The Select

CHAPTER NINE

Tim's head was killing him as he pulled into The Ingraham's student parking lot. He leaned forward and gently rested his forehead on the steering wheel.

Jack Daniel's...too much Jack Daniel's. It happened every time someone talked him into trying some sour mash.

He shook himself and straightened. He'd made it from Baltimore in forty minutes—record time—but he hadn't raced all that distance just to take a nap in the parking lot. He glanced at his watch. Two minutes to get to Alston's lecture. He jumped out of the car and hurried toward the class complex. He eyed the security cameras high on the corners of the buildings, wondering if they were eying him.

As the days had stretched into weeks, Tim had found himself falling into the rhythm of The Ingraham's class and lab schedule. The basic first-year courses were mostly rote. Anatomy, pathology, and histology were purely memory. Biochemistry and physiology were more analytical, but still mostly regurgitated facts. And regurgitating facts was Tim's specialty. Poor Quinn needed hours of crunch study to master what he could absorb in minutes.

So he'd found himself getting bored. Sure there was the roving bull session in the dorm, but he could take only so much of speculating and arguing about the future of medicine. Novels and his tape collection could hold his interest only so long. With everybody's head but his own buried in a book most of the time, he'd begun to feel like the only seeing, speaking person in a land populated by the deaf and blind.

The only answer was to get off campus. The nearby county seat of Frederick was little better than staying on campus. He needed a city. Baltimore and Washington were the two obvious choices.

He was passing the pond when he heard a familiar voice.

"Where have you been?"

He turned and saw Quinn hurrying up the walk behind him. He stopped to wait for her, nodding to others he knew as they swirled past him. She looked great but he didn't want her to get too close. He figured he had a terminal case of morning mouth.

"Miss me?" he said.

"I was looking for you last night. Kevin told me you took off after dinner. God, you look awful. Where on earth have you been?"

"Baltimore."

He knew a little about the city. Some guys he'd hung with in high school had gone to Loyola and he'd made a few trips down there during his four years at Dartmouth. But last night he'd headed for downtown, far from Loyola's suburban neighborhood. He'd hit Baltimore Street: The Block. Baltimore's down-sized equivalent of New York's West 42nd Street or Boston's Combat Zone.

He hadn't gone there for the porn shops, the peep shows, the strippers, or the whores. He'd gone for the games. He'd learned on his past visits that there were a couple or three backroom card games in progress on any given night, games with stakes high enough to make things interesting.

Trouble was, they hardly ever played blackjack. Poker, poker, poker was all these guys cared about. Tim knew he was a decent poker player, but nothing close to what he was in blackjack. Still, he was desperate for some action, and Atlantic City was too far.

"Did you get mugged or something?" Quinn said, looking him up and down.

He smiled and thought: In a way, yes.

He'd stayed up all night playing five-card stud. The other players had been stand-offish at first—because of his youth, Tim assumed—but after they'd seen he could play, they'd warmed to him. Even started buying him drinks after a while. Jack Daniel's. Many Jack Daniel's.

Good ol' Tim. C'mon back anytime.

They loved him. Why not? He'd dropped a couple of hundred.

Poker. Not his game.

"No. Just not enough sleep."

"Well, come on. You're late, and Dr. Alston will cut you up into little pieces."

"You go on ahead. I'm going to sit in the back. Way in the back."

He watched her cute butt hurry off and followed at a slower pace.

Dr. Alston's Medical Ethics: the semester's only non-regurgitant course. It was scheduled for only one hour a week but that hour fell at 7:00 a.m. on Wednesday mornings. Some days it was hell getting there, and today was pure murder, but Tim had never missed it; not simply because attendance was required and strictly monitored, but because the class actually was stimulating.

I could use some stimulating now, he thought as he slipped into the last row and took a seat in a shadowed corner.

Dr. Alston seemed to take delight in being provocative and controversial. His manner was brusque, witty, acerbic, and coolly intellectual, as if he were contending for the title of the William F. Buckley of the medical world.

Tim vividly remembered the first lecture a couple of weeks ago...

"Most medical schools don't offer this course," Dr. Alston had said on that first morning. He'd looked wolfishly lean in his dark business suit and one of his trademark string ties. The overhead lights gleamed off his pale scalp. His movements were quick, sharp, as if his morning coffee had been too strong. "I guess they expect you to become ethical physicians by osmosis—or pinocytosis, perhaps. And a few schools may offer something called Medical Ethics, but I assure you it's nothing like my course. Their courses are dull."

Amid polite laughter he'd stepped off the dais and pointed at one of the students.

"Mr. Kahl. Consider, if you will: You have a donor kidney and three potential recipients with perfect matches. Who gets the kidney?"

Kahl swallowed hard. "I...I don't have enough information to say."

"Correct. So let's say we've got a nine-year-old girl, a 35 year-old ironworker with a family, a 47 year-old homeless woman, and a 62 year-old CEO of a large corporation—who, by the way, is willing to pay six figures for the transplant." He pointed toward the rear of the room. "Who would you give the kidney to, Mr. Coyle?"

"The little girl."

"She has no money, you know."

"Money shouldn't matter. I wouldn't care if the CEO was willing to pay seven figures for the kidney."

"We wouldn't be indulging in a bit of reverse discrimination against a rich, older man over an indigent child, would we, Mr. Coye?" He turned to another student. "How about you, Mr. Greely? Think carefully and unemotionally before you answer."

Tim was impressed. This was Dr. Alston's first lecture to the class and already he seemed to know every student by name.

"I believe I'd also give it to the little girl," Greely said.

"Really? Why?"

"Because she's got the most years ahead of her."

"Years to do what? You don't know what she'll do with her life. Maybe she'll perfect cold fusion, maybe she'll die at eighteen with a needle in her arm. Meanwhile you tell the homeless woman, the ironworker, and the CEO to go scratch?"

He turned toward the second row. "Who would you choose, Miss Cleary?"

Tim leaned forward when he realized Quinn was on the spot. He saw her cheeks begin to redden. She wasn't ready for this. No one was.

"The ironworker," she said in that clear voice of hers.

"And why is that?"

"Because he's got a family to support. Other people are depending on him. And he's got a lot of productive years ahead of him."

"What about the CEO? He's very productive."

She paused, then: "Yes, but maybe he'll get twenty years out of the kidney. The ironworker might get twice that."

"Perhaps, perhaps not. But the CEO's present position places him in charge of the livelihoods of thousands of workers. Without his management expertise, his corporation could go under."

Quinn obviously hadn't thought of that, but she didn't seem ready to back down. Tim decided to buy her some time.

"Are doctors supposed to be playing God like this?" he called out.

Dr. Alston looked up and pointed at him. He didn't seem annoyed that Tim had spoken without being recognized.

"An excellent question, Mr. Brown. But 'playing God' is a loaded phrase, don't you think? It implies an endless bounty being dolled out to some and withheld from others. That is not the case here. We are dealing with meager resources. There are barely enough donor organs available at any one time to fulfill the needs of one tenth of the registered recipients. No, Mr. Brown, we are hardly playing God. It rather seems more like we are sweeping up after Him."

He returned to the dais and surveyed the class for a moment before speaking again. Tim found Dr. Alston a bit too pompous but the subject was fascinating.

"In an ideal world," Dr. Alston said, "there would be a donated organ waiting for every person who needed one, there would be a dialysis machine for every chronic renal failure patient who was a difficult match, bypass surgery for every clogged coronary artery, endarterectomy for every stenotic carotid, total replacement surgery for every severely arthritic hip and knee...I could go on all morning. The sad, grim truth is that there isn't. And there never will be. And what is even grimmer is the increasing gap between the demand for these high-tech, high-ticket, state-of-the-art procedures and society's ability to supply them.

"Consider: there are now around thirty million people over age 65 on Medicare. In the year 2011, when you are in the prime of your practice years, the first baby boomers will hit Medicare age. By the year 2030 they will swell the Medicare ranks to 65 million. That is nothing compared to what will be going on outside our borders where the world population will have reached ten billion people."

Dr. Alston paused to let his words sink in and Tim struggled to comprehend that figure. Ten billion people—almost twice the planet's present population. Who the hell was going to care for all of them?

As if reading his mind, Dr. Alston continued.

"Don't bother cudgeling your brains to figure out how to care for the world's population when you'll be hard-pressed enough satisfying the demands of the geriatric baby boomers. And believe me, those demands will be considerable. They will have spent their lives receiving the best medical care in the world and they will expect to go on receiving it."

"Is it the best?" a voice challenged from the rear.

"Yes, Mr. Finlay. It is the best. You can quibble about delivery, but when those who can afford to go anywhere in the world need state-of-the-art treatment, where do they come? They come to America. When foreign medical graduates want the top residencies and post-graduate training, where do they apply? To their own country's medical centers? No. They apply here. The U.S. can't handle more than a fraction of the foreign doctors who want to take residencies here. Conversely, how many U.S. medical school graduates do you hear of matriculating to Bombay, or Kiev, or even Brussels, Stockholm, Paris, or London? Have you heard of one? At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, this is where the cutting edge of medicine gets honed."

Tim felt a guilty surge of pride. If the U.S. had the best, then certainly he was enrolled in the best of the best. He made a little promise to himself to put what he learned at The Ingraham to good use.

"But back to our elderly baby boomers: Who is going to supply their enormous demand for medical care? That demand will eat up a proportionally enormous portion of the GNP. The national debt was one trillion in 1980. It is now approaching five trillion. Who can guess what it will be by the time the twenty-first century rolls in? Who is going to pay for all that medical care? In an ideal world, it would be no problem. But in this world, the real world, choices will have to be made. In the real world there are winners and losers. Some will get their transplant, their endarterectomy, their chance to resume a normal life; others will not. Who will decide? Who'll be making the list and checking it twice, deciding which ones receive a share of the finite medical resources available, and which ones do not?

"Is that playing God? Perhaps. But someone must make the decisions. Ultimately the guidelines will be drawn up by politicians and administered by their bureaucrats."

Tim lent his groan to the others arising from all sides of the lecture hall. Dr. Alston raised his arms to quiet them.

"But you can have a say. Ultimately you will have a say. Often the final say. Look at the tacit decision you all made this morning. How many of you considered the homeless woman for the transplant?"

Tim scanned the hall from his rear seat. Not a hand went up.

Dr. Alston nodded slowly. "Why not, Mr. Jessup?"

Jessup started in his seat like he'd been shocked. "Uh...I...because it seemed the other candidates could put the transplant to better use."

"Exactly! Societal worth is a factor here. There are individuals who give much more to the human community than they receive, and there are those who put in as much as they take out. And then there are those who contribute absolutely nothing but spend their entire existence taking and taking. In the rationing of medical resources, what tier should they occupy? Should they be classed with the hard-working majority where they can siphon off valuable health care resources in order to continue their useless lives at the expense of the productive members of society?"

"No one's completely useless," said a female voice. Tim recognized it as Quinn's.

Good for you, babe.

Dr. Alston's eyes gleamed. "How right you are, Miss Cleary. And someday it might fall to you to help these people become useful, to guide them toward making a contribution to the society they've sponged off for most of their lives. But more on that another time. The purpose of this course is to give you the tools, the perspectives to make the monumental moral and ethical choices which will become an everyday part of medical practice in the future."

So saying, Dr. Alston had ended his introductory class in Medical Ethics. Tim had felt intellectually alive for the first time since classes had begun. He'd vowed then never to miss one of these classes.

He was remaining true to that vow this morning, hangover and all.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

Quinn and Tim had stopped before the huge pin board in the main hall of the Administration Building, the companion to the one in the caf. She'd glanced at the display in passing on a daily basis, but this was the first time in a while she'd stopped to look at the list of graduates of which The Ingraham seemed the proudest. Tim stopped beside her.

As she read through the names and their locations all across the country, she was impressed at how far and wide the Ingraham's graduates had spread from this little corner of Maryland. They ran inner-city clinics or nursing homes from Los Angeles to Lower Manhattan to Miami, Chicago, Houston, Detroit, and all points between. And all were active staff members of a KMI medical center which was never far away.

A thought struck her.

"Doesn't anybody come out of The Ingraham and practice medicine in the suburbs?"

"Maybe," Tim said. "But I don't think they're listed here."

"Weird, isn't it," she said as they walked on. "Dr. Alston's always talking about ranking patients according to societal value, and the way he talks you'd figure he'd place inner-city folks at the bottom of the list. But here you've got all these Ingraham graduates spending their professional lives in inner-city clinics."

She couldn't say exactly why, but somehow the "Where Are They Now?" board gave her a vaguely uneasy feeling.

THE WORLD'S LONGEST CONTINUOUS

FLOATING MEDICAL BULL SESSION

(I)

"Not tonight," Quinn told Tim as he tried to get her to sit in on the bull session when it moved into his room. "I've got to crunch Path."

"Lighten up or you'll wind up like Metzger," said a second-year student she didn't know.

"Who's Metzger?" Quinn said.

"Someone from our year. He studied so hard he began hearing voices in his head. Went completely batty."

"Or how about that guy in the year before us?" said another second-year. "The guy who went over the wall. What was his name?"

"Prosser," said the first. "Yeah. Work too hard and you might pull a Prosser."

"What does that mean?" Quinn said.

"One night he upped and left. Vanished without a trace. No one's heard from him since."

"Okay," Quinn said. "I'll stay. But not too long."

"All right!" Tim said, making room for her beside him. "Where were we?"

It was some sort of tradition. No one knew how it got started, but it had been going as long as anyone could remember. The floating bull session, wandering from room to room, from floor to floor, changing personnel from night to night, hibernating during class hours and sleep time, but reawakening every night after dinner to pick up where it had left off.

Quinn rarely got involved in the sessions; she had too much work to do, always seemed just on the verge of—but never quite—catching up. But when she did sit in, the topic almost always gravitated toward Dr. Alston's lectures. Like tonight.

"I was up," Judy Trachtenberg said. "I was just saying that if rationing of medical services is inevitable, maybe the elderly should be put at the ends of the waiting lists."

"Sure," Tim said. "I can just see you telling your grandmother she can't have that hip operation because she's over 75."

"So, I'd find away to squeeze her in," Judy said with an expressive shrug.

Her casual attitude offended Quinn. As much as she wanted to avoid getting mired in one of these endless conversations, she had to speak.

"Either you believe in what you're proposing or you don't," she said. "You can't say this is how we're going to do it, these are the rules and they apply to everyone equally—except my friends and family."

Judy laughed. "Quinn, where have you been for the past thousand years? This is the way the world works. What you know is nowhere near as important as who you know."

Quinn felt herself reddening but pressed on.

"But then you run into the corruption of the magnitude of old USSR-style Communism, where the size of your apartment and the amount of meat on your plate depended on how buddy-buddy you were with the local commissar. I don't think that kind of system is the answer."

"Well, we need some kind of system," Judy said. "Like a national health insurance program that will keep costs down so we can distribute the services as broadly as possible."

"And end up like the Brits?" Tim said. "No thanks. Their system is broke and they're already rationing care to the elderly. A million people on waiting lists. Nobody over 55 gets dialysis. Chemotherapy and coronary bypasses are strictly rationed too. That's pretty cold. That kind of system seems to insure that everyone gets some health care but no one gets great health care. And I'm one hundred per cent against rationing."

"So am I," Judy said. "But since I don't plan to practice in Shangri-La, what do we do when we can't treat everybody on demand?"

"Do it on a need basis," Tim said. "The guy whose heart has the worst coronary arteries and is just about to quit gets first spot on the list, and the next worst gets second, and so on."

Quinn said, "But what about the guy who's far down the list with only one bad coronary artery, but his angina's bad enough to keep him from running his fork lift? Does he have to wait till he's in cardiogenic shock before he gets some help?"

"If he gets worse, we move him up the list."

"In other words, under your system people will have to get sicker before they can get well?"

Tim scratched his head, his expression troubled. "You know, I never looked at it like that."

"Okay, Quinn," Judy said. "Now that you've shot everything down, what's your solution to the mess?"

"The coming mess," Quinn said. "Dr. Alston talks like it's already here, but it's not. And with the way medical knowledge and technology are advancing, the entire practice of medicine could be revolutionized by 2011. It might be nothing like what we see today. We'll have new resources, new methods of delivery, we might be able to handle —"

"You can't count on that," Judy said.

"Technological growth is exponential," Quinn said. "As the base broadens—"

"You still can't count on it."

Quinn sighed. Judy was right. No matter what happened, the Medicare population was going to double in the next thirty to forty years, but medical resources weren't going to double with them.

She had a sudden vision of the future. She found herself in the worn-down and rusted-out body of an elderly woman, seventy-six years old, with a failing heart, gallstones, and arthritis, trudging from specialist to specialist, clinic to clinic, hospital to hospital, trying to find relief, and being told repeatedly that none of her conditions met the established criteria that would allow immediate medical intervention, so she'd have to wait her turn.

True enough, perhaps, on paper. True enough according to the numbers the medical facilities had used to encode her diagnoses for the government computers.

True enough: Her heart failure had been gauged as Grade II, which meant the old pump was failing, its reserve low enough to make a breathless chore of walking a single block, but still pumping well enough to keep her from being completely incapacitated; Grade II heart failure warranted only a limited work-up and certainly not aggressive therapy.

True enough: Her Grade II gallbladder disease did not trigger attacks of sufficient severity to yellow her skin or generate enough unremitting pain to warrant emergency surgery, but her rattling gallstones did cause her daily abdominal distress and incessant belching, and she lived in constant fear of another attack, so much so that each meal had become a form of gastric Russian roulette.

True enough: The Grade III arthritis in her hip elicited a bolt of pain whenever she went up or down a stair, and her spine was arthritic enough to cause it to stiffen like a rusty gate whenever she sat or reclined for more than fifteen minutes, which made rising from a chair or getting out of bed each morning an excruciating ordeal; but her symptoms—when adjusted for age—did not code severe enough (you needed Grade V) under the federal guidelines to warrant hip surgery or even one of the newer, more potent anti-inflammatory medications that were in such short supply; she'd have to make do with the older, more tried-and-true (and lower-priced) generics.

All true enough—when each condition was considered one at a time. If she had been afflicted with just the arthritis, or merely the gallstones, or simply the heart failure, she could have handled it. And she even might have coped fairly well with a combination of any two of them.

But all three?

The triple whammy was slowly doing her in, melting her days into exhausted blurs, nibbling away at her quality of life to the point where she'd begun to wonder whether life was worth living any longer.

Why wasn't there a code for the quality of life? Why couldn't the computers add up a person's Grade II's and Grade III's and send up a red flag that said Help when they reached a certain critical number—regardless of age?

Was that what it was going to be like? Number-coded doctors treating the number-coded diseases afflicting number-coded patients? There had to be another way.

But what?

"Quinn?" It was Tim's voice. "Yo, Quinn. Where are you? Come back to us."

Quinn shook herself. "I'm, uh, thinking," she said.

"Good," Tim said. "I thought you were in a trance. Come up with anything?"

"No," she said. "No solution. Sooner or later the politicians and bureaucrats are going to take over completely. They can control the funds and the distribution of their so-called resources—and they'll consider us 'resources' too—but they can't control the delivery of compassion, can they?"

Judy groaned but Tim cut her off with a karate-chop wave of his hand.

Tim nodded. "You said it. The empty suits will try to get into the hospital charts, into the operating rooms, into the office records, even into the examining rooms." He tapped his chest. "They'll even try to get in here, and believe me, plenty of times they'll succeed, but they can't get a piece of that special chemistry that happens between a doctor and a patient unless we let them. And part of that chemistry is compassion. Empathy."

"The floor's getting gooey with idealism," Judy said. "How about a little realism here?"

"We're still students," Tim said. "We're not supposed to be realists. That comes later. For the moment let's believe in the healing power of compassion."

Quinn saw the fire in his eyes, the ferocity in his tight smile, and knew she'd found a kindred spirit. She raised a fist to chin level and responded with a smile of her own.

"Compassion," she said. "Let 'em find a procedure code for that."

MONITORING

"I believe it's time to start the night music," Alston said. "What do you think?"

Louis Verran concealed his annoyance as Alston stood with his hands behind his back and leaned forward over his shoulder, studying the main console.

Right, Verran thought. Like he almost knows what he's looking at.

"You're the boss," he said, not meaning a word of it. In this room Louis Verran was the boss.

Alston pointed to one of the read-outs. "My goodness, what's going on in room 107."

Verran glanced up. The mattress weight sensor for bed B had risen into the red.

"Looks like some extra bodies on the bed. I'd guesstimate about four."

Alston's eye widened. "Really? What on earth could they be doing?"

"Probably an orgy," Verran said, keeping his face deadpan. "Don't you wish we had video?"

"Certainly not. Turn up the audio and let's hear what's going on."

Verran activated the audio. All of the rooms had been wired with tiny electret microphones. The sound of male voices quizzing each other on hepatic histology swelled through the speakers.

"Orgy indeed!" Alston said. He pointed to another read-out panel. "Look at room 224. What's—?"

Verran took a deep puff on his cigar and floated a trio of blue-white smoke rings. He watched with concealed amusement as Alston backed away, waving his hand through the air.

"Must you, Louis?"

"If you can't stand the smoke," Verran muttered, "stay away from the console."

He glanced at Alston and was startled by the fury that flashed across his features. It showed only for an instant, then was gone as if it had never been, and the prissy, supercilious expression was back in control. But Verran realized his remark had caused the mask to slip and allowed a darker side of Dr. Arthur Alston to peek through.

Verran glanced at Kurt and Elliot. Both of his assistants were busy at their own consoles, checking the mattress sensors to see who was in bed and who wasn't. They gave no indication that they had heard or seen anything. Good. They'd learned quickly to act oblivious to the squabbles between their boss and Dr. Alston. Verran had known them both when he'd been with the CIA. He'd hired them away from the Company when he'd landed this job.

Elliot and Kurt—the tortoise and the hare.

Elliot was careful, meticulous, one of the best electronic surveillance jockeys in the business. He could bug a room six ways from Sunday with no one the wiser. But he'd been stopped on the street in Costa Rica one night and couldn't explain all the electronic junk in his trunk. Spent one very rough week in an Alajuela jail before the Company could extricate him. Elliot never spoke of that week, but even now he got quiet and twitchy whenever anyone mentioned jail. After the Costa Rica incident, he refused any and all foreign assignments. Which meant his career was dead in the water.

Kurt was fast on his feet but a little flaky. He had gained a reputation around the Company as something of a loose cannon and had been passed over a number of times when promotions came around. It was obvious he wasn't going to move any farther up the ladder.

Neither had hesitated when Verran offered them jobs at the Ingraham. He'd never regretted it, and neither had they.

But he did regret having to deal with Alston. Even so, Verran wouldn't have made that kind of crack if Alston were his direct superior. But after seeing Alston's ferocious reaction, Verran was suddenly very glad that he didn't have to answer to the man. He had a feeling life could be pretty shitty for an underling who got on the good doctor's bad side. Fortunately, security had its own responsibilities, separate from Alston's education bailiwick. They both answered to the Foundation, however. And the Foundation, of course, answered to Mr. Kleederman.

Verran had never met Mr. Kleederman and had not the slightest desire to do so.

"I assure you, Louis," Alston said levelly, "I wouldn't be here if I didn't have to be. I don't enjoy your smoky presence any more than you enjoy mine."

Verran put his cigar in the ashtray—he would let it sit there and go out as a peace-making gesture. Besides, he needed peace to function in this job.

Maybe he'd been letting Alston get too far under his skin. The creep was a long-term irritation, like his ulcer, and he'd have to learn to live with him, just like he'd learned to live with the gnawing hunger-like pain in his gut. But if the undercurrent of hostility between them broke out into the open, it could impinge on Verran's concentration. And he couldn't allow that. Security at The Ingraham was a seven-days-a-week, around-the-clock process that ruled his life ten months a year. And he was good at his job. Damn good. There'd been a few glitches over the years, and a couple of close calls, but he and Alston had been able to keep them nice and quiet, with no one—except the Foundation—the wiser.

So, like it or not, he and Alston had to work together, or their heads could wind up on the chopping block.

"I've got nothing against you, Doc. It's just that we're dealing with delicate equipment here. State-of-the-art sensors and pick-ups. Very temperamental. I get nervous when anybody but me or Kurt of Elliot gets near it. This stuff is my baby and I'm a protective daddy. So don't take it personal."

Alston accepted the truce with a slight nod of his head. "I understand. No offense taken. It's forgotten."

Right, Verran thought. Tightasses never forget.

"So," Alston said, clearing his throat with a sound like a record needle skipping to another track, "it seems to me that we've given them enough time to acclimate to their new surroundings. A few weeks should suffice for anyone. All the equipment is in a state of readiness, I assume?"

"The SLI units are ready and waiting. Every room in the dorm is on line and working like a dream."

"Excellent. And our new charges, are they all behaving themselves? No bad apples in the bunch?"

"All but one: the Brown kid."

"Timothy Brown? The high-IQ boy from New Hampshire? What's he been up to?"

Alston's ability to recognize each student's face and reel off their vital statistics never failed to amaze Verran. It was the one thing about Alston he envied.

"All-nighters," Verran said.

"We certainly don't discourage studying, Louis."

"No. I mean out all night. Off campus."

"Really?" Alston frowned with concern. "That's not good. Where?"

"Baltimore, I think."

"How often?"

"Twice, so far."

"Weekday nights?"

"Let me check." Verran swiveled to his computer keyboard and punched in Brown's room number. His data file scrolled down the screen. "One Tuesday into Wednesday, and one Saturday into Sunday."

"Hmmm. I don't like that mid-week absence. Let's hope he doesn't make a habit of it. We'll have to come down on him if he does, but we'll let it go for now. I don't particularly care about the weekends. Any night music they hear on weekends is a lagniappe anyway. But do keep a close watch on young Mister Brown. I do not want another fiasco like two years ago."

Verran's stomach burned at the memory. Neither did he. One of those was enough for a lifetime.

"Will do," he said. "You're the boss."

Alston smiled and it looked almost genuine. "You sound so convincing when you say that, Louis."

"Well, you are the DME, after all."

"Yes. The maestro, as it were. Very well, strike up the band and let The Ingraham's nocturnal concert series begin."

He turned and headed for the door, humming a tune Verran recognized from The Phantom of the Opera..."The Music of the Night."

OCTOBER

Carbenamycin (Carbocin - Kleederman Plarm.), the new macrolide released just two years ago, has become the number-one-selling antibiotic in the world.

P.M.A. News