Dr. Gesner raised his hand and voices were stilled, the shuffle of feet ended and the mutape chattered alone in the sunshine. He leaned over and read the tape, and as he straightened his back, even the recorder stopped still. He heaved himself to his feet with the help of two internes.
"He says—" puffed Dr. Gesner—"he says this is no time for sadism."
"Last ones up, girlie," said Dr. Brooks.
She sat on the bed and the mutape spoke to her noisily. Big Carl had hooked two cables in place, Dr. Brooks the other two, and the floor platform began to rise through the room toward the maw of the hovering whirlybird. She tucked the covers gently around her patient's distorted throat.
The chatter stopped. She read, "This is something the Royalty predicted for weeks ahead of time. I thought we could avoid it, but the Silvertongue people must have fed me the virus at our last luncheon meeting. Then when negotiations remained uncertain—thanks to Royalty sentiment on my board—they came visiting while I slept and injected me with a larger dose and planted the projectors. I woke up in awful pain. You were there, young lady—I screamed, silently, with my features. I was unable to raise my head. You wiped blood from my cheeks with your palm and cleaned it on a piece of cotton. You thought it was under water. Your eyes turned away before your hand left the projector field—or else you could not see what you could not expect. While I looked on, you treated me like a sleeping baby and asked Dr. Brooks about radio...." The perforated tape had stopped feeding from the machine.
"His tape!" she cried.
"Don't worry," Dr. Brooks said. "We're unplugged from the hospital system, but I reserved the only ambulance with its own computer circuit. It conveys limited ideas, but that's better than nothing."
Big Carl had erected the safety gates. "Look below," he said.
She stood up and pressed her forehead to the latticework of the nearest gate. At first there was only a diamond-shaped patch of sky, with the Silvertongue factory in the bottom corner. Then, as the platforms swung on its cables, she saw the curved edge of the Mushroom, and the Administration roof swarming with figures on motorskates. They circled among the squat mountain laurels, pointing upward. The ambulance walls settled around her suddenly blocking the view, and the belly of the vehicle rumbled shut. With a bump, the floor platform was deposited on its girders.