The Infinite Moment Read Online Free PDF Page B

offered any comment. The feeling that they shared her opinion was strong, but luckily I was spared confirmation by the opening of the door.
    The senior attendant reentered with half a dozen small myrmidons, but this time the group was dominated by a handsome woman of about thirty. Her appearance gave me immense relief. She was neither little, nor Amazonian, nor was she huge. Her present company made her look a little overtall, perhaps, but I judged her at about fivefootten; a normal, pleasantfeatured young woman with brown hair, cut somewhat short, and a pleated black skirt showing beneath a white overall. The senior attendant was almost trotting to keep up with her longer steps, and was saying something about delusions and "only back from the Centre today, Doctor."
    The woman stopped beside my couch while the smaller women huddled together, looking at me with some misgiving. She thrust a thermometer into my mouth and held my wrist. Satisfied on both these counts, she enquired: "Headache? Any other aches or pains?"
    "No," I told her.
    She regarded me carefully. I looked back at her.
    "What?" she began.
    "She's mad," Hazel put in from the other side of the room. "She says she's lost her memory and doesn't know us."
    "She's been talking about horrid, disgusting things," added one of the others.
    "She's got delusions. She thinks she can read and write," Hazel supplemented.
    The doctor smiled at that.
    "Do you?" she asked me.
    "I don't see why notbut it should be easy enough to prove," I replied, brusquely.
    She looked startled, a little taken aback, then she recovered her tolerant halfsmile.
    "All right," she said, humouring me.
    She pulled a small notepad out of her pocket and offered it to me, with a pencil. The pencil felt a little odd in my hand; the fingers did not fall into place readily on it, nevertheless I wrote: "I'm only too well aware that I have delusionsand that you are part of them."
    Hazel tittered as I handed the pad back.
    The doctor's jaw did not actually drop, but her smile came right off. She looked at me very hard indeed. The rest of the room, seeing her expression, went quiet, as though I had performed some startling feat of magic. The doctor turned towards Hazel.
    "What sort of things has she been telling you?" she enquired.
    Hazel hesitated, then she blurted out: "Horrible things. She's been talking about two human sexesjust as if we were like the animals. It was disgusting!"
    The doctor considered a moment, then she told the senior attendant: "Better get her along to the sickbay. I'll examine her there."
    As she walked off there was a rush of little women to fetch a low trolley from the corner to the side of my couch. A dozen hands assisted me on to it, and then wheeled me briskly away.
    "Now," said the doctor grimly, "let's get down to it. Who told you all this stuff about two human sexes? I want her name."
    We were alone in a small room with a golddotted pink wallpaper. The attendants, after transferring me from the trolley to a couch again, had taken themselves off. The doctor was sitting with a pad on her knee and a pencil at the ready. Her manner was that of an unbluffable inquisitor.
    I was not feeling tactful. I told her not to be a fool.
    She looked staggered, flushed with anger for a moment, and then took a hold on herself. She went on: "After you left the Clinic you had your holiday, of course. Now, where did they send you?"
    "I don't know," I replied. "All I can tell you is what I told the othersthat this hallucination or delusion, or whatever it is, started in that hospital place you call the Centre."
    With resolute patience she said: "Look here, Orchis. You were perfectly normal when you left here six weeks ago. You went to the Clinic and had your babies in the ordinary way. But between then and now somebody has been filling your head with all this rubbishand teaching you to read and write, as well. Now you are going to tell me who that somebody was. I warn you you won't get away with this