for the coordinates, it was the only thing that could go wrong with a drop that wouldn’t abort it, and he had said the locational coordinates were right. How much slippage, though? Badri had told him it might be as much as two weeks, and he wouldn’t have run all the way to the pub in the pouring rain without his coat unless it were much more than that. How much more? A month? Three months? But he’d told Gilchrist the preliminaries showed minimal slippage.
Mary elbowed past him and put her hand on Badri’s forehead again. “Add sodium thiosalicylate to the drip,” she said. “And start a WBC screen. James, get out of the way.”
Dunworthy edged past Mary and sat down on the bench, near the back of the ambulance.
Mary picked up her bleeper again. “Stand by for a full CBC and serotyping.”
“Pyelonephritis?” the medic said, watching the reads change. BP 96 over 60, pulse 120, temp 39.5.
“I don’t think so,” Mary said. “There’s no apparent abdominal pain, but it’s obviously an infection of some sort, with that temp.”
The sirens dived suddenly down in frequency and stopped. The medic began pulling wires out of the wall hookups.
“We’re here, Badri,” Mary said, patting his chest again. “We’ll soon have you right as rain.”
He gave no indication he had heard. Mary pulled the blanket up to his neck and arranged the dangling wires on top of it. The driver yanked the door open, and they slid the stretcher out. “I want a full blood workup,” Mary said, holding on to the door as she climbed down. “CF, HI, and antigenic ID.” Dunworthy clambered down after her and followed her into the Casualties Department.
“I need a med hist,” she was already telling the registrar. “On Badri—what’s his last name, James?”
“Chaudhuri,” he said.
“National Health Service number?” the registrar asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “He works at Balliol.”
“Would you be so good as to spell the name for me, please?”
“C-H-A-” he said. Mary was disappearing into Casualties. He started after her.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the registrar said, darting up from her console to block his way. “If you’ll just be seated—”
“I must talk to the patient you just admitted,” he said.
“Are you a relative?”
“No,” he said. “I’m his employer. It’s very important.”
“He’s in an examining cubicle just now,” she said. “I’ll ask for permission for you to see him as soon as the examination is completed.” She sat gingerly back down at the console, as if ready to leap up again at the slightest movement on his part.
Dunworthy thought of simply barging in on the examination, but he didn’t want to risk being barred from hospital altogether, and at any rate, Badri was in no condition to talk. He had been clearly unconscious when they took him out of the ambulance. Unconscious and with a fever of 39.5. Something wrong.
The registrar was looking suspiciously up at him. “Would you mind terribly giving me that spelling again?”
He spelled Chaudhuri for her and then asked where he could find a telephone.
“Just down the corridor,” she said. “Age?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Twenty-five? He’s been at Balliol for four years.”
He answered the rest of her questions as best he could and then looked out the door to see if Gilchrist had come and went down the corridor to the telephones and rang up Brasenose. He got the porter, who was decorating an artificial Christmas tree that stood on the lodge counter.
“I need to speak to Puhalski,” Dunworthy said, hoping that was the name of the first-year tech.
“He’s not here,” the porter said, draping a silver garland over the branches with his free hand.
“Well, as soon as he returns, please tell him I need to speak with him. It’s very important. I need him to read a fix for me. I’m at—” Dunworthy waited pointedly for the porter to finish arranging the garland and write the number of the call box down, which he finally did, scribbling it on the lid of a box of ornaments. “If he can’t reach me at this number, have him ring the Casualties Department at Infirmary. How soon will he return, do you think?”
“That’s difficult to say,” the porter said, unwrapping an angel. “Some of them come back a few days early, but most of them don’t show up until the first day of term.”
“What do you mean? Isn’t he staying in college?”
“He was. He was going to run the net for Mediaeval, but when he found he wasn’t needed, he went home.”
“I need