On Wednesday I had to dismantle the refrigerator.
“I’m sorry, sir; I didn’t mean to let go of the cat,” Aaron said anxiously, “but it hissed at me.”
“If you had closed the door to the cat room before opening the cage, we wouldn’t be having this problem,” I replied, not making any effort to make my voice pleasant. Aaron hung his head, looking wilted, while I contemplated the disaster area in front of me. The refrigerator lay on its side amid massive piles of vaccines, injectables, stool samples, half-used cans of pet food, heartworm tests, and tools. A lumpy spleen in a plastic bag rested against the toolbox. Halfway up the back of the refrigerator, securely wedged among the wires and coils, lay Muffin, a small calico cat.
Wistfully I wished that there was enough large-animal work in town to keep my veterinary clinic busy. No one would ever find an escaped cow trapped in the back of a refrigerator. But economics dictated that I would have to continue seeing dogs and cats, and even worse, birds and reptiles. These creatures were very, very good at escaping—I would never forget the hollow, horrified voice of one of my colleagues describing the night when a large snake had slithered out of its cage and devoured a prize cockatoo in the neighboring cage.
But cats were quite bad enough, especially when Aaron was involved. I got on my hands and knees and crawled toward Muffin, who responded by squirming even farther into the bowels of the refrigerator, hissing and struggling. How in the world was I going to get her out? She was wedged so tightly that she was now having trouble breathing. Perhaps I should anesthetize her, to keep her from getting into even deeper trouble. But I had no desire to sedate a cat that was already in respiratory distress. I would simply have to take the refrigerator apart around her. With Aaron’s dubious help I set to it, and was just beginning to make some headway when Kami, my receptionist, came and hovered over me, looking around in bewilderment.
“What are you doing, Dr. Clayton?” she asked.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” I snapped irritably. “I’m taking a cat out of the refrigerator.”
“Oh.” Kami hesitated. “Can you talk to Mrs. Campbell about Sparky? She’s on the phone.”
“No, I can’t talk to her now. Take a message, Kami.”
“All right.” Obediently, Kami returned to the phone. As I took more parts off the refrigerator I heard her say, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Campbell, but Dr. Clayton can’t get to the phone right now. He’s taking a cat out of the refrigerator. May I take a message and have him call you back?”
I sighed. Kami was not much better as a receptionist than Aaron was as a kennelman. I missed my assistant, Tegan, more than ever. If she’d been here today, I would not be looking forward to explaining to Mrs. Campbell that I did not normally house cats in the refrigerator. I would not, in fact, be dismantling the refrigerator at all. But now, at last, I could reach Muffin. I grabbed her around the middle; she struggled and tried to embed herself in the coils again, but I managed to drag her out. I deposited her in her cage and watched her for a time. She was gasping for breath, but as the minutes passed her breathing slowly became less labored, and I let out a long sigh of relief. There had been nothing wrong with Muffin when she’d come into my clinic; her owner, Mrs. Davis, was having work done on her house and had decided to board her cat here for the duration. Presumably she had thought that Muffin would be safer here. I couldn’t help imagining a gruesome scenario in which I had to tell Mrs. Davis that her cat had died from being boarded at my clinic. I groaned, and put a hand to my head.
Oh, how I missed Tegan. Mournfully I thought back to the day I had hired her. On first sight—complete with spiked magenta hair, tattoos, and a forgotten lizard in her hair—she had seemed an extremely unlikely candidate for the job. But in spite of first impressions, she had turned out to be the most committed and hardworking employee I had ever seen. Well, first impressions, for me at least, were often faulty. Aaron, for example, had seemed to me to be reasonably capable and intelligent during his job interview.
But in any event it was not just because of her value in the workplace that I missed Tegan. I had fallen in love with her, and in fact had gone so far to ask her to move in with me—but before she even had a chance to tell me yes or no, she’d had to leave town. Family business, she had said. She hadn’t known how long it would take. But now she’d been gone for almost four weeks, without so much as a letter or a phone call, and I was starting to get very nervous indeed. Suppose she never did come back?
From the treatment room I heard a cheerful voice. “Right this way, Mrs. Davis,” Kami said. “Muffin’s here in the cat room.”
Startled, I turned around and looked out the cat room door. Kami was leading Mrs. Davis across the minefield of the disassembled refrigerator. Mrs. Davis stepped carefully over a pile of assorted vaccines, looking extremely uncertain. I hurried out to greet her.
“Hello, Mrs. Davis!” I said brightly. “You must be here to visit Muffin.” And if she’d come ten minutes sooner, she’d have discovered her cat stuck in the back of the fridge . . . “Muffin’s right in here,” I said, showing her into the cat room, where Muffin sat in her cage—no longer gasping for breath, thank God, but still breathing heavily. “We’ve just moved her to a new cage, and she’s a little bit stressed out by that, ha-ha! But I’m sure she’ll calm right down now you’ve come to visit.”
Once I had Mrs. Davis settled in a chair with her cat in her lap (and the cat room door securely closed) I fled back to my office and sat at my desk with my head in my hands. Today had not been a good day. During my first appointment I’d called Aaron in to help restrain a little white poodle so that I could examine its ears, only to find that Aaron had eaten cheese puffs for breakfast and had not washed his hands since. The elderly couple who owned the poodle had not been amused by the orange stains on its impeccably groomed fur. And the day had gone downhill from there.
Outside my office door, I heard Kami and Aaron arguing about how to re-assemble the refrigerator. One thing was certain; if I left them to do it, the fridge would never function again. I groaned, got to my feet, and headed out of my office to face the rest of the day.
The rest of the day passed in much the same way. Aaron broke a window with the mop handle, Kami scheduled three exams in the same fifteen-minute slot, and I managed to mortally offend a new client by giving a compliment to his horse. “What a pretty little mare!” I told Mr. Miller. “It looks like she has a bit of Arabian in her.”
There was a long, frosty silence. Then Mr. Miller said, “She’s a pure-bred Arabian.”
“Oh,” I said. I managed not to tell him that his mare was the oddest looking pure-bred Arabian I’d ever seen, but I was still fairly certain that Mr. Miller would not be coming back to see me again. A pity, really. I did so enjoy horse work.
Then at last the day was over, all but the last appointment—clipping the wings on Mrs. Johnson’s pet cockatiel. Surely nothing could go wrong with such a simple procedure as that.
“It was a nightmare,” I said in a hollow voice, staring into the depths of my coffee and wishing it was something much, much stronger. Across the café table from me, my old friends Howard and Lynda Winston listened sympathetically.
“Aaron was holding the bird, and I reminded him not to press down too hard, so of course he let it go entirely. So there it was, flapping around the exam room, but there wasn’t anywhere it could go, right?” I fumbled for my cup and took a deep gulp. “So I caught it in a towel, but the damned bird faked me out. It went limp, and I took off the towel to check on it, and it flew off, and just then Kami opened the door and off it went into the waiting room . . .”
Lynda, who had once worked at my clinic, was cringing.
“So the bird was loose in the waiting room, and Aaron was chasing it, and Mrs. Johnson started screaming, and then the bird flew smack into the window and knocked itself out—God, I though it was dead.”
“Was it dead?” Howard asked anxiously.
“No. Thank God.”
“Is it a lawsuit?” Lynda asked. She was always very practical.
“I don’t know yet.” I sighed. “I tell you, if my pager goes off tonight, I’m going to scream.”
Immediately, my pager went off.
A few minutes later I was hurrying back to the clinic at unsafe speeds, with Howard and Lynda following my truck at a more sedate pace. Mrs. Seaton had been hysterical when I’d spoken to her; her dog, Mishka, had gotten into a fight with the dog next door. “She’s bleeding to death, Doctor, I’m sure of it,” she’d gasped.
When I pulled into the parking lot, Mrs. Seaton was already there, standing at the door clutching a fluffy white dog in her arms.
“Let’s get her inside and onto the exam table,” I said, in my best competent-and-professional voice. Quickly I unlocked the front door and switched on lights. “Put her here on the table. That’s it. Now let’s have a look.”
Mrs. Seaton stepped back, trembling, as I examined the dog. Mishka’s eyes were bright, her ears pricked; her gum color was excellent, and I couldn’t find a trace of blood anywhere.
I heard the front door open and close, and Lynda hurried into the exam room to help me with the dire emergency. I saw her looking over the dog with confusion. Obviously she didn’t see any blood either.
Baffled, I made another circuit of the dog, peering closely to examine every centimeter of fluffy white fur. I still couldn’t find any blood.
“Um—Mrs. Seaton?”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“Where, um, where would you say the, um, worst of the bites is?”
“Her right front leg,” Mrs. Seaton said faintly.
I began a minute examination of the right front leg, parting the fur to inspect the skin. At last I found the place where the dog was bleeding: a tiny puncture wound adorned with a microscopic spot of blood. I’d never have found it on my own.
“How bad is it, Doctor?” Mrs. Seaton asked. “How many stitches will it need?”
“Well now, it really isn’t too bad,” I said, mastering the art of understatement. “And it won’t need any stitches. It’s a puncture wound, and those need to be left open.” It would be impossible to stitch it anyway, of course; it was much too small. But I made a great show of clipping the fur and washing the wound, and Mrs. Seaton left the clinic pleased with my work and convinced that I’d saved Mishka’s life. There didn’t seem to be any point in trying to tell her otherwise.
There was a long silence in the clinic. At last Lynda said, “Do you know, I’d almost forgotten how peculiar your clients are.”
I sighed. “I haven’t. Where’s Howard?”
“He dropped me off so he could pick up some papers at his office. We figured that I’d be here helping you for quite a while; a dog bleeding to death and all, you know. I’ll give him a ring and let him know we’re already done—oh wait, maybe I won’t.”
My pager had already gone off again. This time it was a Mr. Williams, calling because he was concerned about his dog, which had a cut on its leg. This story was beginning to sound familiar.
“Do you think it’s an emergency?” Mr. Williams asked. “Because if it isn’t, I’ll just bring him in tomorrow.”
“Well, that’s hard to say over the phone. Is the cut very large? Is it bleeding?”
There was a long silence, as Mr. Williams presumably examined the dog. “It’s maybe a couple inches,” he said at last. “It’s bleeding some. Do I need to bring him in?”
“Well, that’s up to you,” I said. “If there’s very much bleeding, you should bring him in tonight. If there isn’t, you can probably wait until morning.”
“How much bleeding is very much?” Mr. Williams asked.
“Maybe you should just bring him in,” I said with a sigh.
“Are you sure? That emergency fee of yours is kind of steep, you know.”
“I can’t be sure over the phone,” I snapped, thoroughly irritated. “Just tell me if you’re bringing him in or not.”
“Hold on.” I heard a clunk as the phone was put down, and then I heard Mr. Williams and a woman arguing.
“What do you mean, he’d not sure?” the woman said. “He’s the doctor, isn’t he?”
“Well, he wouldn’t tell me what very much meant.”
“How much is the emergency fee? Oh, that’s outrageous. Anyway, I don’t think it looks all that bad.”
“So let’s take him in tomorrow.”
“But what if he ought to go in tonight? I can’t believe that doctor won’t tell us.”
Ten minutes later, a consensus was reached: Mr. and Mrs. Williams were going to bring in their dog. I sighed. I’d really been hoping they’d just wait until tomorrow.
“So how are things?” Lynda asked, sitting with me as I waited for my emergency to arrive. “How is Aaron doing overall—apart from handling birds, that is?”
“He lost a cat up the back of the refrigerator this morning,” I said morosely. “And someone’s supposed to come repair the lab window tomorrow.”
“Oh.” Lynda was silent for a moment. “Er—how about Kami?”
“Same as always.”
“Oh.”
I smiled faintly. “I don’t suppose you’d like to have your old job back? It would just be temporary, you know. Till Tegan gets back.”
I was quite sure she’d say no, as I’d asked the same question many, many times before, and she’d always said no. She’d left the clinic when she married Howard, and had gone to live on his remote ranch at the end of Caliente Canyon, where she now helped look after horses, cattle, a multitude of reptiles, and eight enormous sea monsters that lived in a huge hidden pool. The sea monsters were Howard and Lynda’s most precious secret, creatures that had never before been seen anywhere in the world, and Lynda was spending prodigal amounts of time trying to decipher the whistles and squeaks that made up their language. I hadn’t asked her about her work lately because it didn’t seem to be going well; the monsters’ language was apparently about as difficult to decipher as their physiology—in other words, impossible. I was very fond of the sea monsters; they were intelligent and personable and extremely friendly, but as a veterinarian, they were my worst nightmare; whenever they were sick, I became a twitching, nervous wreck.
But Lynda didn’t say anything about the importance of spending time with her monsters or about the unreasonable length of the commute to the clinic. Instead she frowned, and said, “Michael, when is Tegan coming back?”
The question put a cold chill of fear into the pit of my stomach. “Well, I don’t know exactly,” I said. “She took a leave of absence. It was something to do with her family. She didn’t seem to know how long it would take.”
“Why don’t you give her a call? Find out how things are going?”
“Well, I can’t.” Saying it out loud made all my fears and insecurities rise to the surface. Why didn’t she leave a phone number or an address? “I don’t have her number.”
“Can you write to her?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have an address.”
“Has she called you?”
“No.”
“Oh, Michael.” There was pity on Lynda’s face, and she laid a hand on mine. “I’m so sorry.”
“She is coming back,” I said, pulling away from her. “If nothing else, she left her pets in town. She has to come back for them.”
Lynda looked down, shaking her head. “That’s the thing, Michael. I don’t know how to tell you this.”
“Tell me what?”
“It’s something Howard just found out when he was teaching his poetry class. You remember Adam Brophy, don’t you? The big biker fellow who adopted that nine-foot snake you had?”
“Of course I remember him.” It wasn’t every day you saw a huge bearded biker reciting poetry to a huge snake.
“Well, he has Tegan’s lizards and snakes now. Her plants, too.”
I shrugged. “So he’s pet-sitting.”
Lynda shook her head again. “No, Michael. Adam says Tegan sold them to him. She’s not coming back for them.”
“Oh.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Tegan had sold her beloved reptiles? She’d sold her plants? It seemed impossible. She had had a great many plants; her little apartment had been a positive riot of greenery. I’d asked her about them once, and she’d laughed and told me that every time she got depressed, she went out and bought a plant. She’d been joking, of course. Tegan was always bright and cheerful, even when she was cleaning up parvo diarrhea in the isolation room. That brightness was a great part of why I’d fallen in love with her. I could not even imagine her being depressed.
“Lynda?” I said, in a very small voice. “Do you think Tegan was depressed, before she left?”
Lynda looked thoughtful. “I didn’t ever think so,” she said, “but Howard did. It was something he saw when she was in his poetry class, I suppose.”
I was silent. Oh, Tegan. She’d been depressed, and I’d been too moronic to notice even when she’d told me so to my face. And now she was gone. To visit family, she’d said, although I’d never once heard her speak of family before. It was obvious now. I’d pushed too hard, asking her to move in with me, and she’d left because of me. The leave of absence to visit family had been a polite fiction. She was never coming back.
“Michael?” Lynda was looking at me in concern. “Will you be all right?”
At that moment the front door opened, and a young couple sauntered in with a large greyhound on a lead. The greyhound had a sock bound loosely around a gaping wound in its hind leg, but the makeshift bandage had slipped down the leg and was doing nothing at all to staunch the bleeding. Lots of bleeding didn’t begin to describe it. Arterial blood was spraying everywhere, all over the waiting room, the reception desk, and the dog’s nonchalant owners.
Half an hour later, as I put the last few sutures into the greyhound’s leg, I heard the front door open. Oh, wonderful. In all the chaos, I’d forgotten to lock it. But then, if the intruder were a burglar, or even a murderer, the condition of the waiting room would probably scare him away. There were great pools of blood on the floor, with sprays and splashes of blood on the walls, the desk, and the benches, and I was fairly certain there was blood on the ceiling as well.
“Hello?” The voice was uncertain and quavering, but it was definitely Howard. I sighed with relief.
“Hi, honey,” Lynda called. “Come on in. And lock the door behind you.”
Cautiously Howard came in to the treatment room, trying not to step in any blood. He looked extremely queasy. “Did all that blood come from this dog?” he asked, blinking behind his glasses.
I nodded. Certainly none of it had come from Mishka.
“Wow. Is he going to live?”
“Probably. No thanks to his owners.”
Lynda giggled. “You’ll never believe what happened, Howard. This dog was spouting blood everywhere, but when Michael raced up with a tourniquet and pressure bandages, they stopped him.”
“Stopped him? But why?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
Howard shook his head.
“Because it would cut off the circulation.” Lynda grinned. “And it was circulating so well, too.”
“You’re kidding,” Howard said uncertainly. “Aren’t you?”
“Nope,” I said, putting in the last suture. “I swear, I had to argue with them for five minutes. I thought the dog was going to bleed out right there in the waiting room.”
Lynda efficiently turned off the anesthetic machine, trundled it out of the way, and set to work cleaning up the blood. Howard looked at me nervously and said, “Did Lynda tell you?”
“Yes. She did.” I spread a blanket on the floor and laid the greyhound on it, where I could keep an eye on the dog’s recovery while I cleaned.
“Are you going to be all right?”
“I don’t know.” I really didn’t. I was still numb. But Howard looked so wilted that I managed to force a smile. “It’s funny,” I said. “Here I was, worried sick that you were going to tell me that something was wrong with your sea monsters. That was the worst news I could imagine. But now I wish to God that was what had brought you here.”
Lynda and Howard exchanged an uncertain, furtive glance, and I looked from one to the other in horror.
“You can’t mean it,” I said faintly. “There’s something wrong with the sea monsters too?”
The next day I wandered through my work like a sleepwalker. I was in a fog, and all I could think of was Tegan. I replayed every conversation we’d ever had, trying to pinpoint the place where things had gone wrong, and when I saw Aaron blithely moving cats from one cage to another with the cat-room door wide open, I couldn’t muster the energy to correct him. Every now and then my thoughts turned to the monsters, which was almost as bad. Howard and Lynda had said there was something wrong with Curious—my favorite, of course—and that though it didn’t seem to be an emergency, it was very strange. The thought of something strange going on with the sea monsters was enough to make me twitch even now, deep in depression though I was. How was I supposed to diagnose what was wrong with a sea monster when I still didn’t understand their normal physiology? It was impossible. It couldn’t be done, and I might as well give up now. I sat down at my desk, pulled out my file on the monsters (which I kept hidden away in the workers-compensation folder) and tried to study it. But all I succeeded in doing was writing Tegan’s name in the margins, over and over.
I was still deep in gloom when I started the day’s small-animal surgeries, although with the exception of a little dog named Ozzie, I had nothing on my board more difficult than routine spays and neuters. Ozzie had an obstruction in his small intestine, and though he was a young dog in good condition, I was still a bit nervous about what I might find. I started out with a cat spay, a simple twenty-minute procedure that ought to be a good warm-up for the real work ahead.
But over an hour later, I was still frantically puddling through Alley the cat’s abdomen, trying to locate the uterus. I was baffled. Alley was six months old and had been born in the owner’s household, so there was no chance that she had been spayed anywhere else. Where could the uterus be? I’d spayed a few cats that had had only one ovary and one horn of the uterus, but in this case I couldn’t find anything at all. What in hell was going on?
Suddenly my stomach sank and I shuddered as if a bucket of cold water had been poured over me. Had I checked to make sure that this cat was female? I always did; it was routine, a reflex. But I had been in such a fog this morning . . . and many of my colleagues admitted to having, at least once, attempted to spay a tomcat . . .
I covered my incision with a sterile towel, lifted the drape, and leaned over to look under my patient’s tail. Yes, Alley was definitely female; she had a vulva. I must have checked after all. But then, where was the uterus? If Alley had turned out to be male, as mortifying as that would have been, that would at least have told me what was wrong.
Aaron, apparently assuming that I’d finished the surgery, took the mask off Alley’s face and started to wheel the anesthetic machine away. “No!” I yelped. “Put that back! We aren’t done yet.”
As Aaron put everything back together, I leaned closer to peer at the vulva. This close, it did look a little ... strange. There was an odd, tiny swelling on each side of it. I stripped off my gloves and palpated the barely-visible swellings, and I couldn’t help groaning as I realized what they were. Testicles. One on each side of the vulva. This was no ordinary cat.
Soberly I sutured closed the massive incision in the abdomen, and then removed both of the tiny, atrophied, buried testicles. What a dismal mess. This poor cat would now have to recover from a major abdominal surgery that had been quite unnecessary, and I certainly would not be able to charge for my extra time. So much for the warm-up surgery.
To my surprise, Ozzie’s surgery went very well indeed. I found the offending length of small intestine in moments, and sighed with relief. It was a simple obstruction, not a tumor, and it had not yet done major damage to the intestine. I would be able to make a small incision and simply pop the thing out, whatever it was.
But what was it? Slowly I drew it out, and looked at it in bewilderment. It looked like a puppy, so much like a puppy that I glanced hastily down to make sure I had made an incision in the small intestine and not the uterus—never mind that Ozzie was, without any doubt, male.
I cleared some of the mucus from the puppy’s face, feeling completely adrift, and a pair of felt eyes stared back at me.
“What is that, sir?” Aaron asked. “Is that a puppy?”
“So it is,” I said, gazing at it in awe. The little stuffed toy did not even have any bite marks on it; Ozzie must have swallowed it whole, which was truly a prodigious feat for such a small dog.
“Wow,” Aaron said. “Why would a dog eat something like that?”
I shrugged, changed my gloves, and started to suture the intestine. In my experience, dogs would eat anything in the known universe, including socks, underwear, dental floss, Easter grass, rubber bands, needles and thread, rocks, fishhooks and wedding rings. Last year I’d examined a dog that had munched her way through several cases of light bulbs. There was no point in trying to figure out why.
Curious, the sea monster, had been known to eat bizarre things too. I hoped that wasn’t what was going on this time; I’d done surgery on him once before and I did not want to ever, ever, have to do it again. Particularly since now I wouldn’t have Tegan present, holding Curious’ fin and soothing him through the procedure.
I was pleased that I’d been able to take care of Ozzie so easily, and while I’d been working on him I’d almost managed to drive Tegan from my mind, but now the thought of the sick sea monsters began to weigh on me. I had promised to see them that evening, and since I wasn’t on call, there would be no convenient emergencies to hold up as an excuse.
Howard and Lynda lived on a huge, remote ranch at the end of Caliente Canyon. It was a wearing fifty-mile drive, compounded by the dreadful condition of Howard’s road. The trip from Howard’s gate to the monsters’ pool involved jostling the truck over huge rocks, through deep pits, and around tight switchbacks that leaned out over spectacular cliffs. I hadn’t minded the drive when Tegan rode with me; in fact, when she was with me the trip had seemed hardly long enough. But now it was endless and miserable.
When I got to the pool, Howard, Lynda, and the monsters were waiting for me. The Sun was low over the mountains, glowing on the surface of the pool, and the monsters were splashing and playing. All except one, which lay listlessly in the shallows by Lynda’s feet. I swallowed, trying to find my nerve, and got out of the truck.
Both Howard and Lynda greeted me, and as they asked me how my day had gone they were careful to make no mention of Tegan. I told them my day had been fine—well, part of it had been—and knelt in the shallows to examine Curious.
Curious was a big monster now, much bigger than he had been on that dreadful day when I’d had to do surgery on him. At first glance, he looked perfectly fine. His eyes were bright, his gills and blowhole were clear, his odd spherical body and four-pronged tail looked sturdy and strong. But he certainly wasn’t behaving normally, moping at the edge of the pool while his sisters and brothers played.
I took hold of his fin, which was articulated into a number of dexterous tentacles, and concentrated on what I felt. He whistled and squeaked at me, and I wished, as I did with so many of my patients, that I could understand what he was telling me. Since Lynda had not yet gotten anywhere with her language project, the only real communication I had with the monsters came through touch. Strong emotions seemed to be transmitted across some chemical pathway; we could tell when the monsters were happy or sad, excited or depressed, and they could pick up such things from us as well. I tightened my grip on the fin and hoped desperately that this would give me some revelation.
What I felt was odd, and mixed. Depression, pain, and lethargy were there, but there was also something excited, something happy. I let go of Curious and turned to Lynda in confusion.
“What have you been feeling from him?” I asked.
“Well, it’s off and on, you know,” Lynda said. “Sometimes he seems perfectly normal. At other times he seems to be in pain. That’s when he doesn’t play, and he just lies down here in the shallows.”
“Have a feel now, and see what you think,” I said.
Lynda took the fin, concentrated for a moment, and then looked up at me in surprise. “I feel the pain, but he’s happy too. At the same time.” She stepped back, looking thoughtful. “I expect he’s happy because you’re here, and he knows you’ll make him feel better.”
My heart sank a bit further. I didn’t think I was going to be able to make him feel better this time. The last time he’d been ill the problem had been reasonably obvious. Now, his physical exam seemed totally normal. Obviously I was missing something. But what?
I went through the motions of the physical exam again without discovering anything new, and then drew a blood sample from the tail vein. The monsters never seemed to mind when I took blood samples from them, which was fortunate since they were now much too large to physically restrain. Curious then settled himself in the shallows, his blowhole out of the water, and lay quietly.
I watched the other monsters for a time, trying to see if anything might be wrong with them, but they went on playing quite normally. I coaxed a couple of them to my hand so that I could touch their fins, but they radiated nothing but well-being. Whatever the problem was, it was only affecting Curious—at least so far.
Howard looked at me expectantly. “What’s wrong with him, Michael?” he asked.
Even after all the years he has known me, Howard still seems to believe that I can diagnose everything at a glance.
“I don’t know,” I said gloomily. “I don’t have any idea.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Howard said. “You’ll have to check the blood sample.”
I was fairly certain that the blood sample wouldn’t tell me anything at all, but I nodded.
They asked me to stay for dinner, but it was a tense and rather quiet affair, with both Howard and Lynda working hard to make no references to Tegan, and I left as soon as I politely could…
