Page:Fantastic Universe (1956-10; vol. 8, no. 3).djvu/66

94 by Ethel Lewis


 * "Among us there are no dead—only those who have happily reached Completion"

, head nurse in Surgery at Watkins General, told herself that she was being foolish. From the age of twenty-one she had assisted great surgeons, and the strain was beginning to tell. A woman of forty-one, she scolded, ought to know better. It was true that she saw Dr. Horton Smith bend over his patient for a matter of some ten seconds, apparently without doing anything, immediately after he had made the large incision.

But for goodness sake, old Dr. Ezra Yates had always cleared his throat like a fog horn before he shot out one of his hands for an instrument from her tray. And Dr. Otis Frank invariably shut his eyes for three seconds before he whispered, "Ready, Beals." Well, Dr. Smith had as much right as any of them to a personal idiosyncrasy.

With this final admonition to herself, Sara was able to put her troubling observations from her mind until the day that Dr. Horton Smith's patient got fully dressed and walked out of the hospital without waiting for his

''Nurse Sara Beals had been wondering why Dr. Smith found it necessary to bend over the patient immediately after the first incision was made. Nobody seemed to realize that all four of the patients who'd disappeared had been patients of his. She thought of this and so much more when she finally confronted this man with the gentle voice and ''

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