Lyla’s turn to draw herself up alertly. Not noticing, Reedeth ploughed on.
“Mrs. Flamen was one of them. She’d responded exof course, or else she wouldn’t have been rebut-but this wasn’t so much treatment as inAnd I honestly don’t think we’d have realized unless Mr. Flamen had complained about the coldness with which she behaved to him. So I’ve been wonder.” The words trailed away into a shrug. “And the other was Madison’s,” he concluded lamely.
“Flamen,” Conroy said with an air of satisfaction, “I think you may have a proposal to put to Jim Reedeth now.”
Flamen shaped words with his lips, canceled them, and shot out a hand towards the desketary. “Ah-doctor! Is what we say monitored by that thing and stored in the hospital data banks?”
Reedeth passed a weary hand through his hair, touit. “I could arrange for it not to be,” he muttered. “Madison worked it over for me a few days ago, and it’s not exactly standard any longer.”
“Ah-hah!” Conroy said. “I got hints about that from Flamen too, on the way here. So make the arrangeJim, and hear what Flamen wants to say to you.”
Reedeth gave the desketary a curt order, and glanced at Madison.
“Will that fix it?”
Madison looked ever so slightly uncomfortable; by contrast with his previous imperturbability, it was as though a mountain had trembled. He .said, “I guess so, doc.”
“Damn it, you altered the thing-you must know!” Reedeth blurted, then mastered himself with an effort. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m a bit on edge today. Okay, Mr. Flamen, let’s hear what you want to tell me.”
“You’ve probably figured out already that I’m suffiworried about my wife to have her independently packled by Dr. Conroy,” Flamen said slowly. “I did warn you that if she was prematurely discharged I’d take some such steps, didn’t I? But if it does turn out that she’s suffered at the hands of your director, I won’t stop with a simple suit for damages. I’ll do my utmost to have him impeached and dismissed.”
“No wonder you wanted to prevent that being reReedeth said. He gave a thin smile. “Yes, I’d more or Jess figured that out. What are you trying to get me to do-bore from within to undermine him? Forget it. But I wouldn’t weep if someone else took over who was-well-let’s say less dogmatic than he is. It’d make working here a lot easier, and what’s more I think we’d do a better job.” He ended on a note of defiance, looking almost surprised at his own decisiveness.
“I’m sure Flamen wasn’t asking you to turn traitor,” Conroy said promptly. “But it shouldn’t be necessary to tell you, Jim, that I work much more happily on the basis of personal reactions than computerized analyses. And every now and again.”
It was his turn to hesitate, and his hearers looked at him in puzzlement as he glanced from one to another of them, his gaze lingering longest of all on Lyla.
“I’d better declare my interest,” he said eventually, and gave a wry grin. “Without intending the least disto Flamen’s position and influence, on reflection I can’t believe that something as straightforward as inpackling of Mrs. Flamen is going to afford the lever to topple your boss off his pedestal, Jim. It could far too easily be discounted on grounds of perpique-couldn’t it? And yet on the flight down from Manitoba I was thinking just how necessary it is to get Mogshack out.”
He leaned back in his chair, put the tips of his fingers together, and stared at them musingly.
“You see. like it or not, and frankly I don’t like it, this city of New York has a prestige, a cachet, a quality of influence, left over from the days when America really was on top of the world. There’s this curious kind of envy-I’m sure you’ve noticed it-which means that even people in Capetown and Accra and the capitals of Asia have a nostalgic regard for what’s done in New York, much in the same way as the Goths and Franks venerated Rome even after Alaric had sacked the city and the Romans had ceased to be a major power. And here’s Mogshack on top of the local heap, and I sinbelieve he’s doing things which are going to be disastrous. But they’re being imitated from Mexico to Moscow, and-and I’m getting worried. Jim, do you appreciate at all what I’m driving at?”