Perchance. Michael Kurland

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СКАЧАТЬ who liked to keep you waiting a few minutes, just so you wouldn’t forget who called whom. Delbit picked up a copy of the New England Journal of Homeopathetics and settled down on one corner of the red couch.

      Ten minutes later Dobbins ushered him into the inner office. Dr. Faineworth was sitting behind his desk, and a squat, excessively wide man with red mutton chop whiskers sat to one side. “Stand up straight,” Dobbins whispered, stopping Delbit squarely in front of the desk.

      “Ah, Delbit, here you are,” Dr. Faineworth said, glancing up from the folder he was studying. “This is Mr. Edbeck, an associate of mine who is interested in the case at hand. Come along with us. We are going to try once again to introduce you to our mysterious guest. It may aid you in some way in visualization or resonance or something. And since the girl must know what’s happening, since we have to wire her to the synapse recorder, she should meet the man who’s going to be on the other end. No use in adding unnecessary or preventable stress to the experiment. At last report she was still in her, ah, room.” He stood up and strode out of the office, the others following in his wake.

      “A very interesting case, as I have explained,” Faineworth told his chubby friend Edbeck as they headed toward the young girl locked up in the closed ward. “We are calling her Exxa, the unknown female. We don’t know where she came from, and we don’t know where she went—or how. It’s not everyone who can vanish from a locked cell. A pair of Confederal agents have been around asking about her. And a third man—a tall, hooded chap with the strangest accent. I don’t know how they got word; presumably someone on staff here. The concept of loyalty is a dying one in this age, I fear.”

      “The CDE?” Edbeck twisted his puffy face into a worried grimace. “What did they want?”

      “They want to know where the girl came from. I told them I’d have to get back to them on that. They want to know if she can really disappear. I told them not to be ridiculous. Exxa is our property, Edbeck, and the government is going to have to keep its grubby paws off.”

      “What of the third man?”

      “He said he had heard reports that we were holding an amnesiac young woman here, and he wanted to see whether it was his sister, who has been missing for a few weeks. He was obviously lying—and not very well. It was as though he were unused to the necessity of masking his desires beneath untruths as the rest of us do. A very strange and disturbing man. I told him nothing, and sent him on his way.”

      “You’re calling the girl Exxa? Not a very flattering name, surely,” Mr. Edbeck commented.

      “I didn’t want to pick a name that might have some unknown connotation to the young lady.”

      “Ah,” Edbeck said, his puffy cheeks jiggling as he nodded his head, “very wise. Very astute.”

      “One must be careful,” Dr. Faineworth said. “The mind is a delicate battleground. Purely from the scientific standpoint, a lot can be learned from this girl, once we can reunite her with her memories.”

      “Science is all very well,” Edbeck said, puffing to keep up with the doctor’s long strides, “But what of the more practical considerations that we discussed?”

      “If my theories are correct....” Letting the unfinished thought reverberate, Faineworth knocked on the locked door to the ward. “Ah, there you are, Fenton. Let us in; I have brought some guests to see our lady friend.”

      They followed the burly male nurse silently down the ward corridor and stopped before the locked door.

      Faineworth took a deep breath and turned the key in the lock, then pulled the door open.

      The room was not empty this time. A slight, brown-haired girl stood by the cot, her hospital robe pulled around her. She glared at the group in the doorway. “It’s about time you got here, Dr. Faineworth,” she said, her voice musical but cold as ice. “The attendant told me I had to wait to talk to you. Now I am talking to you. What have you done with my clothes?”

      She’s just a girl! Delbit thought, trying to get a look at her from over Edbeck’s broad and chubby shoulders.

      “Please, I have some people to introduce you to,” Faineworth told her. “I will get your clothing for you if you like. There didn’t seem much point to it, my dear, with you disappearing all the time and leaving it behind.”

      “Why, what a charming young thing,” Edbeck said, putting his hand to his face in a pudgy gesture of appreciation. “You didn’t tell me she was so attractive, Doctor. Shame on you!”

      “I don’t like being locked up,” the girl said, ignoring Edbeck and advancing toward Faineworth until she could poke her finger in his chest, “and I don’t like having to wear a shapeless cotton bathrobe which smells of disinfectant!”

      Faineworth held up a warding hand. “It’s for your own good,” he said.

      “I choose my own good,” she told him, walking back to her cot and sitting on the edge.

      “We are trying to help,” Faineworth assured her blandly. “Remember, they were our clothes in the first place. The first time you came here, you were wrapped in a horse blanket. We’ve clothed you, fed you, and given you a place to sleep. Our intentions are honorable. It is difficult to know what to do, but we’re doing our best. We don’t have people disappearing from our locked wards every day—or appearing naked on Broadway four days later. And you’ve done both three times now.”

      Three times? Delbit wondered why nobody had mentioned that to him. Probably they didn’t want to crowd his mind with unimportant facts. Appeared and disappeared three times? Moving to the side of the door so he could see in past Edbeck’s bulk, he looked at the girl with some interest.

      Her light brown hair fell in soft curls below her shoulders. Her slender body, now tense with anger and frustration, looked to be soft and supple in repose. And her large, wide brown eyes encompassed universes in their depths.

      She is younger than a spring day, Delbit thought, and older than life. Unaccustomed to such thoughts, he shook his head and stared, unconscious of staring. A long-suppressed emotion stirred deep within him.

      “I have not done it with purpose,” she said. “I have not willed it to be so. I will repay you for your kindnesses. And what I do against my own will, I do as easily against your locked doors.”

      “You’ve stopped taking your medication,” Dr. Faineworth said. “Fenton tells me you refuse to do so.”

      “That is so. Keeping me sedated may make it easier for you to manage me, but it does me no good. I do not choose to be so.”

      “We will discuss that,” Faineworth said.

      “Come now, this is very interesting,” Edbeck said, waddling farther into the room. “You mean, girl, that you really do what Dr. Faineworth says? That you disappear—poof—and reappear—plop—and don’t know where, when, or how?”

      The girl looked the chubby man over carefully. “That is so,” she said. “What business is it of yours? Are you a doctor?”

      “Mr. Edbeck is an associate of mine,” Dr. Faineworth said.

      “A medical associate? Dr. Faineworth, I am not here to be put on display. I will not have you bringing around casual friends or associates to gawk at me. Next I know you’ll СКАЧАТЬ