But their hunger was of a different sort, and he knew he would have nothing in his cupboard for them until tomorrow.
He drove away feeling tense and uneasy. He wondered if they had believed him.
___29.___
Sylvia
She hated the idea of leaving Jeffy here for one night, let alone three, but Charles insisted it was the best and quickest way to have him evaluated.
"We'll scan him head to foot," he said from behind his desk. "We'll monitor and record him awake and asleep, collect twenty-four-hour urines, and you can have him back in seventy-two hours. By then we'll know everything there is to know about him. Otherwise it will take forever on a piecemeal basis."
"I know," she said, sitting with Jeffy on her lap, her arms tight around him. "It's just that it's been years since he's been away overnight. What if he needs me?"
"Sylvia, dear," Charles said, and she resented the touch of condescension in his voice, "if he calls for you in the night, I will personally send the Foundation helicopter to pick you up and bring you here. It will be an unprecedented breakthrough."
Sylvia said nothing. Charles was right. Jeffy interacted with no one now. Not even the pets; not even himself. She wondered if he would even know she was gone.
"What else is wrong?" Charles said. She looked up to see him watching her face. "I've never seen you so blue."
"Oh, it's a bunch of things. Little things, big things—from my favorite bonsai getting root rot to Alan having his hospital privileges suspended, and very possibly about to lose his license. Everything was going so well for so long; now everything seems to be going sour at once."
"Bulmer's problems aren't yours."
"I know." She hadn't seen much of Charles since the party, so he couldn't know how her feelings for Alan had intensified.
"It's not as if you're bloody married to him." Was there a trace of jealousy in Charles' voice? "And from what I've heard, most of his troubles are his own doing. Sounds to me as if he's come to believe what the yellow press has been saying about him."
"According to Alan, the stories are true. And Ba told me he saw something similar in Vietnam when he was a boy."
Charles snorted in contempt. "Then Bulmer's license should be revoked for practicing medicine without a mind!"
Sylvia resented that and instantly came to Alan's defense.
"He's a good, kind, decent man who's being crucified!" But her anger cooled quickly, for what Charles had said reflected the tiny doubts that had been clawing at the walls of her mind for weeks now. "You met him. Did he seem unbalanced to you?"
"Paranoids have a knack for appearing perfectly normal until you tread on their forbidden ground. Then they can be bloody dangerous."
"But Ba—"
"With all due respect to your houseman, Sylvia, he is an uneducated fisherman from a culture that worships its ancestors." He came out from behind the desk and leaned against it, looking down at her, his arms folded in front of him. "Tell me: Have you ever seen him perform one of these miraculous cures?"
"No."
"Have you ever personally known someone incurably ill who has returned in perfect health from seeing him?"
"No, but—"
"Then "watch out for him! If something breaks all the known rules, and can't be seen or heard or touched, then it isn't there! It only exists in someone's head. And that someone has broken with reality and is potentially dangerous!"
She didn't want to hear this. She couldn't conceive of Alan being dangerous to anyone. Charles was simply lashing out at someone he was coming to see as a rival.
And yet what if he were right?
___30.___
Alan
Alan poured himself a scotch as soon as he entered the house. It was scotch he liked, wasn't it? He sipped and decided he liked the taste. He flopped onto the couch and let his head fall back.
The ride had been an ordeal. If he hadn't had the presence of mind to write down the directions from his home to his office and back again before leaving here earlier, he'd still be driving around. His memory was shot. He couldn't think! Even in the office, when that fellow with the bamboo spine had come in, he'd had to go look it up in a textbook to find the name—Strümpell-Marie disease, also known as ankylosing spondylitis.
God, what was happening to him? Why couldn't he remember everyday things anymore? Was it related to the Dat-tay-vao, or was he getting senile? There was a name for the condition but he couldn't think of it at the moment. At least he didn't have a brain tumor—he had proof of that in black type on yellow paper from the radiology department at University Hospital.
He closed his eyes. He was tired.
When he opened them again, it was dark. He jerked upright. He couldn't have dozed off that long. A glance at his watch revealed that barely an hour and a half had passed. Then he heard a rumble of thunder and understood: A summer storm was brewing.
The front doorbell rang. Was that what had awakened him? Alan turned on the lights, then opened the door and found a man standing there. He was short and thin, wearing a Miami Dolphins jacket; he was nervously twisting a baseball cap in his hands as he looked up at Alan.
"Dr. Bulmer, could I speak to you a minute?"
He had that look, that hungry look. Alan swallowed.
"Sure. What can I do for you?"
"It's my wife, Doc. She—"
Alan had a sudden queasy feeling. "Were you over at my office?"
"Yeah. But they wouldn't let me in to see you. You see, my—"
"How did you find out where I live?"
"I followed you from the office."
My God! He hadn't even thought of that!
Alan looked beyond the man to the street. The light was rapidly being swallowed up by the storm, but the lightning flickers revealed a caravan of cars and vans and Winnebagos pulling up to the curb.
"I see you didn't come alone."
The man looked around with obvious annoyance. "A couple of other guys followed you, too. They must've told the rest. I was gonna wait till you came out, but when I saw them coming, I figured I better get to you first."
"I can't do anything for you now," Alan said. Is this what it was going to be like? People ringing his doorbell, camped on his lawn? "I told you: tomorrow at five."
"I know that. But y'see, we live in Stuart—that's a ways north of Palm Beach in Flahda—and the wife's too sick to be moved, so I was wondering if maybe you'd sorta like come down and see her." He laughed nervously. "A long-distance house call, if you know what I mean."
Despite the uneasiness that was growing by inches and yards within him, Alan couldn't help being touched by this little man who had come all the way up the coast on behalf of his sick wife.
"I don't think so," Alan said. He couldn't keep his eyes off the growing crowd outside. "At least not now."
"I'll drive you. Don't worry about that. It's just that"— his voice caught—"that she's dying and nobody seems to be able to do anything for her."
"I really can't leave here," Alan said as gently as he could. "I've got too many people here to care—"
"You're her only hope, man! I seen what you did today and if you can help those people, you can help her, I know it!"
There were people crossing the lawn toward them. Thunder rattled the windows. The sky was going to open up any minute. Alan started to close the door.
"I'm sorry, but—"
"Sorry, hell!" the man said, stepping forward and blocking the door's swing. "You're comin' with me!"
"But don't you see, I—"