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okay?”
    “Umm… Oh yes.
Yes. Everything’s fine.”
    When she hung
up, Felicity stood by the telephone for a few minutes. It wasn’t
like Shirley Benson to make such a call. She had already known the
answer to her own question anyway. Felicity could not help thinking
that there was some other reason why she rang—something that, once
on the telephone, Shirley could not bring herself to express.
Felicity returned to the patio, smiling at her family.
    “I have to go,”
she said.
    “You should
really rest a little while yet...” Wendell scowled.
    “No. I have to
go now,” Felicity insisted.

*

    Shirley Benson
had suffered a rare fright. The truth was that the new patient—Mr.
Carrick—was already in the isolation ward and had been since he
arrived that evening. Shirley was on night duty and should have
gone off in the morning but she waited for Doctor Campbell to
arrive. She would wait—no matter how long it took.
    In the night
she had visited the isolation ward and stood amidst the beds, the
lights were dimmed but for the monitoring equipment with its
screens of tracings busily indicating that everything was normal.
The lights flickered, and the room was abuzz with a faint sound,
and it was probably only Shirley’s long experience with such
equipment that caused her to sense something was wrong.
    She busied
herself, trying to ignore what was an irrational sensation. These
people were all ones across the board on the Glasgow Scale—yet
there was full EEG, ECG, respiration normal. Every four hours, they
needed liquifilm to keep their unblinking eyes moist but otherwise
nothing happened. There was no decerebrate rigidity—their limbs
remained flexible, skin texture good except poor Mr. Carrick. For
all intents and purposes, they might have been asleep. Electrolyte
balance good, respiratory and circulatory status good. Nothing was
wrong, except she could sense at the core of her being that
something was different. Something weird.
    At first it was
impossible to say what. She walked over to Mr. Solomon’s console
and considered it for a time. All readings normal. EEG, ECC pulse
rate, blood flow, normal, normal.
    “You seem fine,
Joe. Everything ticking along perfectly,” she told the unconscious
man.
    Joe Solomon’s
spine was broken and no one had told him yet. No one had told him
that his wife was dead either. You could never tell just how aware
comatose patients were. For Joe Solomon, it might be better if he
never woke up.
    Worse still was
the American gentleman, Kevin Wagner, who didn’t yet know that he
had lost his whole family. Alone and far from home—but he was a fit
and healthy young man who, unlike Joe Solomon, would eventually
make a full recovery. Chrissie Rice had some nasty abdominal
injuries, and there was Brian Carrick’s pickled skin—best not to
drive after being too close to him. Lorna and Andromeda were in
perfect health. Only sleeping. Strange in itself. But there was
something else.
    She crossed to
Lorna Simmons’ monitor and thought about that. Normal, normal. All
normal, even Mr. Carrick. And then it struck her. It was all just a
little too normal.
    For a time she
moved about the monitors, not quite sure of what she was doing but
doing it anyway. She switched switches, individualising the screens
and sequences until she found what she wanted. And when she did,
she jolted with shock. She almost screamed. She did run out of the
room.
    She took
herself to the cafeteria and had a cup of coffee. Her hands were
still shaking. The equipment was faulty. That had to be it. She
would call maintenance in the morning and have them sort it out.
Only it wasn’t an equipment fault. She had checked each monitor and
knew the absurdity it indicated so clearly was the truth.
    For it had been
when she cut out the input from all sources except the EEG on all
six monitors that she understood what had bothered her. They were
all the same. All six patients had precisely the same alpha waves.
It was as