weeks. He was obviously lying—and not very well. It was as though he were unused to the necessity of masking his desires beneath untruths as the rest of us do. A very strange and disturbing man. I told him nothing, and sent him on his way.”
“You’re calling the girl Exxa? Not a very flattering name, surely,” Mr. Edbeck commented.
“I didn’t want to pick a name that might have some unknown connotation to the young lady.”
“Ah,” Edbeck said, his puffy cheeks jiggling as he nodded his head, “very wise. Very astute.”
“One must be careful,” Dr. Faineworth said. “The mind is a delicate battleground. Purely from the scientific standpoint, a lot can be learned from this girl, once we can reunite her with her memories.”
“Science is all very well,” Edbeck said, puffing to keep up with the doctor’s long strides, “But what of the more practical considerations that we discussed?”
“If my theories are correct....” Letting the unfinished thought reverberate, Faineworth knocked on the locked door to the ward. “Ah, there you are, Fenton. Let us in; I have brought some guests to see our lady friend.”
They followed the burly male nurse silently down the ward corridor and stopped before the locked door.
Faineworth took a deep breath and turned the key in the lock, then pulled the door open.
The room was not empty this time. A slight, brown-haired girl stood by the cot, her hospital robe pulled around her. She glared at the group in the doorway. “It’s about time you got here, Dr. Faineworth,” she said, her voice musical but cold as ice. “The attendant told me I had to wait to talk to you. Now I am talking to you. What have you done with my clothes?”
She’s just a girl! Delbit thought, trying to get a look at her from over Edbeck’s broad and chubby shoulders.
“Please, I have some people to introduce you to,” Faineworth told her. “I will get your clothing for you if you like. There didn’t seem much point to it, my dear, with you disappearing all the time and leaving it behind.”
“Why, what a charming young thing,” Edbeck said, putting his hand to his face in a pudgy gesture of appreciation. “You didn’t tell me she was so attractive, Doctor. Shame on you!”
“I don’t like being locked up,” the girl said, ignoring Edbeck and advancing toward Faineworth until she could poke her finger in his chest, “and I don’t like having to wear a shapeless cotton bathrobe which smells of disinfectant!”
Faineworth held up a warding hand. “It’s for your own good,” he said.
“I choose my own good,” she told him, walking back to her cot and sitting on the edge.
“We are trying to help,” Faineworth assured her blandly. “Remember, they were our clothes in the first place. The first time you came here, you were wrapped in a horse blanket. We’ve clothed you, fed you, and given you a place to sleep. Our intentions are honorable. It is difficult to know what to do, but we’re doing our best. We don’t have people disappearing from our locked wards every day—or appearing naked on Broadway four days later. And you’ve done both three times now.”
Three times? Delbit wondered why nobody had mentioned that to him. Probably they didn’t want to crowd his mind with unimportant facts. Appeared and disappeared three times? Moving to the side of the door so he could see in past Edbeck’s bulk, he looked at the girl with some interest.
Her light brown hair fell in soft curls below her shoulders. Her slender body, now tense with anger and frustration, looked to be soft and supple in repose. And her large, wide brown eyes encompassed universes in their depths.
She is younger than a spring day, Delbit thought, and older than life. Unaccustomed to such thoughts, he shook his head and stared, unconscious of staring. A long-suppressed emotion stirred deep within him.
“I have not done it with purpose,” she said. “I have not willed it to be so. I will repay you for your kindnesses. And what I do against my own will, I do as easily against your locked doors.”
“You’ve stopped taking your medication,” Dr. Faineworth said. “Fenton tells me you refuse to do so.”
“That is so. Keeping me sedated may make it easier for you to manage me, but it does me no good. I do not choose to be so.”
“We will discuss that,” Faineworth said.
“Come now, this is very interesting,” Edbeck said, waddling farther into the room. “You mean, girl, that you really do what Dr. Faineworth says? That you disappear—poof—and reappear—plop—and don’t know where, when, or how?”
The girl looked the chubby man over carefully. “That is so,” she said. “What business is it of yours? Are you a doctor?”
“Mr. Edbeck is an associate of mine,” Dr. Faineworth said.
“A medical associate? Dr. Faineworth, I am not here to be put on display. I will not have you bringing around casual friends or associates to gawk at me. Next I know you’ll be charging admission. I suppose I’m lucky that you left me with a bathrobe. And who is that young man who stares at me as though I were a gazelle?”
“Mr. Edbeck represents the Confederal Government,” Dr. Faineworth explained, indicating his fat friend. “The Confederal Department of Examination is interested in your case.”
“What case?” the girl demanded.
“And young Delbit here has come all the way from Philadelphia, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, to help diagnose your problem. He will help us monitor your dreams, and with his aid, perhaps we can learn to prevent these nightmares you’ve been having.”
“This is the help you’ve been promising me? This boy?” She glanced disdainfully at Delbit before fastening her gaze on Dr. Faineworth.
Delbit was not insulted by this reaction. He would have felt the same way himself, he was sure, in her place. But he would help her if he could. He silently promised her that. It seemed clear that Dr. Faineworth had no intention of doing so. Edbeck from the Confederal Government? Ridiculous! He was too short for the CDE. And he wasn’t wearing a hat! What the doctor was after was unclear to Delbit, but it clearly was not an unmitigated desire to help this girl.
“I shall help you,” Dr. Faineworth assured her, speaking to her slowly and patiently as one would to a balky child. “But first I must know what to do. Remember, a doctor swears to do no harm. I have to better understand your case—your situation—before I can be sure that what I do is for your good. I have only your good in mind. It is clear that your bad dreams are somehow associated with your disappearances. We must study those dreams. This boy Delbit, here, can help us. He is a useful tool, nothing more. You must not get upset at his presence.”
Thanks a lot, Delbit thought. But he said nothing.
“No more than at yours,” the girl told Faineworth.
“That is not the right attitude to take,” Dr. Faineworth told her. “We are here to help you, after all.”
“Let me be on my way, if you want to help.”
“On what way?” Faineworth asked smoothly. “You don’t know who you are, or where you’re from, or what you’re doing here. You don’t even know your right name.”
“I know that if you leave me alone, I’ll be better off,” the girl told him.
Edbeck advanced toward the girl and sat on the edge of the cot next to her. “Tell us where you go when you disappear from here,” he said, taking her hand, “and how you do it. The CDE wants to know.”
“I’ve told you before,” the girl said in a tired voice. She removed her hand from Edbeck’s grasp, but made no attempt to move away. Where was there to go? “I don’t know how I do it. And the other place—where I go when I disappear from here—seems