She rose and faced the elevator as sharp-tuned ears caught the almost imperceptible hum of doors opening. Dr. Alfreed nodded cheerfully to her, twitched his head for her benefit toward the man whose arm he was grasping. Patient sixty-six-twenty-five, no doubt, she thought, glancing again at his card. Name was Clark Stevens (M-3972677-234a-150N-190), she saw. Tall, too, and well-built. But, somehow, his posture and bearing were almost utterly lacking in masculinity; at the moment he looked the role of a weak, vacillating subject of a rehabilitation test, and he shocked Markett's sense of what was right and decent with his overclad body. He wore a shirt and trousers, seemingly improvised from a number of the one-piece, short-sleeved suits worn by the world as fashion and comfort decreed. Yet there was something about him—? She wrenched her eyes back to the figure of the doctor, small, compact, and natty in leatheret bandolier. Pity, she thought with professional coldness, must not interfere with her operative functions. However, the sight of Stevens could not help but make her think of pictures she had seen of nurses in the old days, hideously overclad, their freedom of movement hampered. She, as all nurses of this enlightened era, wore only a bandolier, to which was attached a harness carrying the various items which must always be on her person, regulation shorts, and shoes.
Dr. Alfreed took the patient's card from her and scribbled notations. She turned to take the patient's arm, but, with a cry of fear, he cowered from her.
"Now," she said soothingly. "Let's come along and not have—" she was backing him into the arms of the doctor, of course. He pinioned the patient, and winked at Markett. "Sorry," he said. "He's afraid of women too. Forgot to tell you. Let's take him in." And the little doctor lifted the big-boned patient easily to his shoulders, holding him helplessly balanced, and trotted down the enameled corridor into a high-walled, darkish room. He dumped the psychotic into one of many deep, padded chairs, and Markett promptly slapped thick, strong bands of a tough plastic across the man's knees and chest. Patient sixty-six-twenty-five began to weep.
The doctor busied himself with a little projector and screen that constituted the equipment of the room. "What reel?" he called to Markett.
She wrinkled her nose. "Are you going to do it in one shot or work him up to it?" she asked.
"One shot. Might kill him, of course. But if it doesn't, we'll have reclaimed a citizen—and from all accounts a good one. He used to be an organizer for a coal-mine before this happened to him. Pathetic, isn't it?"
"Yeah," agreed Markett, busy fastening meshes of pure copper about the limbs and head of the now quiet patient. "But how about these—these swathings of his? Do the bus-bars have to contact his skin?"
"No," said the doctor. "We'll just turn the stuff on and see what happens. It's as strong as they come—you wouldn't understand it; I've studied ancient history, so it's a little clearer to me."
"Well," said Markett, uncertainly, as the doctor turned off the lights and started the projector. She settled herself in a comfortable double seat, and the doctor joined her, while Experimental Reel Seven, Full Power, went clicking through the camera and onto the screen. But they, being otherwise absorbed, paid little or no attention to it.
The patient—sixty-six-twenty-five—whimpered and tried to scrape off the copper bus-bars that confined him. Then his eyes drifted to the screen, and he beheld a marvelously real landscape, not frozen in paint on canvas but quivering with life. A rabbit started, and the patient, who had never seen a rabbit, recognized the little creature, and worked his jaws. There was an unfamiliar taste in his mouth, as though he were champing something tough-fibred, like a woven cloth or bit of soft wood. He had never eaten meat, so to the still-dominant presence of his ego there was no connotation.