Denise came up behind him and rubbed his neck. His face looked tired.
“Have you found any?” she asked.
“No,” said Philips. “But I’ve only looked at a dozen or so films.”
“Have you narrowed down your field?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’ve seen two cases. Both are recent, both are women, and both are about twenty.”
Philips looked at the row of films in front of him and grunted. It was his way of acknowledging that Denise had a good point without saying so. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it himself.
She followed him back to the main computer terminal maintaining a steady stream of commentary about the busy evening in the ER. Philips listened with half an ear while he made his entry. He asked for the names and unit numbers of female patients, aged fifteen to twenty-five, who’d had skull films within the last two years. When the output printer came alive it only typed one line. It told Philips that the data bank was not keyed to retrieve skull films by sex. Philips adjusted his demand on the keyboard. When the printer reactivated, it typed at a vicious rate, but only for a short interval. The list comprised only a hundred and three patients. A quick scan suggested that somewhat less than half were female.
Randy liked the new list. He said the size of the other was demoralizing. While they waited, he pulled seven envelopes saying it would give them something to start with while he gathered the others.
Back in his office, Martin admitted that he was beat and that fatigue was beginning to erode his enthusiasm. He dropped the X rays in front of his alternator and put his arms around Denise, pressing her against him. His head dropped over her shoulder. She hugged him back, her hands just beneath his shoulder blades. They stood there for a moment supporting each other, not speaking.
Finally Denise looked up into Martin’s face and pushed his blond hair from his forehead. His eyes were closed.
“Why not call it a day,” she said.
“Good idea,” said Philips, opening his eyes. “Why don’t you come on back to my apartment? I’m still a bit manic; I need to talk.”
“Talk?” asked Denise.
“Whatever.”
“Unfortunately, I’m certain I’ll be called back to the hospital.”
Philips lived in an apartment building called the Towers, which had been built by the Med Center and was contiguous with the hospital. Although it had been designed with very little creativity, it was new, safe, and superbly convenient. It was also built on the river and Martin had one of the riverside units. Denise, on the other hand, lived in an old building on a cluttered side street. Her apartment was on the third floor and its windows faced a forever dark air shaft.
Martin pointed out that his apartment was as close to the hospital as the on-call room in the nurses’ quarters, which was available for Denise’s use, and three times closer than her own apartment. “If you get called, you get called,” he said.
She hesitated. Seeing each other while she was on call was a new experience and Denise was afraid that escalating the relationship was going to force a decision.
“Maybe,” she said. “First, let me check the ER and make sure there aren’t any problems brewing.”
While he waited for her, he began putting some of the new X rays on his viewer. He had three of them up before his eyes were pulled back to the first. Leaping from his chair, he put his nose to the film. Another case! There was the same speckling starting in the very back of the brain and running forward. Philips looked down at the envelope. The name was Katherine Collins, age twenty-one. The typed X-ray report glued to the envelope listed “seizure disorder” as the clinical information.
Taking Katherine Collins’ X ray back to the small computer, he fed it to the scanner. Then he grabbed the remaining four envelopes and extracted a skull film from each. He began putting them on his viewer, but before his hand even left the edge of the first film, he knew he’d found yet another case. His eyes were now very sensitized to picking up the subtle changes. Ellen McCarthy, age twenty-two, clinical information: headaches, visual disturbance, and weakness of right extremities. The other films were normal.