Stranger in a Strange Land

still sitting there, gathering dust and still charged out to the floor. Powered beds were always in short supply and cost six times as much as an ordinary bed. While, strictly speaking, it was the wing superintendent's worry, Jill saw no reason to let overhead charges for her floor run up unnecessarily-and besides, if it was still there, she could get it at once. She decided to find out.
                The sitting room door was still locked. She was startled to find that her pass key would not open it. Making a mental note to tell maintenance to repair the lock, she went on down the corridor to the watch room of the suite, intending to find out about the bed from the doctor watching over Mrs. Bankerson.
                The physician on watch was the same one she had met before, Dr. Brush. He was not an intern, nor a resident, but had been brought in for this patient, Jill had learned from him, by Dr. Garner. Brush looked up as she put her head in. "Miss Boardman! Just the person I want to see!"
                "Why didn't you ring? How's your patient?"
                "She's all right," he answered, glancing up at the Peeping Tom, "But I definitely am not."
                "Trouble?"
                "Some trouble. About five minutes' worth. And my relief is not in the building. Nurse, could you spare me about that many minutes of your valuable time? And then keep your mouth shut afterwards?"
                "I suppose so. I told my assistant floor supervisor I would be away for a few minutes. Let me use your phone and I'll tell her where to find me."
                "No!" he said urgently. "Just lock that door after I leave and don't let anybody in until you hear me rap 'Shave and a Haircut' on it, that's a good girl."
                "All right, sir," Jill said dubiously. "Am I to do anything for your patient?"
                "No, no, just sit there at the desk and watch her in the screen. You won't have to do anything. Don't disturb her."
                "Well, if anything does happen, where will you be? In the doctors' lounge?"
                "I'm not going that far-just to the men's washroom down the corridor. Now shut up, please, and let me go-this is urgent."
                He left and Jill obeyed his order to lock the door after him. Then she looked at the patient through the viewer and ran her eye over the dials. The elderly woman was again asleep and the displays showed her pulse strong and her breathing even and normal; Jill wondered why Dr. Garner considered a "death watch" necessary?
                Then she remembered why she had come in there in the first place and decided that she might as well find out if the bed was in the far room without bothering Dr. Brush about it. While it was not quite according to Dr. Brush's instructions, she would not be disturbing his patient-certainly she knew how to walk through a room without waking a sleeping patient!-and she had decided years ago that what doctors did not know rarely hurt them. She opened the door quietly and went in.
                A quick glance assured her that Mrs. Bankerson was in the typical sleep of the senile. Walking noiselessly she went past her to the door to the sitting room. It was locked but her pass key let her in.
                She was pleased to see that the powered bed was there. Then she saw that the room was occupied-sitting in an arm chair with a picture book in his lap was the Man from Mars.
                Smith looked up and gave her the beaming smile of a delighted baby.
                Jill felt dizzy, as if she had been jerked out of sleep. Jumbled ideas raced through her mind. Valentine Smith here? But he couldn't be; he had been transferred somewhere else; the log showed it. But he was here.
                Then all the ugly implications and possibilities seemed to line themselves up . - - the fake "Man from Mars" on stereo ... the old woman out there, ready to die, but in the meantime covering the fact that there was another patient in here . . . the door that would not open to her pass-key-and, lastly, a horrid vision of the "meat wagon" wheeling out of here some night, with a sheet concealing the fact that it carried not one cadaver, but two.
                When this last nightmare rushed through her mind, it carried in its train a cold wind of fear, the