It rasped: "How are you feeling, Mr. Palfrey?"
But Vic couldn't answer. Vic had gone back down into the green depths. It was his mamma he saw behind the faceplate of the white-suit. Mamma had been dressed in white when Poppa took him and George to see her for the last time in the sanny-tarium. She had to go to the sanny-tarium so everybody else in the fambly wouldn't catch what she had. TB was catching. You could die.
He talked to his mamma... said he would be good and put in the horse... told her George had taken the funnies... asked her if she felt better... asked her if she thought she would be home soon... and the man in the white-suit gave him a shot and he sank deeper and his words became incoherent. The man in the white-suit glanced back at the faces behind the glass wall and shook his head.
He clicked an intercom switch inside his helmet with his chin and said, "If this one doesn't work, we'll lose him by midnight."
For Vic Palfrey, magic hour was over.
"Just roll up your sleeve, Mr. Redman," the pretty nurse with the dark hair said. "This won't take a minute." She was holding the blood pressure cuff in two gloved hands. Behind the plastic mask she was smiling as if they shared an amusing secret.
"No," Stu said.
The smile faltered a little. "It's only your blood pressure. It won't take a minute."
"No."
"Doctor's orders," she said, becoming businesslike. "Please."
"If it's doctor's orders, let me talk to the doctor."
"I'm afraid he's busy right now. If you'll just - "
"I'll wait," Stu said equably, making no move to unbutton the cuff of his shirtsleeve.
"This is only my job. You don't want me to get in trouble, do you?" This time she gave him a charming-waif smile. "If you'll only let me - "
"I won't," Stu said. "Go back and tell them. They'll send somebody."
Looking troubled, the nurse went across to the steel door and turned a square key in a lockplate. The pump kicked on, the door shooshed open, and she stepped through. As it closed, she gave Stu a final reproachful look. Stu gazed back blandly.
When the door was closed, he got up and went restlessly to the window - double-paned glass and barred on the outside - but it was full dark now and there was nothing to see. He went back and sat down. He was wearing faded jeans and a checked shirt and his brown boots with the stitching beginning to bulge up the sides. He ran a hand up the side of his face and winced disapprovingly at the prickle. They wouldn't let him shave, and he haired up fast.
He had no objection to the tests themselves. What he objected to was being kept in the dark, kept scared. He wasn't sick, at least not yet, but scared plenty. There was some sort of snow job going on here, and he wasn't going to be a party to it anymore until somebody told him something about what had happened in Arnette and what that fellow Campion had to do with it. At least then he could base his fears on something solid.
They had expected him to ask before now, he could read it in their eyes. They had certain ways of keeping things from you in hospitals. Four years ago his wife had died of cancer at the age of twenty-seven, it had started in her womb and then just raced up through her like wildfire, and Stu had observed the way they got around her questions, either by changing the subject or giving her information in large, technical lumps. So he simply hadn't asked, and he could see it had worried them. Now it was time to ask, and he would get some answers. In words of one syllable.
He could fill in some of the blank spots on his own. Campion and his wife and child had something pretty bad. It hit you like the flu or a summer cold, only it kept on getting worse, presumably until you choked to death on your own snot or until the fever burned you down. It was highly contagious.
They had come and got him on the afternoon of the seventeenth, two days ago. Four army men and a doctor. Polite but firm. There was no question of declining; all four of the army men had been wearing sidearms. That was when Stu Redman started being seriously scared.
There had been a regular caravan going out of Arnette and over to the airstrip in Braintree. Stu had been riding with Vic Palfrey, Hap, the Bruetts, Hank Carmichael and his wife, and two army non-coins. They were all crammed into an army station wagon, and the army guys wouldn't say aye, nay, or maybe no matter how hysterical Lila Bruett got.