“What if Myr Starke leaves the cottage area?” Renata asked.
“She won’t.”
“What if Myr Starke asks us to leave?” Mary said.
“She won’t.”
The evangelines glanced at each other, and Wee Hunk continued. “Be aware that I’ll be watching you continuously and that I will debrief you at the end of the day. Now, time is fleeing, so please board the lead car, and it will take you to Decatur East where a limo will be waiting. That is all.” With that, the scape closed, and the arbeitor rolled away.
THE LIMOUSINE LANDED in an outer parking lot and rolled along a brick drive to a gatehouse set into the fortresslike walls of Roosevelt Clinic. The evangelines decarred and approached a sentry window set into a large pressure gate. A jerry guard asked them their business, and they swiped the guard post with open palms.
“Been expecting you,” the guard said. “Come through the gate.” A slot opened in the wide, translucent gate of shaped air. The slot was wide enough for only one person to pass at a time. Two jerry guards awaited them inside, both armed and typically officious. Their voices reverberated in the large concrete space. Incongruously, the place smelled of sautéed garlic.
“G’wan through there,” one of the guards told them, pointing to the entrance of the pedestrian scanway.
The evangelines passed through the long scanway tunnel in single file, pausing at the various stations to spit, peer at the target, and submit to sniffers and irradiation. It was one of the most thorough scanways Mary had ever encountered.
They emerged in the middle block of the gatehouse, where another jerry guard awaited them. “Hang on while we look at your results,” he said. There were massive, floor-to-ceiling clinker epoxy barriers in the middle block, and any vehicle passing through would have to make a tight S-turn around them.
“Sorry, ’leens,” the guard said, “but you’ll have to lose those.” He patted the top of his head.
Under normal circumstances, Mary would have complied without question, but with Wee Hunk’s instructions fresh in her mind, she said, “Sorry, Myr Jerry, but we can’t do that.”
“Don’t worry,” he replied, “you’ll get them back when you leave.” When the evangelines still refused to remove their saucer caps, he pointed to a spot on the concrete floor and said, “Wait there.”
On the floor was painted a WAIT HERE box. They went to stand on it while the jerry ducked into a control booth. Renata said, “I wonder who trumps who, Starkes or Roosevelts.”
A few minutes later, the jerry returned and waved them through to the inner block with no further discussion. Starkes, apparently.
Like the outer gate, the inner gate was a wall of highly pressurized air. Beyond its shimmering expanse lay a plaza and the clinic grounds. But before they could enter the grounds, the evangelines had to wait in another WAIT HERE box with a dozen or so other Applied People contractees. And here the guard was a russ, not a jerry. He was no russ that Mary knew, but as she and Renata joined the others in the box, he flashed them a friendly smile.
“I heard they hired a pack of ’leens today,” he said. “Congratulations, and welcome to Roosevelt Clinic.”
Just like a russ. The evangelines thanked him.
When a few more Applied People iterants arrived, mostly Johns and janes in custodial uniforms, the russ lowered the pressure gate. The dense air collapsed like a splash of water, and the day workers entered the clinic grounds at last. Immediately abutting the gatehouse was a cobblestone plaza, South Gate Plaza, which in turn was surrounded by a parklike wooded area divided by lanes and footpaths. A tall man in a long, white jacket was waiting for them.
“Good morning, all,” he said cordially, “and welcome to Roosevelt Clinic, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Fagan Health Group. My name is Concierge, and I am the Fagan Health Group mentar and your supervisor. Since all of you are new assignees, I thought I’d take this opportunity to orient you to our facility as I escort you to your respective duty stations. Please divide yourselves into groups of similar job rubric: groundskeepers here, housekeepers here, and so on.”
As the iterants sorted themselves into groups, five more Concierges, identical to the first, ambled up a path and entered the plaza. They spread out, one to each group. Mary and Renata made up a group of two. Their own copy of the mentar made a slight bow and said, “Mary Skarland and Renata Carter, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Since we have a little extra time before your shift begins, allow me to give you a brief tour of the campus. How does that sound?” The evangelines agreed eagerly, and the small party set off via a footpath.
The clinic grounds were extensive and rich. Six hundred acres of woods, meadows and fields, brilliant ponds, and flower gardens. By and large, the buildings were only one or two stories high, constructed of brick or stone, and styled after nineteenth-century English country homes. Most were hidden behind dense foliage and gave no sign as to their function. Concierge pointed them out: Here was a noted restaurant, here the physical therapy/spa building, there the theater, here the dining commons, there the stables and boathouse. Along the way they passed clinic guests out for a stroll or sunning themselves on lush green lawns. The guests were, without exception, accompanied by jenny nurses. Concierge addressed the guests by name, wishing them a pleasant day. All but a few guests ignored the mentar, or returned his courtesy with a curt nod or disinterested grunt. As though the mentar were just another servant, which Mary supposed he was. But the mentar’s charm never wavered. Mary, who found most mentars to be too stiff or too silly, was impressed. This was no caveman in a loincloth.
There was something odd about odors. Mary had smelled garlic in the gatehouse, wood smoke in the plaza, and just now fresh-baked bread.
“Oh, that,” Concierge said when she asked. “After a while you won’t even notice it. That’s our scent clock. Every fifteen minutes, olfactory generators located throughout the campus pump out a designated odor. Here’s a list of them with their times. They repeat the same every day.” He swiped the evangelines the list. “After a few days, you’ll be able to tell the time in your sleep.
“Which is the whole point,” he went on. “Most of our guests spend the bulk of their days in jacketscapes where it’s easy to lose track of clinic time. We find that our scent clock helps them anchor themselves here even when they’re projecting themselves across continents. Also, and more importantly in your own client’s case, we’ve learned that even people in deep coma can sense changes in ambient odor.” The evangelines glanced at each other—coma? “We can use this to help them experience the passage of time. Being able to sense the passage of time is very stimulating to the brain. It has proven to hasten a return to consciousness.”
“But do the smells have to be so yummy?” Renata said and inhaled the fragrance of baking bread.
“THIS IS MINERAL Way,” Concierge said when they turned onto a shady lane. “South Gate, where you entered the clinic, is just through those woods.” He pointed the direction. “We’ve taken a roundabout way to arrive here.” They passed little stone-paved footpaths marked with rustic signs: Jasper, Quartz, Mica, Hornblende. “These lead to guest cottages,” the mentar continued. “Ah, here’s Feldspar, the temporary residence of Myr Ellen Starke.”
The path to Feldspar Cottage was lined on one side with rosebushes in full bloom. The concentrated perfume blended well with the scent clock’s new quarter-hour odor—freshly brewed coffee.
The cottage had stucco walls and a quaintly pitched roof. Its door was made of plain wood, painted bright yellow. Inside was a sparsely furnished single room, half of it raised up a step. There was an open ceiling, crossed by a roof beam of hand-hewn wood. All of the windows were open, and a breeze ruffled lace curtains. When Mary and Renata entered the cottage, they were greeted by two evangelines already there.