The Select (30 page)

He
hungered
for her presence. And that
baffled him. He'd always been so self-sufficient. Now, when Quinn
wasn't around, he felt incomplete. Tim wasn't sure he liked
that.

But looking at her face now, at the
disturbed and troubled expressions playing across it, he wondered
if he'd been wise to include her in the bull session tonight. Her
expression drifted toward horrified as Harrison elaborated on his
ideas on the formation of a central government authority to oversee
the equitable redistribution of medical resources. Tim couldn't
understand her reaction. Harrison's plan made perfect sense to
him.

"I don't believe you people," Quinn
said when Harrison took a breath. "You're all talking about
'redistributing' medical care like you're discussing natural
resources."

"A country's medical care is a natural
resource," Judy Trachtenberg said. "Once of its most valuable
resources."

"But it's
not
a natural resource,"
Quinn said. "It wasn't sitting underground waiting to be dug up.
It's human made. You're not talking about moving lumps of coal or
steel around, you're talking about people—doctors, nurses,
technicians. I don't know about you folks, but I don't become a
national resource just because I've earned a medical degree. I'm
not something to be shipped around at the whim of some appointee in
Washington. I don't remember signing off my human rights when I
became a student at The Ingraham."

The room was silent. The eight other
occupants sipped Pepsi or munched pretzels as they stared at
her.

"Easy Quinn," Tim said.

"No. I won't take it easy." She was
getting hot now. He could see the color rising in her
cheeks.

She said, "Since when are all of you
in favor of bureaucrats making medical decisions? What are we going
to medical school for? To become glorified technicians? To spend
our professional lives taking orders from a bunch of political
appointees? 'Here, Brown. Fix this one here but forget that one
over there.' They'll shunt you here and shift you there and call
you a 'provider' and a 'resource,' but what about the
patients?"

The room was utterly silent. Tim saw
eight uncomprehending faces staring at Quinn as if she were
speaking a foreign language.

"Well," Harrison said
slowly, "it's because of the patients—
for
the patients—that tiering is
necessary. They can't all receive top-level care, so some will have
to be satisfied with second-level care, and some with third-level
care. And someone has to decide who deserves what level of care. No
one's happy with that, but it's a reality that has to be faced.
Hiding your head in the sand won't make it go away."

The crack annoyed Tim but Quinn simply
laughed it off.

"Who's got his head in the sand?
You're talking about social engineering. What next? Eugenics? Or
maybe a new Master Race?"

Judy groaned. "We're not
Nazis."

"You know, I wish you'd all wake up
and smell the coffee. I mean, don't you think there'll be a
temptation for some of us to 'tier' patients according to
political, religious, and racial prejudices?"

Harrison cleared his throat. "I can't
see that being a problem for an ethical physican."

"I aggree," Quinn said. "But we're not
all ethical—we're human. And we should be treating illness wherever
we find it, not just in a select population. That's a God game I
don't want to play."

"But it's going to be the
only game in town," Harrison said. "That's why it's so important
that graduates of The Ingraham go into primary care. That's where
the front lines are. That's where we'll be exposed to both the
useful and the useless members of society. That's where we can make
a real difference. And maybe we can work it so that some of those
useless folks
can
contribute something to society." He turned to Tim. "You've
been unusually quiet tonight, Brown. Any comments?"

Tim shook his head. "No, uh...just
listening."

Tim avoided Quinn's eyes but knew she
was giving him a strange look.

He deserved it. He
felt
strange. He'd had
the oddest feeling while sitting here listening to the
conversation. Schizoid. Dissociated. A deep part of him completely
agreeing with Quinn and yet another part tugging him the other way.
The only times he noticed this dichotomy in his attitudes was on
those rare occasions when he discussed medical politics with Quinn,
or when she stopped by the bull session. He'd attributed his
attitude shift to the fact that he was now more conversant with the
issues associated with the coming healthcare crisis than he had
been in September. None of the bull session regulars seemed to
differ much on the issue of tiering health care delivery, simply on
the mechanics of how to implement it. Quinn was becoming the
gadfly, the Devil's Advocate they maybe needed to goad them into
examining their premises.

Except no one was examining premises.
Tim seemed to be the only one of the group even remotely receptive
to Quinn.

But what had rocked Tim back on his
heels was Harrison's last statement.

That's why it's important
that graduates of The Ingraham go into primary care. That's where
the front lines are. That's where we'll be exposed to both the
useful and the useless members of society. That's where we can make
a real difference. And maybe we can work it so that some of those
useless folks
can
contribute something to society

It had been a typical
Harrison statement. That wasn't the problem. The problem was in
Tim's head: The same statement -not the same sentiment,
the same statement
,
word-for-word—had gone through Tim's mind in response to Quinn's
question.

Almost as if he'd been
coached.

Suddenly he wanted out of the
session.

Not to walk out. To run.

MONITORING

"Guess who's on his way down," Elliot
said.

Louis Verran looked up from the daily
status printout and groaned. "Don't tell me..."

"Yep."

"Shit," Verran said. He
wasn't in the mood for Alston tonight. But then, when was he
ever
in the mood for Doc
Tightass? "All right, pull that last bull session tape. Maybe it'll
get him off our backs."

Alston had developed this thing for
the Cleary girl. He'd been on her case and had been dropping by the
control room regularly since Thanksgiving, looking for anything and
everything Verran could get on her.

"Good evening, gentlemen," he said,
breezing through the door like he owned the place. "Any new
elucidating snippets of tape for me, Louis?"

"As a matter of fact, yes," Verran
said. "We found some good stuff for you this time." He turned to
Elliot. "Got that tape cued up there? Let her roll."

Alston took a seat and cocked his ear
toward the speaker, listening intently. Verran listened, too, not
so much to the words—he'd already heard them—as to the quality of
the recording. Not bad. Pretty damn good, in fact. The kids must
have been circled around the mike. Let Alston try griping this time
about not being able to understand what they were
saying.

Verran didn't record everything.
Couldn't, and wouldn't want to if he could. Most of what went on in
the dorm was studying and sleeping, the sound of pages turning
followed by deep, rhythmic breathing. And when the kids were
talking, it was usually about the most trivial, boring junk
imaginable. So he sampled here and there. He'd rotate from pick-up
to pick-up, eavesdropping from within the rooms or along the
telephone lines, listening for anyone who might be talking about
The Ingraham, or about any particular staff or faculty member.
Happy talk was bypassed for the most part, but gripe sessions were
always recorded. And any talk of a potentially compromising
nature—sexual encounters, schemes to cheat on tests—was recorded
and cataloged and filed away in Louis Verran's personal J. Edgar
Hoover file...just in case.

The roving bull session tended to be
as boring as all the other talk, except when a couple of them
disagreed and got real pissed, but that only happened between
newcomers early in their first year. After they'd all been here
awhile, not only did the disagreements rarely get vehement, they
rarely happened.

But when Verran had picked up the
Cleary girl's voice in last night's bull session, he'd stopped his
wandering ways and settled down to record the whole thing. Alston
had said he was looking for any tidbits that would give him another
look into Cleary's views on the future of medicine. Verran had
recognized one of her rare participations in the bull session as a
golden opportunity. Originally he had planned to tease Alston along
with it, dangle the recording before him like a carrot before a
mule. But when he'd heard Cleary sounding off like she did, he knew
he couldn't wait. He had to dump the whole thing on Alston in one
shot...and watch him squirm.

Verran watched the growing
concern on Alston's face as he listened. He barely moved. He was
still sitting there listening even after Cleary had quit the
session. He knew exactly what Dr. Tightass was thinking:
Who can I blame this on?

But Louis was ready for him when
Alston finally swiveled in his chair and faced him.

"What do I have to do, Louis, to
induce you to repair that young woman's defective SLI
unit?"

"There's nothing to
repair."

"It's quite obvious to me, and I am
sure it will be equally obvious to our overseers from the
Foundation, that you are not getting the job done."

Verran had suddenly had enough. He
wanted to grab this twit and shake him until his brain rattled
inside his skull. Instead he squeezed the arm rests of his
chair.

"I'm not in the mood for
games, Doc, so here's the story: Her unit checks out. Elliot and I
went back to her room again last weekend while Cleary and her
boyfriend were off campus boffing each other. It checks out. You
hear that, Doc: Her SLI is in A-1 shape.
Perfectamento
. So stop blowing smoke
and tell me what you're going to do about it?"

Alston was silent for a moment. His
voice sounded tired when he finally spoke.

"What else can I do? She'll have to
flunk out."

SEVENTEEN

Tim was feeling restless, edgy. He
couldn't handle studying tonight. He wanted to be with Quinn but
she was booking it for the anatomy practical tomorrow. So he
wandered.

He wound up in the north wing's
first-floor lounge—soft, shapeless leather couches, a dropped
ceiling for acoustical effect, snack and soft drink machines lined
up against the rear wall. Joe Nappo was stretched out in front of
the big rear-projection screen watching some cop movie. Tim dropped
into one of the rear seats. He didn't recognize the movie but he
did recognize Peter Weller's face from the Robocop flicks. On the
screen, Weller was tearing his apartment apart, looking for
something. Tim didn't know what the film was about and didn't care.
He stared at the screen without really following the action. He had
other things on his mind.

Like his own mind, for
instance.

His last bull session—the
one Quinn had sat in on—still bothered him. It baffled him how he
could
believe
one
way and
think
another. The shrinks had a term for it: cognitive
dissociation. Two conflicting points of view existing within the
same person.

...on the screen Peter Weller pulled
his telephones apart, then began unscrewing the plates over the
electrical outlets in his walls...

Tim realized he had two
intellectual positions, one very much like Quinn's, the other
identical to Harrison's, warring within him. The first seemed to
spring from his gut, seemed to
belong
to him, but it had been
battered into the mud by the second position. He might have
forgotten it had ever existed had not Quinn's arguments caused it
to stir. And that stirring had pointed up the vague strangeness of
Harrison's position. What was it doing in his head? It sounded like
an echo of everybody else who spoke up at the bull
sessions.

Everybody else.

Tim had always prided
himself on not thinking like everybody else. Yet he could sense
himself becoming an intellectual clone of Dr. Alston. The guy was a
charming and disarming lecturer, true, but he wasn't
that
good.

...on the screen Peter Weller was
holding up something he had found. A small dark object. He was
examining it, turning it between his fingers. The camera moved in
for a close-up...

Tim bolted upright in his
chair.

"What the hell?"

The object in Peter Weller's hand
looked startlingly familiar, like a tiny hockey puck on a
pin.

"Hey, Joe," he said. "What is
this?"