They brought him coffee. He listened to a distant hum of traffic.
Very carefully he thought about nothing.
When he next looked up Hufman was standing nearby, peeling away transparent gloves.
“I’m sorry to say, Mr. Walmsley, it’s as I feared.” Nigel said nothing. His face felt caked with dense wax, stiff, as though nothing could crack through.
“An incipient brain stem hemorrhage. The lupus did equilibrate in her organs, as I thought. She would have been all right. But it then spread into the central nervous system. There has been a breakdown in the stem.”
“And?” Nigel said woodenly.
“We’re using coagulants now. That might possibly arrest the hemorrhage.”
“What then?” a female voice said.
Hufman turned. Shirley was standing in the doorway. “I said, what then?”
“If it stabilizes… she might live. There is probably no significant brain damage yet. A spasm, though, induced by the lupus or our treatment—”
“Would kill her,” Shirley said sharply.
“Yes,” Hufman said, tilting his head back to regard her. He plainly wondered who this woman was.
Nigel made a halting introduction. Shirley nodded at Hufman, arms folded under her breasts, standing hipshot with tense energy.
“Couldn’t you have seen the lupus was getting worse?” she said.
“This form is very subtle. The nervous system—” “So you had to wait until she collapsed.”
“Her next biopsy—”
“There might not be a next—”
“Shirley!” Nigel said sharply.
“I must go,” Hufman said stiffly. He walked out with rigid movements.
“Now you’ve fair well muddled it,” Nigel said. “Shaken up the man whose judgment determines whether Alexandria lives.”
“Fuck that. I wanted to know—”
“Then ask.”
“—because I just got here, I didn’t talk to anybody and—”
“How did you know Alexandria collapsed?”
Nigel had thought he could gradually deflect the conversation and calm her down. He was surprised when Shirley glared at him and fell silent, nervously stretching her arms to the side. Her face was ashen. Her chin trembled slightly until she noticed the fact and tightened her jaw muscles. In the distance he could hear the staccato laboring of some machine.
“Shirley …” he began, to break the pressing silence between them.
“I saw the ambulance leaving when I came back from my walk.”
“Walk?”
“I got to the apartment early. Alexandria and I had a talk. An argument, really. Over you, your working late. I, I got mad and Alexandria shouted at me. We were fighting, really fighting in a way we never had before. So before it got any worse I left.”
“Leaving her there. Wrought up. Alone. When Hufman had already said she couldn’t take stress in her condition.”
“You don’t have to…”
“Rub it in? I’m not. But I’d like to know why you harp away on my taking time for JPL. You work.”
“But you’re her, well, she leans on you more than me, and when I got to the apartment and she was so weak and pale and waiting for you and you were late I—”
“She could lean on you. That’s what we three are all about. Extended sharing, isn’t that the proper jargon?”
“Nigel—”
“You know what I think? You don’t want to face the fact that you’ll lose Alexandria and you’re blaming me in some buggered-up way.”
“You’re so damned independent. You don’t share, Nigel, you—”
“Can that shit.” He took a convulsive, mechanical step toward her and caught himself. “That’s, that’s your own illusion.”
“A pretty convincing one.”
“I’ve tried—”
