Prothero reached into the water and took her hand. It was like a pale water lily in his broad palm. "If Chase is the kind of guy I think he is, he'll
She gave him a quick sideways smile. "I guess I'm scared." An uncharacteristic admission for her. "We've talked about it for so long, thought about it, and now we have to make the decision. We're burning our bridges ... or at least you are. If your government finds out
Prothero's face tightened. "My government is up to its neck in bacteriological herbicides. The old, old games. Like a kid fooling around with matches in a house that's burning to the ground." Then it spilled out of him like venom. "I've had all that, Ingrid. ASP can go screw itself,
"Screw them before they screw up the world," Ingrid said. She pouted at him through the rising steam. "What are you smiling at?"
Prothero couldn't stop grinning. "It sounds funny, an expression like 'screw up,' in a Swedish accent."
"So! You think I'm funny, huh?" She pulled her hand free with ladylike hauteur and slid down until the water lapped her chin.
"That's right, madam, I do," Prothero said, eyeing her narrowly. "Not to mention incredibly sexy. Come here."
With both hands he scooped into the water, wetting the sleeves of his bathrobe up to the elbows, and pulled her up under the arms until they were both standing, his bathrobe open, her wet breasts pressing spongily against his hairy chest. He stooped and picked her up in his arms, a hot wet desirable woman, faintly steaming.
Prothero frowned. "Just one logistical handicap." "Oh?"
"Glasses. Fogged. Can't see my way to the bedroom."
"No logistical handicap at all," said the UN secretary-general huskily. She unhooked his glasses and flipped them over her shoulder. They landed in the lavender-scented water with a plop.
For a reason Dr. Ruth Patton had never been able to figure out, from 6:00 p.m. onward was the busiest admissions period of the twenty-four-hour schedule. People collapsed on the streets and were ferried in by ambulance or staggered in themselves to receive treatment at the Manhattan Emergency Hospital in the dilapidated eight-story building on East Sixty-eighth Street that had once housed the Cornell School of Medicine.
The admissions department resembled a battlefield casualty clearing station. Anoxia and pollution cases were sprawled on chairs or laid out on stretchers on the floor, so tightly packed that there was barely enough room to move among them. There was little more she could do except make an instant diagnosis, classifying them as terminal--requiring hospitalization--or short stay. In the latter case they were given a whiff of oxygen, drugs to clear their bronchial tubes, and sent on their way. Orderlies followed her, sorting out the patients according to the red or blue stickers on the soles of their shoes.
Then it was on to the wards.
The unwritten policy of the hospital was not to give anyone over the age of fifty-five a bed. Better to save the life of a younger person than waste bed space on someone whose life expectancy was only a few years at best. Ruth hated the policy. More than once she had been reprimanded for admitting a patient above the "death line." She had even falsified the records, subtracting five and sometimes ten years from the patient's age and slipping him through the net.
Fred Walsh, aged sixty-three, had slipped through. He lay shrouded in a plastic oxygen tent, a small wiry man with spiky gray hair and watery brown eyes, who from the day he arrived had not uttered one word of complaint. He had the native New Yorker's caustically laconic wit, honed to a fine art by a lifetime spent as a cutter in the Manhattan rag trade. Ruth didn't know why she had admitted Fred when she had rejected hundreds of others--some just as bad as he, some younger. Yet a week ago she had written "Walsh, Frederick Charles; Male; Caucasian; age 52" on the pink admissions sheet after an examination lasting no more than a minute.
In her heart of hearts she suspected a reason. Fred reminded her of Grandpa Patton, the same slight body that was nevertheless as tough as old boots. She remembered her grandfather with much affection; he had taught her to ride in the summer vacations back in Columbus, Ohio, a million years ago.
