The Select Read Free

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