11^th Floor

He pressed the electric bell softly on the green-tiled wall outside the doorway and no one responded. He looked around for a camera or a telephone but there was nothing. Then he pressed again, then leaned in and peered through the glass inwardly towards the nurses and records. No one was sitting behind the counter. He rapped lightly on the glass. Suddenly a computerized squawk crackled through an unseen speaker and he jumped back.

“Number zero-two-zero-two-zero-zero-eight Brtyla Niven, medical student, mark 4, to see Dr. Hashi-,” he said reflexively.

“Bell’s broken and where the hell is your badge,” said a voice, and then nothing.

He tried the handle now and it was open.

I have to regain composure, he thought. He would have to ask about the badge he apparently did not have. This unsettlement was unlike him and he knew why.  Being selected out of the class to appear at Stickney Crater was an honor, and Dr. Hashin was an eminent psychiatrist. For him to take a student at all was extraordinary.  It had taken 7 hours to arrive from Endurance on the barely lit shuttle which was the only transportation out of Stickney at all on Saturdays. But he had only recieved the letter on the 11^th. I must not show exhaustion, he thought. 

There was a curved area for nurses with computers murmuring silently and various papers scattered about. The lights were all off except for one faintly lighting the hallway and another dimly illuminating the nursing area. He marveled at that, how oldfashioned it all was, this rural off-world hospital. A stinging smell that he imagined to be some mysterious, exotic excrement hung over the air. There were some patient rooms across from the nurse’s desk and also around a corner. But he knew he was assigned to the rooms down the hall beyond a locked entryway of frosted glass, where Dr. Hashin saw the indigenous patients.

The area was empty except for a nurse at a countertop staring into a screen.  Brtyla approached her cautiously. He checked his watch: 7:15, two minutes past their scheduled meeting time.

“Has Dr. Hashin arrived-”

“First you see 2103,” she said without looking away, the same voice he had heard before.

“I’m sorry?”

“2103. Hashin’s gonna be late. Go see 2103 what he said. And your next stop, you go get your damn badge from security in zone 11.”

2103 was on the side of the nurses station, not beyond the frosted glass doors.  So it would be an outworlder. The nurse stayed silent, so he turned the corner disappointed into the dim hall and counted back numbers along the way until he found the door standing open to a sliver.

He pushed it open and spoke into the darkness. “Sir? Are you awake, sir?”

There was no reply. He felt for the switch and when he pressed it and the room became illuminated he looked ahead, and there was a steel frame bed and a small-framed, Asian man naked lying atop it, skin and elderly bones jutting to the ceiling.

Brtyla felt the air stick in his throat. “Dr. Hashin-”

“Ssh,” said Hashin, a finger to his lips-and then he noticed that that same hand was on his arm and then he realized that he, Brtyla, had been turning to move for the door and Hashin was stopping him. The touch was electric and the electricity ran down his spine pathways to his feet and into the floor and he was paralyzed. 

“I have something to tell you,” Hashin said, and Brtyla irresistably felt himself drawing his ear to the lips, dry and cracked, gently breathing, warm and gentle. 

He opened his eyes to the sounds of machines humming, whirring, the pressure of synthetics over his face. There were tall men standing over him peering down and then he focused and realized they were wearing the traditional brown jackets of the physicians and he knew they were doctors.

“What I want to know is.”

“If he was warned adequately or too big for his britches.”

“There was a miscommunciation,” said the other.

“When they get schizophrenia...”

“You can’t really call it that.”

“Breakdown of typical psychic inhibitions.”

“Did you ever a see a reaction like that.”

“Is he on psychic protocol now?”

“You’d better damned well believe he is.”

Brtyla wanted to move but could do nothing. One of the men stepped over to him, and came down on one knee.

“I know you can hear me,” he said. “I know this is very frightening to you and you must be very confused right now.”

Brtyla felt panic well up in his chest. He wanted to nod but his muscles ached. 

“We think you had a run-in with a patient who has a serious disorder. One of the telepaths who may have had a kind of...psychotic break, you might call it. A loss of the ability to restrain his repressed mental energies.”

Brtyla just looked ahead.

“Normally there are precautions and gear to protect against this sort of thing.  Somehow as a student you weren’t notified. Some of the patients here are very dangerous, you know. You’re a lucky young man.”

The other man was standing beside now and looking down as well. One of them laid his hand on Brtyla’s arm.

And then a voice came across his mind like a loudspeaker, the voice of the doctors standing above him in silence: But don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.  The doctor smiled.

Brtyla felt a strange sense of peace as the world floated into darkness.

Blaine Eubanks, MS III

Class of 2008