“I have, Dr. MacArthur. A problem which I should like very much....” Cub began unwinding his body and adjusting his bushy head, unconsciously balancing that list in his left shoulder, Dr. Hoffbein, Psychiatrist-in-Chief of the Elijah Wilson, noted.
“The matter you told me about yesterday?” There was a note of patience in Dr. MacArthur’s question. “Why not wait until you are certain, Ethridge?”
“No, sir. With your permission, I would rather....”
Words came out of his mouth as though shot by mental force. They were chosen with a clarity, spoken with a certainty and uttered with a velocity which tired the ears of these men whose minds had learned the defense of slow speech.
Dr. James Harrison raised his shaggy brown eyebrows which had not turned gray with his fringe of hair and his beard and reached for his watch. Twenty years ago a smart-alec student had said he looked like Christ in a Derby hat. But even that didn’t stick. A man whose hazel-brown eyes had spent sixty-eight years laughing at life received no permanent nicknames. After thirty years of urology and literature, he still believed that the wages of sin were occasionally a damn good living.
Cub moistened his lips and hunched forward.
Dr. Harrison stroked his Vandyke beard and measured the intensity of young Sterling’s excitement. Since Monday staff meetings usually lasted from four to five and that was an hour when nobody ever died, he could give the boy fifteen minutes. After five, the really sick patients didn’t wait for an audience....
“Perhaps the best way to state the situation we suspect is through the facts.” The eyes of the other seven members of the General Staff of the Elijah Wilson Hospital turned to Dr. Ethridge Sterling, Junior, temporarily Physician-in-Chief, aged thirty-eight, whose present importance came about through the premature death of Dr. Merritt at fifty-two, and the natural advantage of being his father’s son.
Cub continued, “Two patients in Medicine Clinic, B Ward, have died of causes which seem to our staff not natural in origin and which cannot be traced.”
Dr. Harrison snapped his watch shut and interrupted: