Don't Look Now

BY LEONARD RUBIN
Illustrated by WOOD
The Royalty Party wasn't what you would imagine—it stood for a great deal, but there was as much it wanted no part of!
You're not allowed in the ambulance, Miss Knox said.
They were both typical advertising men, down to the motorskates strapped beneath their shoes. Their faces were so utterly undistinctive as to seem fuzzy. Each carried a large flat briefcase with a coil antenna sticking out.
Watch it! the attendant growled, and they skated aside with a whir.
Big Carl came driving up the ramp, ducked his head to enter, and brought the bed to a stop in the belly of the ambulance. Miss Knox pressed the button and the door closed in the admen's faces.
When Mr. Barger was lowered from the hovering ambulance, his swollen, tearful eyes were sun-blind. Square hands clenched over and over with pain. Above the rotors' rackety-rackety-rack , Miss Knox shouted soothing things. She didn't wait for an answer. He was the worst case of laryngitis she had ever known—the only case, really, in her professional experience. Abolished diseases always came back virulently.
She and the bed sank between white hospital walls and landed in the room with a bump. The waiting attendant walked around the platform, folding the safety gates. He unhooked the four support cables, each vanishing out of his grasp like spaghetti slurped from a plate.
Just as the ceiling closed overhead, cutting off sight and sound of the whirlybird against the sun, Brooks, the radiologist, came in through the door, shepherding an entire class of medical students. Then two nurses seemed to clear an inoffensive path through the chemically tainted air of the corridor—and after them came Dr. Gesner, the greatest throat man in the country. Miss Knox knew him from his portrait in the Mushroom.
Brooks winked her an At ease! with a shaggy eyebrow and followed the fat man through the crowd. Dr. Gesner went to the bed and sat down. He was Barger's weight, with the same sort of elephantine bones, but he was almost two feet shorter. He stared at the nose and cheeks protruding from the bedclothes, and opened a fat black bag.