She called for the nurse.
"It's impossible," Ellis said, pacing up and down in the nurses' station. "Absolutely impossible. He's two days - a day and a half - post-op. He couldn't possibly leave."
"He did," Janet Ross said. "And he did it the only way he could, by changing into an orderly's uniform. Then he probably walked downstairs to the sixth floor and took an elevator to the lobby. Nobody would have noticed him; orderlies come and go at all hours."
Ellis wore a dinner jacket and a white frilly shirt; his bow tie was loosened and he was smoking a cigarette. She had never seen him smoke before. "I still don't buy it," he said.
"He was tranked out of his skull with thorazine, and- "
"Never got it," Ross said.
"Never got it?"
"What's thorazine?" the cop said, taking notes.
"The nurses had a question on the order and didn't administer it. He had no sedatives and no tranquilizers since midnight last night."
"Christ," Ellis said. He looked at the nurses as if he could kill them. Then he paused. "But what about his head? It was covered with bandages. Someone would notice that."
Morris, who had been sitting silently in a corner, said,
"He had a wig."
"You're kidding."
"I saw it," Morris said.
"What was the color of the wig in question?" the cop said.
"Black," Morris said.
"Oh Christ," Ellis said.
Ross said, "How did he get this wig?"
"A friend brought it to him. The day of admission."
"Listen," Ellis said, "even with a wig, he can't have gotten anywhere. He left his wallet and his money. There are no taxis at this hour."
She looked at Ellis, marveling at his ability to deny reality. He just didn't want to believe that Benson had left; he was fighting the evidence, fighting hard.
"He called a friend," Ross said, "about eleven." She looked at Morris. "You remember who brought the wig?"
"A pretty girl," Morris said.
"Do you remember her name?" Ross said, with a sarcastic edge.
"Angela Black," Morris said promptly.
"See if you can find her in the phone book," Ross said.
Morris began to check; the phone rang, and Ellis answered it. He listened, then without comment handed the phone to Ross.
"Yes," Ross said.
"I've done the computer projection," Gerhard said. "It just came through. You were right. Benson is on a learning cycle with his implanted computer. His stimulation points conform to the projected curve exactly."
"That's wonderful," Ross said. As she listened, she glanced at Ellis, Morris, and the cop. They watched her expectantly.
"It's exactly what you said," Gerhard said. "Benson apparently likes the shocks. He's starting seizures more and more often. The curve is going up sharply."
"When will he tip over?"
"Not long," Gerhard said. "Assuming that he doesn't break the cycle - and I doubt that he will - then he'll be getting almost continuous stimulations at six-four a.m."
"You have a confirmed projection on that?" she asked, frowning. She glanced at her watch. It was already 12:30.
"That's right," Gerhard said. "Continuous stimulations starting at six-four this morning."
"Okay," Ross said, and hung up. She looked at the others.
"Benson has gone into a learning progression with his computer. He's projected for tipover at six a.m. today."
"Christ," Ellis said, looking at the wall clock. "Less than six hours from now."
Across the room, Morris had put aside the phone books and was talking to Information. "Then try West Los Angeles," he said, and after a pause, "What about new listings?"
The cop stopped taking notes, and looked confused. "Is something going to happen at six o'clock?"
"We think so," Ross said.
Ellis puffed on his cigarette. "Two years," he said, "and I'm back on them." He stubbed it out carefully. "Has McPherson been notified?"
"He's been called."
"Check unlisted numbers," Morris said. He listened for a moment. "This is Dr. Morris at University Hospital," he said,
"and it's an emergency. We have to locate Angela Black. Now, if- " Angrily, he slammed down the phone. "Bitch," he said.
"Any luck?"
He shook his head.
"We don't even know if Benson called this girl," Ellis said. "He could have called someone else."
"Whoever he called may be in a lot of trouble in a few hours," Ross said. She flipped open Benson's chart. "It looks like a long night. We'd better get busy."
2
The freeway was crowded. The freeway was always crowded, even at 1 a.m. on a Friday morning. She stared ahead at the pattern of red tail-lights, stretching ahead like an angry snake for miles. So many people. Where were they going at this hour?
Janet Ross usually took pleasure in the freeways. There had been times when she had driven home from the hospital at night, with the big green signs flashing past overhead, and the intricate web of overpasses and underpasses, and the exhilarating anonymous speed, and she had felt wonderful, expansive, free. She had been raised in California, and as a child she remembered the first of the freeways. The system had grown up as she had grown, and she did not see it as a menace or an evil. It was part of the landscape; it was fast; it was fun.
The automobile was important to Los Angeles, a city more technology-dependent than any in the world. Los Angeles could not survive without the automobile, as it could not survive without water piped in from hundreds of miles away, and as it could not survive without certain building technologies. This was a fact of the city's existence, and had been true since early in the century.
But in recent years Ross had begun to recognize the subtle psychological effects of living your life inside an automobile. Los Angeles had no sidewalk cafes, because no one walked; the sidewalk cafe, where you could stare at passing people, was not stationary but mobile. It changed with each traffic light, where people stopped, stared briefly at each other, then drove on. But there was something inhuman about living inside a cocoon of tinted glass and stainless steel, air-conditioned, carpeted, stereophonic tape-decked, power-optioned, isolated. It thwarted some deep human need to congregate, to be together, to see and be seen.
Local psychiatrists recognized an indigenous depersonalization syndrome. Los Angeles was a town of recent emigrants and therefore strangers; cars kept them strangers, and there were few institutions that served to bring them together. Practically no one went to church, and work groups were not entirely satisfactory. People became lonely; they complained of being cut off, without friends, far from families and old homes. Often they became suicidal - and a common method of suicide was the automobile. The police referred to it euphemistically as "single unit fatalities." You picked your overpass, and hit it at eighty or ninety, foot flat to the floor. Sometimes it took hours to cut the body out of the wreckage...
Moving at sixty-five miles an hour, she shifted across five lanes of traffic and pulled off the freeway at Sunset, heading up into the Hollywood Hills, through an area known locally as the Swish Alps because of the many homosexuals who lived there. People with problems seemed drawn to Los
Angeles. The city offered freedom; its price was lack of supports.
She came to Laurel Canyon and took the curves fast, tires squealing, headlamps swinging through the darkness. There was little traffic here; she would reach Benson's house in a few minutes.
In theory, she and the rest of the NPS staff had a simple problem: get Benson back before six o'clock. If they could get him back into the hospital, they could uncouple his implanted computer and stop the progression series. Then they could sedate him and wait a few days before relinking him to a new set of terminals. They'd obviously chosen the wrong electrodes the first time around; that was a risk they accepted in advance. It was an acceptable risk because they expected to have a chance to correct any error. But that opportunity was no longer there.