As they stood up, Cassi whispered again, “What on earth are you doing here?”

In answer, Thomas silently guided her out into the hall, pulling the door shut behind them. “Why aren’t you asleep?” he said crossly. “You’ve got surgery in the morning! I stopped by your room to make sure everything was in order only to find an empty bed. It wasn’t hard to guess where you might be.”

“I’m flattered you came to see me,” whispered Cassi with a smile.

“This is not a joking matter,” said Thomas sternly.

“You’re supposed to be asleep. What are you doing up here at two A.M.?”

Cassi held up the computer sheets. “I couldn’t fall asleep so I thought I’d be industrious.”

“This is ridiculous,” said Thomas, taking Cassi’s arm and leading her back to the stairs. “You should have been asleep hours ago!”

“The sleeping pill didn’t work,” explained Cassi as they went downstairs.

“Then you’re supposed to ask for another. My word, Cassi. You should know that.”

Outside her room, Cassi stopped and looked up at Thomas. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I wasn’t thinking.”

“What’s done is done,” said Thomas. “You get into bed. I’ll get you another pill.”

For a moment Cassi watched Thomas resolutely walk down the corridor toward the nurses’ station. Then she turned into her room. Putting the SSD data on her night table, she tossed her robe onto the chair and kicked off her slippers. With Thomas in charge she felt more secure.

When he returned with the pill, he stood by the bed watching as she swallowed it. Then, half-teasing, he opened her mouth and pretended to search inside to see if it was gone.

“That’s a violation of privacy,” said Cassi, pulling her face away.

“Children must be treated like children,” he laughed.

He picked up the printout, carried it over to the bureau, and dumped it into a lower drawer. “No more of this stuff tonight. You’re going to sleep.”

Thomas pulled the chair over to the bed, switched off the reading light, and took Cassi’s hand.

He told Cassi he wanted her to relax and think about their upcoming vacation. Quietly he described the untouched sands, the crystal water, and the warm tropical sunshine.

Cassi listened, enjoying the images. Soon she felt a peace settle over her. With Thomas there she could relax. Consciously she could feel the sleeping pill begin to work, and she realized that she was falling asleep.

Robert was caught in the netherworld between sleep and consciousness. He’d been having a terrifying dream: he was imprisoned between two walls that were relentlessly closing in on him. The space where he stood became smaller and smaller. He could no longer breathe.

Desperately he pulled himself awake. The entrapping walls were gone. The dream was over, but the awful sense of suffocation was still there. It was as if the room had been sucked dry of its air.

In panic he tried to sit up, but his body would not obey. Flailing his arms in terror, he thrashed around looking for the call button. Then his hand touched someone standing silently in the dark. He had help!

“Thank God,” he gasped, recognizing his visitor. “Something’s wrong. Help me. I need air! Help me, I’m suffocating!”

Robert’s visitor pushed Robert back onto the bed so roughly the empty syringe in his hand almost dropped to the floor. Robert again reached out, grabbing the man’s jacket. His legs kicked at the bed rails setting up a metallic clamor. He tried to scream, but his voice came out muffled and incoherent. Hoping to silence Robert before anyone came to investigate, the man leaned over to cover his mouth. Robert’s knee flew up and thumped the man on the chin, snapping his teeth on the tip of his tongue.

Enraged by the pain, the man leaned his entire weight on the hand clamped over Robert’s face, pushing his head deep into the pillow. For a few minutes more Robert’s legs jerked and twitched. Then he lay still. The man straightened up, removing his hand slowly as if he expected the boy to struggle anew. But Robert was no longer breathing; his face was almost black in the dim light.

The man felt drained. Trying not to think, he went into the bathroom and rinsed the blood out of his mouth. Always before when he dispatched a patient, he had known he was doing the right thing. He gave life; he took life. But death was only administered to further the larger good.

The man remembered the first time he had been responsible for a patient’s death. He had never doubted it was the right thing to do. It had been many years ago, back when he was a junior resident on thoracic surgery. A crisis had arisen in the intensive care unit.

All the patients had developed complications. None could be discharged, and all elective cardiac surgery in the hospital had come to a halt. Every day at rounds the chief resident Barney Kaufman went from bed to bed to see if anyone was ready to be transferred, but no one was. And each day, they stopped last by a patient Barney had labeled Frank Gork. A shower of emboli from a calcified heart valve had been loosed during surgery and Frank Gork, formally Frank Segelman, had been left brain-dead. He’d been on the unit for over a month. The fact that he was still alive, in the sense that his heart was beating and his kidneys were making urine, was a tribute to the nursing staff.

One afternoon Kaufman looked down at Frank. “Mr. Gork, we all love you, but would you consider checking out of this hotel? I know it’s not the food that’s keeping you here.”

Everyone snickered but the man who had continued to stare into Frank’s empty face. Later that night, the man had gone into the busy intensive care unit and walked up to Frank Gork with a syringe full of potassium chloride. Within seconds Frank’s regular cardiac rhythm degenerated with T waves peaking, and then flattening out. It had been the man himself who called the code, but the team only made a halfhearted attempt at resuscitation.

After the fact everyone was pleased, from the nursing staff to the attending surgeon. The man almost had to restrain himself from taking credit for the event. It had been so simple, clean, definite, and practical.

The man had to admit that killing Robert Seibert had not been like that. There wasn’t the same sense of euphoria of doing what had to be done and knowing that he was one of the few with the courage to do it. Yet Robert Seibert had had to die. It was his own fault, dredging up all the so-called SSD series.

Returning from the bathroom, the man quickly searched the room for any papers relating to Robert’s research. Finding none, he moved to the door and opened it a crack.

One of the night nurses was coming down the hall with a small metal tray. For a terrifying moment the man thought she might be coming to see Robert. But she turned into another room, leaving the corridor free.

His heart pounding, the man slipped into the hall. It would be a disaster to be seen on the floor. When he was a resident, he had reason to be in the corridors or patients’ rooms or even the intensive care unit at all hours of the night. Now it was different. He had to be more careful.

When he reached the safety of the stairwell, panic overtook him. He plunged down three floors without pausing for breath and kept up this frantic descent until he’d passed the twelfth floor. Only then did he begin to slow down. At the landing on five, he stopped, flattening his back against the bare concrete wall, his chest heaving from his exertion. He knew he had to collect himself.

Taking a deep breath, the man eased open the stairwell door. Within a few moments he felt safe, but his mind wouldn’t stop racing. He kept thinking about the SSD data, realizing that Robert probably had a source in his office, very likely a floppy disc. With a sigh the man decided he’d better visit pathology right away, before Robert’s death was known. Then the only problem would be Cassi. He wondered exactly how much Robert had told her.