"I was just thinking that we -- "
The outer door hissed. Dr. West's muscles contracted like a criminal's, caught in the act. The inner door shoved open.
"May I come in?" said the Recreation Officer, already in and sniffing his toothbrush mustache in his most characteristic gesture; he had an old face but his mustache and hair were black with dye. "I can come back later." His unreadable gaze bounced off Nona's face, and he stared at Dr. West. "I've been asked, shall we say, ordered, to search for a small useless -- uh, item in your suite."
Dr. West grinned. "Nona told me it was a hypo. Feel free to search away. I'll help any way I can, but I haven't got a hypo for you. I wish there was a prison grapevine so I could tell you who's got the hypo."
The Recreation Officer failed to smile. To Dr. West's surprise the Recreation Officer's usually sly sense of humor was gone, blank.
But Dr. West kept trying. "Since this is my one and only happy hour with this sweet young thing, I would be happier if my suite were searched during the following hour." Dr. West grinned hopefully. "I promise not to go away, sir, since this is my therapeutic hour. Sir, as you said, you could come back later."
"No, I'm already here, so I'll start here," the Recreation Officer replied. "She can vacuum this dirty floor whether I'm here or not."
Dr. West tried again. "Sir, if you could come back later, after Nona's gone -- I need to talk with you alone."
Dr. West was careful not to glance toward the compressor. Beneath it the dissected squirrel was hidden, and Dr. West was afraid Nona's reaction would be revulsion when it was discovered. He thought the Recreation Officer's reaction would have been mild interest if the dissected squirrel had been in plain sight on the work counter.
Unfortunately, Dr. West had concealed the dead squirrel, as if guilty of something. Now the Recreation Officer's reaction when he found the bloody package might be suspicion.
Dr. West knew the Recreation Officer lacked the medical background to put two and two together, but if the squirrel were shown to the Medical Officer -- that intelligent man would recognize this was not merely a squirrel autopsy. The squirrel had been cut open for another purpose. The Medical Officer would ponder this problem and knowing Dr. West's controlling motivation was escape --
" -- in the kitchenette," the Recreation Officer was saying, opening and closing drawers. "You haven't even done his dishes yet, Nona." He opened a cupboard. "A more logical hiding place for a hypo would be -- the bathroom."
Dr. West began to perspire. He knew he needed to maneuver both of them out of the suite in order to dispose of that dissected squirrel. If the Recreation Officer continued searching, eventually he would discover the body of the squirrel.
The Recreation Officer spent a surprisingly long time banging around in the bathroom. All it contained was a medicine cabinet, toilet, basin and tub. The bathroom was located in the narrow inner end of the suite.
Whenever he had sat in the tub, Dr. West could hear the eight elevators humming up and down the central shaft of the cylindrical tower. His thirtieth floor suite was shaped like an eighth of a pie. The center of the pie was occupied by the huge open shaft, which contained the elevators and the air-conditioning ducts. The elevators were code-controlled. To escape without an elevator would be a long fall.
The Recreation Officer emerged from the bathroom, smiling beneath his toothbrush mustache. "I took the liberty of searching your medicine cabinet." His smile widened. "I deduce from the bottles and tubes that you suffer from piles." His smile spread so wide it almost appeared malicious. "Not a very romantic ailment for a world famous Arctic adventurer -- for a convicted mass murderer -- "
Dr. West blinked with surprise. Until now, the Recreation Officer always had treated him with human respect, never mentioned his crime.
"You've murdered more people," the Recreation Officer remarked, "than the rest of the students in this tower combined, and you top it off by stealing a worthless one-shot hypo."
"I haven't got your hypo."
"You're a disgusting example of futility. Do you know, if you'd simply applied for a hypo, if you needed a hypo, I would have purchased you a dozen. But during your second or third night in the tower you didn't know that yet, did you? So you stole one."
Dr. West did not reply. He was wondering if the Recreation Officer had just planted a hypo in the bathroom. From a friend, the Recreation Officer inexplicably had turned into tormentor.
"I brought you scalpels, didn't I," the Recreation Officer persisted. "Enough scalpels to butcher a dozen women."
"Please, sir," Nona protested.
"Don't you approve of humor?" the Recreation Officer asked her. "You and I are both on the staff -- to assist in therapy, to make the students happy. Isn't that right?"
The Recreation Officer strode across the room toward the entry and kicked Dr. West's bed. "What do they expect me to do, split the mattress to find your hypo?"
"I haven't got the hypo." Dr. West stepped forward, his sweating face twisted in an answering smile. "From what I've been told, the policy of this prison, excuse me, educational institution, toward the so-called student is -- "
" -- to treat the disturbed student with respect," the Recreation Officer interrupted in a singsong voice. "Make him feel this is home. Rebuild his feeling of inner worth. Nona, have you been reciting our Staff Book to this filthy murderer?"
"No, she hasn't, Dad," Dr. West retorted, smiling harder, losing control. "You did, remember? Where's your warm father image today? The student is to be drawn into a warm familylike relationship and, I quote, encouraged to lower his defensive barriers. In the New Ottawa Reformation Center he is considered reborn. It is the purpose of the staff to offer the student so warm and reassuring an emotional environment that he will find the inner support he failed to feel in his childhood. Strengthened, basically changed, he can return to society. Isn't that right, Dad?"
"Back off!" The Recreation Officer spoke like an angrily barking dog. "Because you're younger, stronger, more sarcastic doesn't mean you can't be spanked, figuratively spanked, no, literally spanked ." He walked away from Dr. West, lifted the top of the insulated hibernation cage and plunged his arm into it.
The one conscious squirrel squalled with fright.
For the last minute, Dr. West had been considering goading the Recreation Officer to such anger he would stop the search and rush out of the suite. But now Dr. West's heart was hammering, his fists clenched, and he realized his own self-control was so uncertain that the Recreation Officer might be successfully goading him. Perhaps the Recreation Officer's strange behavior was intended to goad him to violence. Then would he be transferred? Was that the Recreation Officer's intent?
Nona, her face pale, her lips narrow, was shaking her head in warning at Dr. West. Silently they watched while the Recreation Officer distastefully lifted out a handful of sawdust.
"What a stench! I noticed it as soon as I entered your suite. Are you sure they're not decaying instead of hibernating?" The Recreation Officer reached deeper into the cage. "The stench, is it to discourage us from looking for the hypo? -- Is this little beggar dead?"
By the tail, the Recreation Officer raised a hibernating ground squirrel. "Since you formerly were an expert on Arctic ecology, among other things, I would have expected you to play with something more typically Arctic -- such as those beastly little lemmings which you reputedly compared to Eskimos."
"To Esks. I explained to you the difference between Eskimos and Esks. I talked for hours when you listened so sympathetically, Dad," Dr. West added savagely. "You ought to be intelligent enough to differentiate between Eskimos and Esks. As for lemmings, they don't hibernate."
The Recreation Officer shrugged, dropped the limp squirrel back into the cage. "Dear me, you're right. You told me no Arctic animal truly hibernates -- except these putrid ground squirrels. I'm not going to search through this stinking mess for the hypo. I'm going to recommend that the contents of this cage be emptied down the inci
nerator."
"I haven't got the hypo," Dr. West repeated, watching the Recreation Officer step to the wider outer end of the suite, where the compressor chugged erratically.
Concealed under the compressor was the dissected squirrel. The compressor unit vibrated against the white concrete wall.
The wall was smooth concrete, slightly concave because it also was the outer wall of the tower. Like a cylindrical concrete grain elevator, the tower had no windows, and its exterior construction was both economical and escape-proof, and functional in other ways.
The Recreation Officer glanced from the compressor to the concave white wall spread out behind it like a wide-angle screen. "This noisy compressor must intrude into the corner of the picture, or do you never turn on the projector any more? For emotionally disturbed students, for you, I recommend a minimum of two hours per day." The Recreation Officer smiled infuriatingly at him.
Dr. West stepped violently toward the compressor, the Recreation Officer and the blank wall. At first, while recovering from his appendectomy, he had lain for hours watching the moving scenery on that wall, his only substitute for a window. Trying to ignore the subliminal cartoons pressing him back against childhood, his favorite escape had been following movies of the surf flashing white along the northern California coastline on the wall. At first he'd stared helplessly. The artificial window had been his only release from claustrophobia.
"Nona, don't leave," Dr. West said, without looking back, knowing she was still sitting on the coffee table. This caused the Recreation Officer to glance back at her.
Dr. West's hand darted into the compressor case.
The compressor unit consisted of an electric motor humming at high rpms and revolving a series of larger and larger gears, the largest turning least rapidly and most powerfully, forcing the piston of the air compressor in and out no faster than a frightened heart. Last week, when Dr. West had assembled this jerry-built contraption, he had set an oiling can to drip at five-second intervals on the moving elbow of the compressor, and now, in this instant, his hand reset the nozzle of the can to dribble rapidly.
As the Recreation Officer turned back to the compressor, a fine mist of oil rose against his blue uniform. Dr. West already was walking away. There was a moment of silence as if the Recreation Officer had not yet realized what had happened. "Your damned machine is leaking. There's little droplets all over my coat."
At this, Dr. West turned back. "Either oil or coolant. If it's coolant -- the coolant is strongly alkaline, irritating to the lungs." He wrapped his handkerchief protectively around his hand and rushed at the compressor, turning his head aside, as if from poison gas, holding his breath while he readjusted the oiler to its former rate of one drop of oil every five seconds. "The coolant will decompose cloth. It should be soaped off the skin as soon as possible."
The Recreation Officer sniffed the back of his hand and glared from Dr. West to Nona. "The least you could do is help me search," he accused her. "Damn, my hand is burning!"
Seated on the low coffee table, Nona stared down at her own hands, cupped on her lap. "Sir, my job is to maintain a close relationship with my students. The Administratrix never asks us to involve ourselves in searches -- "
"You have the soul of a -- they let anybody into civil service these days!" The Recreation Officer dashed out of the suite, scrubbing his hand with his handkerchief, and the elevator hummed.
"I'm sorry," Nona murmured. "He's never acted before as if making a search was -- beneath his dignity. Normally, he's a nice man. Maybe he's having problems Outside -- "
"Oh, sure -- Nice man." Dr. West sat down on the sofa in order to stop shaking. "The staff has to stick together."
"I'm telling you the truth. I've never seen him like this." Suddenly she smiled. "On duty, we're supposed to be saints and let you students have all the tantrums."
Perched on the low coffee table, she pressed her legs together and tugged down at her skirt. She was peering toward the compressor. "Is that a Christmas present underneath? Sort of green shiny paper."
"You'll have to wait till Christmas to find out," Dr. West said and reached forward, seizing her hand before she could stand all the way up and escape to look under the compressor.
Pulled forward off-balance, she raised her eyebrows as she smiled down at him, and plumped down beside him on the sofa. "You didn't need to let go of my hand."
Dr. West grinned with embarrassment, knowing he should try to get her to leave the suite as quickly as possible, so he could dispose of the squirrel. "Do you think my ex-buddy, the Recreation Officer, is likely to pop back in here unannounced?"
She shrugged, jiggling her shirt-waist. "He might." She smiled, glancing at him from the corners of her eyes. "I don't think he will though. He probably went down to the basement to wash and gulp coffee and brood. This was supposed to be his free hour. That's why he was assigned to help search. Next hour he has to be smiling again and sympathetic because he must face his next appointment with another one of you exasperating students."
"Exasperated is the word. I feel like I'm in a fishbowl." Dr. West jerked his head at the Ceiling Lens.
Nona looked up, then down as if she were staring through thirty floors to the basement. "Privacy is mostly in your head. There are 240 screens down there but only one Observer on duty since the budget cut. Mainly the Observer keeps his attention on the red-tagged screens, the new admissions. After all, they're the men most apt to set their suites on fire or slash their wrists or -- uh, develop appendicitis."
Dr. West almost smiled at that. Then he asked a leading question. "When the clock says it's night, and the luminous panels dim, and finally I turn out my reading light, there s still a dim red glow in the dark. I deduce I'm also spied on by infrared transmission?"
"You are a bashful one! The night Observer has only one set of eyes. He's worked here for years. and he's seen everything. He's so bored he's slyly wired one TV to watch Outside hockey games." She giggled. "It takes my own inside alarm system to get any protective reaction from him."
Dr. West laughed in surprise. "Inside alarm? Don't tell me, if a buxom member of the staff is grabbed by a student and squeezed, does that set off her built-in electronic alarm button, gongs clanging, red lights flashing -- "
"You tease! That depends on the member of the staff." Nona stood up unexpectedly.
As if in pain, Dr. West leaped to his feet, reaching for her elbow. But her other hand pressed lightly against his chest, and her gaze shifted from his eyes to someplace over his shoulder.
"The clock says your time's up."
"Listen, Nona, seriously, I need you now." He was startled that he was begging.
"I wish I could stay, but I'm hired to look after my students equally. I wish I could stay, but my 11:00 till 12:00 man is expecting me. It's his hour. He's a terribly nervous, disturbed old man. He has no inner resources at all. He's sitting there expecting me -- "
"But what about my hour? That damned Recreation Officer used up my whole hour bumbling around in here. Listen, you wouldn't understand but I've been hung up in -- hell -- a glass wa -- dead until today and now I need you."
She stepped closer to him. "I'll be back tomorrow. Since you're described in the files as a cerebral type, you can get along," she teased, then added seriously: "I'm so happy you came out of your withdrawal." She smiled again. "Some sillybillies on the staff were making bets you would turn into a vegetable."
"A vegetable? Listen, tell your 11:00 to 12:00 man I'll trade my whole hour tomorrow for thirty of his minutes today, now."
"I'm flattered -- I think. But he's unadaptable. I'll dicker with him for you, but don't hold your breath. I won't be back for at least a half hour, if at all -- lover -- "
"Dammit, Nona," Dr. West almost grabbed for her, then laughed wryly, trying to hide himself behind a sense of humor. "You're playing with dynamite. Nona, is that what you love -- playing with human dynamite?"
"That's my job. I'm supposed to civilize -- " She wink
ed and went out through the hissing door.
The Eskimo Invasion Page 24