals. The pungent odor of its
inhabitants filled the air. The stacked cages full of doomed rats
and mice didn't bother her. As a farm girl she'd learned early on
not to get attached to the livestock. But the array of whining
dogs, meowing cats, and wide eyed monkeys made her acutely
uncomfortable. She was glad to move up to the top floor.

"This is Dr. Alston," Mr. Verran said
when they reached the fifth floor. He presented a tall, sallow,
gaunt, balding, fiftyish man in a lab coat. He had watery hazel
eyes,slightly yellowed teeth, and a string tie. "He's not only
Director of Medical Education at The Ingraham, but one of the
country's foremost dermatological pathologists." He glanced at Dr.
Alston. "Did I say that right?"

Dr. Alston smiled and nodded
tolerantly.

"Looks like Uncle Creepy," a voice
whispered near her ear.

Quinn glanced around and saw Tim Brown
standing close behind her. He was still wearing his dark aviator
glasses. Indoors. Maybe he wanted to hide his bloodshot
eyes.

"I'm going to place you in his hands
for the final leg of the tour," Mr. Verran was saying. "The
research they're doing up here is so secret even I don't know
what's going on."

Dr. Alston stepped forward. His smile
toward the security chief was condescending.

"Mr. Verran has a tendency to
exaggerate. However, we do try to keep a lid on the data from the
fifth floor. Our projects here have commercial applications and we
wish to protect the patents. Any profits from those applications
will, of course, be plowed back into more research and to maintain
funding of the school and the medical center. Follow me,
please."

As they trooped after him down the wide
hallway, he continued speaking over his shoulder. "I can't show you
much, I'm afraid. My own project is in the human trials stage and
we must respect the subjects' privacy. But I can tell you that I'm
working with a semisynthetic, rejection proof skin graft which
I hope, once perfected, will completely change the lives of burn
victims all over the world. But perhaps...there he is
now."

Down the hall ahead of them, someone in
a labcoat stepped into the hallway.

"Oh, Walter. Just a moment,
please."

The other man turned. He was older, a
shorter, and plumper than Dr. Alston. He sported an unruly mane of
white hair and bright blue eyes.

"Oh, great," Tim whispered again.
"Here's Cousin Eerie."

Quinn turned and gave him a hard look
that told him to knock it off.

The man called Walter looked up at Dr.
Alston over the tops of his reading glasses, then at the crowd of
applicants. He smiled absently.

"Oh, my. Another tour."

"Yes, Walter. Walk us through your
section, won't you?"

The shorter man shrugged. "Very well,
Arthur. As long as you do the talking."

"This is Dr. Walter Emerson," Dr.
Alston announced. "Very possibly the world's top expert in
neuropharmacology."

"Really, Arthur—"

Dr. Alston half turned and began moving
his shorter, heavier companion down the hall. The group followed,
Quinn on the left end of the leading phalanx.

"Dr. Emerson is too modest to tell you
so himself, but the work he is doing with a new anesthetic compound
is absolutely astounding. He hasn't named it yet, but it does have
a code number: 9574. If our animal studies translate to the human
nervous system, 9574 will offer total body anesthesia and selective
skeletal muscle paralysis. I can't say more than that, but if we're
successful, 9574 will revolutionize operative
anesthesia."

The tile wall to Quinn's left became
plate glass and she stopped, staring.

A room beyond the glass, a ward, filled
with hospital beds. And in those beds, pure white bodies. Quinn
blinked. No, that wasn't pale skin, it was gauze. The bodies were
gauze wrapped from head to toe. Blue, green, red, and yellow
patches on the gauze. They didn't move. Seven beds, seven bodies,
and not a sign of life. They looked dead.

But they had to be alive.
Nurses—gloved, gowned, masked—glided among them like wraiths. There
were IVs and feeding tubes running into the bodies, and catheters
trailing out from under the sheets down to transparent bedside
collection bags filled with clear golden fluid.

She felt someone bump against her back,
and knew it was Tim.

"Jesus," he said. His voice was
hoarse.

What? No crack about mummies? She
glanced at his face, saw his awed expression, watched his Adam's
apple bob as he swallowed. He seemed genuinely moved.

Quinn stared again into the ward and
was startled to see a bed directly before her on the other side of
the window. The body...patient...person in the bed was wrapped head
to toe in thick white gauze. Only the bridge of the nose and a pair
of dull, rheumy, blue eyes remained uncovered. Those eyes were
staring up at Quinn. They searched her face as if seeking something
there. The patient looked vaguely male...the shoulders were broad,
the chest flat.

"What...who...?" Quinn said.

The entire tour had stopped and
gravitated toward the window, crowding behind Quinn.

"Oh, dear. Oh, my." It was Dr. Emerson,
squeezing toward the front. He looked flustered. "This is Ward C.
Dr. Alston's ward. The curtain should have been drawn on this
window. Not that there's anything confidential going on, but for
the sake of these patients."

"Wh what happened to them?" Quinn
said.

"Burns," Dr. Emerson replied, his voice
soft as he stared through the window at Quinn's side.
"Third degree burns over eighty or ninety percent of their
bodies. Not fresh burns. They'd be in hyperbaric chambers at our
burn center in the hospital if they were. No, these are
burn center survivors. They're alive but so covered with
stiff, thick scar tissue that they can barely move. Some of them
are brain damaged, all of them are in constant misery." He
sighed. "Arthur is their last hope."

Quinn could not take her eyes off the
patient before her. Her gaze seemed to be locked into his. His eyes
seemed to be trying to tell her something.

"Their beds are rotated by the outer
windows and by this hallway window," Dr. Emerson was saying. "They
can't move. Very few of them can even speak. It has to be boring
beyond belief to spend all day staring at the ceiling. So they're
moved around, to let them see the outdoors, let them watch the
hustle and bustle of the hallway here. It stimulates them. The
nurses have been trained to speak to them constantly. Even if
they're not sure their words are being heard or understood, they're
communicating continually with these patients."

Communicating...that was what the blue
eyes of the patient before Quinn seemed to be trying to do. They
were reaching out to her. They narrowed with the effort. Quinn
sensed a silent desperation there.

The patient began to move. Just a
little. Twisting, writhing, ever so slightly.

"Dr. Emerson," Quinn said, pointing
through the window. "Is something wrong?"

Dr. Emerson had turned away. He looked
through the glass again.

"Oh, dear. He seems to be in
pain."

He moved away and spoke through the
door to a nurse in the ward. Then he returned to Quinn's
side.

"He'll get some relief now."

Quinn saw a nurse approach the bed with
a syringe. She poked the end of the needle into the injection port
on the Y adaptor in the IV line and depressed the
plunger.

"Will he be all right?"

"As right as anyone can be with that
amount of skin damage," Dr. Emerson said. Gently he took her arm.
"Come, my dear. These patients and their pain are not on display.
Don't rob them of what little dignity and privacy they have
left."

As Quinn allowed herself to be drawn
away, she glanced back and thought she saw tears in the patient's
eyes, and could have sworn she saw his chest heave with a single
sob before the inner curtain was drawn across the
window.

The remainder of the tour was a blur.
All she saw were those eyes, those pain wracked, plaintive
blue eyes staring at her, calling to her from within their gauze
cocoon.

She knew she had to get back to that
patient. Someday, some way, she would. Easing pain, healing the
unhealable. That was what it was all about. That was what The
Ingraham was all about.

They've got to take me,
Quinn thought for the hundredth time today. They've just
got
to.

CHAPTER TWO

Matt stared at the board on the wall
of the cafeteria.