Chapter 50: Doctor Nischov Revises His Estimate
Doctor Nischov’s morning began with a phone call at ten past six, which was already wrong, because his phone did not ring at ten past six. It rang at seven, from the ward, or it did not ring at all.
It was the Hospital Director. The Director did not say good morning. The Director asked him, in the pleasant and terrible voice of a man who has himself been shouted at by somebody higher up, whether Doctor Nischov had recently informed a patient’s family that a suppression array could not be procured.
Nischov, still sitting on the edge of his bed with one sock on, said that he had, and that it was simply the truth. Production was scarce. Mana-tech had re-priced the entire class of equipment. It was not a matter of money.
"Yes," the Director said. "That is what I told the Association’s logistics officer at five o’clock this morning. He was very polite about it. He was so polite, Nischov, that I have not been able to go back to sleep."
The second call came while he was still in the car park, standing between his own car and somebody’s badly parked van with his bag still on the bonnet.
It was Vaunhold. Not a sales representative. A regional director of Vaunhold Mana-tech, calling a hospital doctor personally at ten to seven in the morning, wanting to confirm the exact configuration of the unit currently running in room 1104, because they intended to build its twin and they did not wish to make an error in the specification.
"You intend to build it," Nischov repeated.
"We intend to build it by the end of the month, doctor. The order has been expedited twice. I have never in my career seen an order expedited twice."
"By whom?"
There was a pause on the line of the kind that costs money.
"I’m not able to discuss the client."
The third call was the one that undid him, because the third call was from an old colleague at Yellemite Central, a man Nischov had trained with thirty years ago and who now sat close enough to the Association’s medical board to hear it breathe. He did not call to ask anything. He called to ask a favour, carefully, the way a man asks when he has realised he is on the wrong side of a door.
"Nischov. Old friend. There’s a young man in your hospital."
"Which young man."
"The one the Association is moving a Class Two array for. The banks are also moving with them, which they do not do, because they do not like to be seen agreeing with the Association about anything."
His colleague’s voice dropped.
"There’s a black identity status on his file. Do you understand what I am telling you? And because of this the board of the Agency has been fussing over it. Whoever he is, he is making the Association move strangely and the Agencies are getting a bad premonition. Everywhere is kind of blowing hot right now, to be honest. Anything you can tell me, I’ll gladly be in your debt."
Nischov sat down on the low wall outside the ambulance bay, in his coat, at half past seven in the morning. The stone was still wet from the night and he felt it come through the coat, and he stayed where he was anyway.
He thought about a boy he had known for a while now. A long time, if he dared say it.
He thought about the day that boy had come running into the emergency bay with a woman burning up in his arms and no money at all, the front of his shirt soaked through where she had been lying against him, and had listened to the number ten thousand a day, and had not flinched so much as blinked, and had bowed, and had gone away to find it, and had come back with it. And had come back with it again the next morning. And every morning since.
He had believed, at the time, that he was being kind by explaining the impossible slowly.
’I told him no.’
’I sat in my chair with my drama paused and I told an unmeasured black-status asset with two of the three great powers of this city in his pocket that he could not have a machine, and he stood up, and he bowed to me, and he thanked me.’
Nischov put a hand over his mouth.
Because that was the part that would not sit down. Not the money and not the black file. It was the bow.
A man with that much weight behind him does not bow to a doctor who has just refused him.
A man with that much weight behind him makes one call and lets the refusal be somebody else’s problem, and Theolyne Chadwick had made that call, obviously, within the hour. But he had bowed first. He had said thank you first. He had gone out of the office so quietly that Nischov had gone back to his tablet and pressed play.
’I have been reading him as a boy who got lucky.’
’What if he is simply a boy who is polite.’
The two were not the same thing at all, and the second one was far more frightening. Even though the poor old man was just thinking all sorts in his head.
***
He went up to the top floor before his rounds, which he never did, and told himself it was to check the array’s calibration log, which it was not.
The guards on 1104 knew him and stood aside without being asked, one of them coming off the wall a half second before the doctor reached him. Frank, sitting at his little station with a folder open on his knee, watched the doctor go past and wrote down the time.
Inside, the room was warm, and smelled faintly of rice.
The crippled one was in her chair with a magazine she was not reading, watching the room over the top of it. The silent one stood at the rail where she always stood, her frost-pale hair loose down her back, one hand laid flat on Thalleria Greenwood’s blanket, and she did not turn round for him.
And Theolyne Chadwick was on the floor beside the bed with his sleeves rolled up, working a cloth into the wheel track of the wheelchair, where a week of hospital corridors had packed grit into the bearing. He turned the wheel a quarter turn and went at it again, and the grit came off the cloth grey.
He looked up and his whole face changed, in the way it always did, as though the doctor arriving was the best thing that had happened all morning.
"Doctor! Good morning. Have you eaten? There’s soup."
Nischov stood just inside the door and did not, for a moment, trust himself to speak.
’He is going to get the machine. He was always going to get the machine. And when it arrives in his house, he is going to write me a card thanking me for my help.’
"Theo," he said at last. "Sit down. There are some forms I need to walk you through, for the transport."
Theo put the cloth down and got up at once, delighted.
"Does that mean Thall can go home?"
"It means," said Doctor Nischov, choosing every word like a man crossing a stream on wet stones, "that I would like to be very useful to you, as early as possible."