"THE HOSPITAL" Screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky SHOOTING DRAFT 1971 THE HOSPITAL. DAY. MAY, PANORAMIC VIEW of The Hospital -- a vast medical complex, a sprawling pastiche of architecture extending ten blocks north and south on First Avenue and east to the river. The Hospital was founded in the late 19th century, and there are still a few begrimed Victorian Bedlams and Bastilles among the buildings. Mostly though, it is Medical Modern 1971, white and chrome and lots of glass and concrete shafts and rotundas. A spanking new Community Mental Health Clinic towers among the tenements at the northern end of the complex. On the far side of First Avenue, a twenty-story apartment house with recessed balconies and picture windows to house the resident staff has just recently been completed, and next to it, eight ghetto buildings are being demolished to make way -- according to the construction company's sign -- for a new Drug Rehabilitation Center, to be completed in 1973, we should all live so long. This is where the shattering SOUNDS OF CONSTRUCTION are coming from. A block length of generators and cement and demolition machines are POUNDING, CRASHING, SCREAMING. Traffic HONKS and BRAYS up First Avenue. It is a cold spring morning -- 10:00 A.M. A 1966 station wagon pulls up to the Holly Pavilion. A tiny, fragile, white-bearded OLD MAN, almost lost in his overcoat, is helped from the rear of a station wagon and slowly led to the entrance doors by a middle-aged nurse. NARRATOR On Monday morning, a patient named Guernsey, male, middle-seventies was admitted to the hospital complaining of chest pains. HOLLY PAVILION. EIGHTH FLOOR CORRIDOR The old man is now in a wheelchair pushed by a hospital orderly down the corridor. NARRATOR He had been referred by a nursing home where the doctor had diagnosed his condition as angina pectoris. Now it is axiomatic that nursing home doctors are always wrong. ROOM 806 The old man, shirtless, is propped on the edge of the bed, wheezing. DR. SCHAEFER, a young intern in white-uniform, perches beside him with the old man's chart in his lap, taking down his history. The other patient in the two-bedded room, a MIDDLE-AGED MAN, is comatose and all rigged up with I.V.'s and catheters. NARRATOR The intern who admitted Mr. Guernsey, however, accepted the diagnosis and prescribed morphine, a drug suitable for angina but not at all suitable for emphysema, which is, unfortunately, what the old man actually had. Within an hour... EIGHTH FLOOR CORRIDOR Two orderlies rush the old man's bed with, of course, the old man in it, past the Nurses' Station and into a waiting elevator. NARRATOR ...the patient became unresponsive and diaphoretic and was raced up to Intensive Care with an irregular pulse of 150, blood pressure 90 over 60, respiration rapid and shallow. INTENSIVE CARE An oxygen mask is applied to the old man's face by the resident. NARRATOR The resident on duty now compounded the blunder by treating the old man for pulmonary edema. He gave him digitalis, diuretics and oxygen. This restored the old man's color... EIGHTH FLOOR CORRIDOR The elevator door opens. Two orderlies wheel the sleeping man on his bed back around the Nurses' Station and down the corridor to his room. NARRATOR ...and he was sent back to his room in the Holly Pavilion, ruddy complected and peacefully asleep. ROOM 806. EVENING The old man is back in his room sleeping serenely, his tiny body making barely a ripple in the white sheet that covers him. The room is in hushed shadows. A yellowish light diffuses into the room from the half-opened bathroom door. The other patient in the room remains as before, comatose and silent. NARRATOR In point of fact, the patient was in CO2 narcosis... ROOM 806 All the lights are on now. NURSE PENNY CANDUSO and an orderly are wrapping the old man in a post-mortem shroud. BRUBAKER, the senior resident, is giving hell to Schaefer, the intern. NARRATOR ...and died at seven-thirty that evening. The shrouded body of the old man is wheeled out of the room. CAMERA STAYS on the vacated bed. NARRATOR I mention all this, only to explain how the bed in Room 806 became available. PAN from bed to Schaefer, now alone in the room and regarding the empty bed with frowning interest. Schaefer is a scraggly young fellow, bespectacled, with a contemporary mess of hair and a swinging unkempt moustachio. HOLD on Schaefer. NARRATOR The intern involved was a prickly young buck named Schaefer who had a good thing going for him with a technician in the hematology lab. In the haphazard fashion of hospital romances, Dr. Schaefer had been zapping this girl on wheelchairs, stretchers, pantry shelves... Dr. Schaefer moves for the phone on the table between the two beds. NARRATOR ...in the kitchen, in the morgue, in the dark corners of corridors... Schaefer speaks softly into the phone. NARRATOR ...standing up, sitting down -- so you can imagine what an available bed meant to him. SCHAEFER (on phone) Hey, Sheila, this is Howard, Sheila. Hey listen. I got us a bed for tonight. A real, honest-to-god bed. FREEZE on CLOSE-UP of the beaming, lubricious Schaefer on phone as CREDITS AND MUSIC ERUPT ONTO THE SCREEN -- THE HOSPITAL INTERSPERSED WITH CREDITS, the following scenes: ROOM 806. NIGHT Dark. Just a bit of moonlight streaking through the not quite closed bathroom. The hallway door opens, and a young woman, carrying a top coat, slips quickly in giggling like hell, followed by Schaefer, who is likewise giggling and admonishing her to be quiet. Her name is SHEILA. Sheila notices the other patient in the room sleeping away and looks questioningly at Schaefer, who reassures her as he removes her coat. After which he strips off his own white jacket and trousers and hangs them in the armoire. The girl asks in a hoarse whisper if they're going to get totally nude and wonders if that's such a good idea. For an answer, Schaefer fondles her crotch. They both giggle, they both shush each other, they giggle again; they're both stoned. The girl unzippers her dress. The dark room is filled for the moment with the flurry of undressing, flung garments, elbows, legs and arms, bumpings into each other, and Sheila saying between giggles, "Boy, I sure hope nobody walks in." They eventually wind up on the unoccupied bed, and the scene ends looking ACROSS the sleeping profile of THE PATIENT in the other bed as Schaefer and his girl thump away at each other with much creaking of springs, moans, groans, giggles and the white-limbed patterns of fornication. ROOM 806 Dark, silent, hushed. The fun and games are over. Sheila is in front of the armoire. She slips back into her dress, after which she tiptoes back to the bed where Schaefer is deeply asleep, smiling in postcoital peace. Sheila bends, shakes his shoulder. SHEILA (whispers) I'll see you. Schaefer smiles, grunts, sleeps on. END OF CREDITS. FADE OUT. FADE IN: THE HOSPITAL. 6:30 A.M. NEXT MORNING, TUESDAY A cold newly-dawned sun shines down on the vast sprawling complex of the hospital. Desultory early morning traffic on First Avenue. HOLLY PAVILION, EIGHTH FLOOR The night shift of nurses is closing out another night's work, which has been on the whole uneventful. The head nurse, MRS. REARDON, hunches over her paperwork. NURSE ELIZABETH RIVERS sits at the desk beside her, resting her head on the palm of one hand. NURSE'S AID J.C. MILLER crosses with an armful of linens. She disappears into the pharmacy and supply areas behind the Nurses' Station. In the west corridor, NURSE LUCINDA PEREZ glances at her watch, then pads down to Room 806. She enters. ROOM 806. DAY A cold gray light cheerlessly illuminates the room. Nurse Perez checks the I.V. on the comatose patient who is in the bed nearest the door. Then she turns to regard the other bed -- which gives her pause. NURSE'S P.O.V.: Intern Dr. Schaefer is lying on this bed, rigid, eyes dilated, pupils staring unseeing. An I.V. tube sticks out of his naked right arm. Nurse Perez doesn't quite know what to make of the fact that Dr. Schaefer is lying on that bed with an I.V. tube sticking out of him looking dead. Frowning, she reaches out a tentative hand to shake his naked shoulder. NURSE PEREZ Doctor Schaefer... There is, of course, no response. A terrible suspicion enters Nurse Perez's mind, and she closes her eyes and sighs a long shuddering sigh. Then she opens her eyes and, with a second and briefer sigh, reaches for Schaefer's neck to take his pulse. Clearly, the result is not encouraging. She sighs another short sigh and regards Schaefer's unblinking, dilated pupils. It's all a bit too much for her; she shuffles to the window and stares out into the gray morning where things are a little more comprehensible. Once again, she returns to the bed, regards Schaefer's death mask. She raises the bedsheet and, for one short but appreciative moment, considers Schaefer's naked body. She lets the bedsheet carefully down. She sighs again. NURSE PEREZ (trying again, with little hope) Doctor Schaefer? She sighs, turns and leaves the room. EIGHTH FLOOR CORRIDOR Nurse Perez, frowning and pursing her lips, moves slowly back to... EIGHTH FLOOR, NURSES' STATION Head Nurse Reardon is still bent over her paperwork. NURSE PEREZ Listen, did you know Doctor Schaefer was in Eight-O-Six, because he's dead? MRS. REARDON (late forties, continues her painstaking paperwork, grunts) What? NURSE PEREZ I'm just telling you, Dr. Schaefer is dead. MRS. REARDON (works on; after a moment, looks up) What do you want, Perez? NURSE PEREZ Look, I don't know what the hell this is all about, but Dr. Schaefer is in Room 806 with an I.V. running and he's dead. I didn't even know he was sick. MRS. REARDON (regards Perez a moment) Perez, what the hell are you talking about? (appeals to Nurse Rivers coming out of the floor pharmacy) Do you know what the hell she's talking about? NURSE PEREZ Well, maybe I'm going crazy. I don't know. Isn't Room 806 the patient Guernsey? I mean, did something happen I don't know about? MRS. REARDON Perez, I don't know what you're talking about. NURSE PEREZ This is the nuttiest thing I ever saw. Dr. Schaefer's in Room 806 dead. MRS. REARDON What Dr. Schaefer? Our Dr. Schaefer? NURSE PEREZ Our Dr. Schaefer. The one who's always grabbing everybody's ass. MRS. REARDON (to Nurse Rivers) Do you know what she's talking about? I don't know what she's talking about. (to Perez) What do you mean Doctor Schaefer's in Room 806 dead? NURSE PEREZ I mean, he's lying on the far bed, stone dead, and with an I.V. tube sticking out of him. And if you don't believe me, maybe you just ought to get up and look for yourself. With a short, irritable sigh, Mrs. Reardon abandons her paperwork and heads down the west corridor, followed by Nurses Perez and Rivers. CAMERA TRACKS as Mrs. Reardon turns to Nurse Rivers. MRS. REARDON All right, maybe you'd better call Mrs. Christie. Phone RINGS. BOCK'S HOTEL ROOM Dark. Venetian blinds drawn. TV set on, a gray coarse-grained square. PHONE RINGS. DR. HERBERT BOCK, 53 years old, a large man, bulky, disheveled, apparently fell asleep in a chair while watching television the night before. The bed still has its spread on but is rumpled. Bock is in trousers and shirt, collar opened, barefooted. PHONE RINGS. The reading lamp is the only light in the room except for the sheen of gray hissing from the television. Newspapers litter the floor. Books, two-day-old plates of food, yesterday's mugs of coffee, cigar-stuffed ashtrays, a shirt, a pair of pants, a winter overcoat, a battered gray fedora have been slung about. PHONE on the bedtable RINGS again, begins to penetrate the sotted sleep of the man. Two bottles of booze, one empty, and a clump of glasses are on the coffee table in front of Bock. He grunts, opens an eye. PHONE RINGS. Bock suddenly exsufflates in a snorting grunt. He stands, shuffles to the bed, a big, sodden fellow, picks up the receiver, interrupting its next RING. He sinks, sitting on the bed. BOCK This is Dr. Bock... Yes, Mrs. Christie, what is it? It's all right, I'd be getting up in a few minutes anyway... I'm sorry I missed that. Would you say it again? Yes, I know him, Schaefer, the stud with the glasses, who fancies the nurses... I'm afraid I don't understand that, what do you mean? Was he sick? I mean, was he... uh, what was the cause of death? Was he being treated? I don't understand. What was he doing in the bed? You did say he... Look, Mrs. Christie, did you call the office? Good, well, I'll... No, no, it's all right. I'll be getting my wake-up call any minute anyway. He returns the receiver to its cradle, sits disoriented, unbuttoning his shirt. HOSPITAL. MORNING. 8:00 A.M. LONG SHOT of the hospital, now alive and jumping. Taxis pull up and out of the large U-shaped drive. A noisy picket line of about twenty chanting protesters parade with signs in an uneven ellipse. GRUMBLING PROTESTERS (chanting) Two-four! Help the poor! Most of the placards are slogan-y: "PEOPLE YES! DOCTORS NO!" -- "CURE POVERTY! HEAL THE POOR!" Two protesters move toward the street, waving and yelling at an approaching car. One, a young white fellow wears a sandwich board that goes into the matter at some length: "WE PROTEST THE EVICTION OF 386 BLACK FAMILIES AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THEIR HOMES TO SERVE THE EXPANSIONIST POLICIES OF THIS IMPERIALIST HOSPITAL." In the back seat of the car sits JOHN SUNDSTROM, handsomely graying, tanned, early fifties, the Director of the Hospital. He looks up. That young demonstrator, DR. IVES, a sandy-haired bespectacled man of 30 in a white doctor's coat, sidles to the car's open rear window angrily shouting. DR. IVES What do you say, Sundstrom? How much longer do you think our monopolistic, exclusionary, racist policies will work? PROTESTER We're the hope! Sundstrom lowers his window and gives his driver directions. He exits in the BACKGROUND parking area, where he notices Bock emerging from his car. Sundstrom waits for him. SUNDSTROM So how's it going, Herb? Bock's sour glance says it all. He locks his car, joins Sundstrom, and the two men start down the concrete ramp. BOCK (after a moment) One of my interns dropped dead this morning. SUNDSTROM Really? I'm sorry to hear that. I understand you've moved out to a hotel. BOCK Yes. SUNDSTROM It got that bad with Phyllis? BOCK It's been that bad for twenty-four years. Are you going to be solicitous? SUNDSTROM Yes. BOCK Oh, God. They trudge across the U-shaped entrance drive, pausing to let a car pass. SUNDSTROM Listen, Herb, I'm the guy who brought you into this hospital, so I think I can skip the diplomatic overtures. Marty stopped me in the hall yesterday, very upset. He had just had lunch with you and said you sounded suicidal. Marty tends to be extravagant, but he's not the only one. Jack Singer mentioned the other day you've been boozing it up a lot. And let's face it, you've been sloughing off. I understand you haven't even been doing rounds. BOCK I'm going to do rounds today. They pick their way around the shuffling line of protesters -- many with Afro haircuts and tinted glasses, including a black minister and four young white activists. HOSPITAL, HOLLY PAVILION, EXECUTIVE CORRIDOR Early-arriving secretaries chat in the doorways. The corridor itself connects to the Bryce Pavilion (pediatrics, gynecology and obstetrics), so a steady stream of traffic moves back and forth. Bock and Sundstrom enter the corridor and slow to a halt to continue their chat by a wall. SUNDSTROM Herb, want a couple of days off? BOCK No. SUNDSTROM Go down to Montego Bay, get drunk, get laid, get a little sun. BOCK For God's sake, John, I'm fifty-three years old with all the attendant fears. I just left my wife after twenty-four years. Standard case of menopausal melancholy. SUNDSTROM Maybe you ought to have a talk with Joe Einhorn. BOCK I don't want to see a psychiatrist. Stop worrying about me. All I have to do is get my ass back to work, and I'll be fine. I'm sorry I've caused you concern. He sets off down the long corridor to the elevators. MILTON MEAD, the Administrator of the Hospital, comes out of one of the offices, waves a good morning to Bock, who acknowledges him and plods on. Mead comes up to Sundstrom, now moving toward his own office. MILTON MEAD Sid just called from St. Luke's, and he's heard that the demonstrators up there are planning a march to join the bunch down here. SUNDSTROM Oh, God. (he wraps his arm around Mead's shoulders, ushering him into his office area) Did you call the cops? MILTON MEAD Yes. HOLLY PAVILION, EIGHTH FLOOR. 8:15 A.M. The elevator door opens. Out comes Bock, overcoat unbuttoned now. He clumps to the Nurses' Station. An unusual number of nurses seems to be there. Through the doorway of the floor pharmacy, we can see Nurse Rivers of the night shift being comforted by Nurse Perez of the night shift and Nurse Edwards of the morning shift. The head morning nurse, MRS. DONOVAN, is at the desk hunched over her paperwork. (Nurses are always hunched over their paperwork.) NURSE FELICIA CHILE is also seated at the desk doing some paperwork. Head Nurse Donovan looks up briefly as Dr. Bock approaches. MRS. DONOVAN (back to her paperwork) They're all in Eight-O-Six, Doctor. BOCK What happened? MRS. DONOVAN I think I'll just let Mrs. Christie tell you about it. Bock lumbers off for the west corridor through a press of activity. Kitchen workers trundle creaking portable carts, nurse's aids and attendants pop in and out of doorways bearing trays and used dishes. A robed patient or two ambulates along the hall. Morning rounds have just started, which means a clump of white-jacketed, white-trousered young doctors are gathered in a gaggle at the far end. The group includes senior resident MONROE BRUBAKER, junior resident HARVEY BIEGELMAN, interns SAM CHANDLER and IRVING AMBLER and another medical student, all lounging outside a door discussing the condition of the patient within. Chandler is presenting the case from a handful of notecards in his hand. The others lean against the walls, listening. They wear shirts and ties with the exception of Ambler, who is new to the floor and still in the canonical white tunic under his jacket. They are all in their twenties and have swinger sideburns and occasional mustaches. When he spots Dr. Bock, senior resident Brubaker turns the rounds over to Biegelman and joins Bock just outside 806. BRUBAKER (as he approaches, rolls his eyes) Oh boy. BOCK What happened? BRUBAKER I've seen some pretty good snafus, but this one... I mean, there's a certain splendor to this one. One of the night nurses, a float, thought Schaefer was a patient and plugged an I.V. into him. He was a diabetic, you know. BOCK What do you mean, a nurse plugged an I.V. into him? BRUBAKER Oh, it's really a screwed-up story, Doctor. You see, what happened was we had an old man in that bed who died last night, so the bed was available. And you know Schaefer. He's Sammy Stud. BOCK And he talked a nurse into zapping him on that bed. BRUBAKER I think it was a girl from hematology he's been running with. BOCK My God, it's a Roman farce. The door to Room 806 opens, and an Assistant Administrator named HITCHCOCK pokes his head out. HITCHCOCK I thought I heard you out here, Doctor. (he too rolls his eyes heavenward in an expression of incredulity) Bock makes a noise and goes into... ROOM 806 Aside from Hitchcock, the room includes MRS. CHRISTIE, the Director of Nurses, a fusty forty-six, in streetclothes; Head Night Nurse, Mrs. Reardon, in uniform; Head Evening Nurse, MRS. DUNNE, mid-fifties, who had apparently been called in from home because she's in mufti and wearing a winter coat; and, of course, the comatose patient and the dead Dr. Schaefer. Mrs. Christie is instructing the two nurses. MRS. CHRISTIE I'll need one from both of you, three copies, and I suggest you do that right now. The forms are in my office... Mrs. Dunne, on the verge of tears, head bobbing, looks up to Bock. MRS. DUNNE I'm really so terribly sorry about this, Dr. Bock. I... BOCK (regarding Schaefer's rigid death mask) As I understand it, one of the nurses inadvertently administered an I.V. to Schaefer here. How the hell could that happen? HITCHCOCK Listen, I think we ought to straighten this out somewhere else. MRS. CHRISTIE Yes, very good idea. Oh God, what a mess. They all file out now, Bock in the rear into... HALLWAY, NURSES' STATION AND LOBBY AREA They all go along to the Nurses' Station where Mrs. Reardon and Mrs. Dunne disappear into the rooms behind. Mrs. Christie leads Hitchcock and the trailing Bock to the TV-solarium; but Dr. Brubaker is now holding his rounds there. He stands, quietly expounding on the uses of heparin, a decoagulant. One of the patients last night had hemorrhaged consequent to injudicious use of that drug. Listening, the other young doctors make notes. Mrs. Christie leans against the wall. Apparently, the conference is to take place in the corridor. Background activity continues normally. MRS. CHRISTIE (with a sigh) Well, these things happen, of course. HITCHCOCK I suppose I'd better call the Medical Examiner. BOCK I still don't know what happened. MRS. CHRISTIE Well, it took an hour to get it sorted out. It seems a patient named Guernsey died last night in Eight-O-Six, but that information wasn't given to the night nurses. These things happen. Bock has begun to get the drift. A curious state of apathy settles over him. MRS. CHRISTIE (rattling on) At any rate, according to the cardex, the patient Guernsey was down for twenty-five milligrams of Sparine Q- 6-H, so Mrs. Reardon sent Nurse Perez to give him his twelve o'clock shot. Meanwhile, it seems Dr. Schaefer had usurped that particular bed for his own purposes. Dr. Brubaker suggests it was for a love tryst, and some weight is given that hypothesis by the fact that Dr. Schaefer was naked. BOCK (trying to give his attention to this) I get the drift, Mrs. Christie. In other words, Nurse Perez went in and sedated Dr. Schaefer thinking it was the patient Guernsey. My God! What I don't understand... MRS. CHRISTIE If I may finish, Doctor. Well, after Perez gave him his shot, she noticed the I.V. on the bed had been pinched off, and she reported that back to Mrs. Reardon, who then assigned Nurse Rivers to restart the I.V. (Bock sighs) Now Rivers was a float. She didn't even know the staff people on the floor, and nobody knew what the patient Guernsey looked like anyway, since he'd only been admitted that morning. BOCK So she plugged an I.V. into him. MRS. CHRISTIE Yes. BOCK How much? MRS. CHRISTIE A liter. BOCK (The doctor in him intrudes into his lassitude) A five percent glucose solution won't kill anybody. Did he have any other ancillary conditions? He wasn't dehydrated, was he? Didn't anybody bother to go in to check him during the night, even under the impression he was merely a patient? Was he hyperasthmolic? Did he have a bad heart? He must have had some kind of thrombosis. I want the post done here, Mr. Hitchcock. And you and I better have a little chat, Mrs. Christie, about your excessive use of float nurses. MRS. CHRISTIE I've got nearly a thousand nurses in this hospital. BOCK (gathering rage) And every time one of them has her period, she disappears for three days. My doctors complain regularly they can't find the same nurse on the same floor two days in a row. What the hell am I supposed to tell that boy Schaefer's parents? That a substitute nurse assassinated him, because she couldn't tell the doctors from the patients on the floor? My God, the incompetence here is absolutely radiant! I mean, two separate nurses walk into a room, stick needles into a man -- and one of those was a number eighteen jelco! -- tourniquet the poor sonofabitch, anchor the poor sonofabitch's arm with adhesive tape, and it's the wrong poor sonofabitch! I mean, my God! Where do you train your nurses, Mrs. Christie? Dachau!? (he is aware his voice has risen and is attracting attention. He lowers his voice) All right, wrap him up and get him down to Pathology. I'm especially interested in his blood sugar. A liter of glucose never killed anybody. Your ladies must've done something else to him. MRS. CHRISTIE Will there be anything else, Doctor? BOCK No. HITCHCOCK Before you call the family, Doctor, I wish you'd talk to Mr. Mead about this. We'd like, naturally, to avoid litigation. Bock heads abruptly down the corridor to the elevators. HOLLY PAVILION, SEVENTH FLOOR, CORRIDOR A corridor of offices. This is the Department of Medicine, where Bock and all the senior staff members of the department have their offices. It's quiet, since most of the staff are away at their various specialties about the hospital. Bock comes up the corridor still wearing the overcoat he arrived in some hours ago. He has only managed to unbutton it in all the time it has taken him to reach the corner office. Gilt lettering on the door reads: DEPARTMENT OF MEDICINE and below that DR. HERBERT E. BOCK. BOCK'S OFFICE, OUTER OFFICE Small office with two desks. As Department Chief, Bock gets two secretaries. Both are at their desks, one on the phone, MISS GLORIA LEBOW, and the other rattling away on the IBM, MISS STEPHANIE McGUIRE. MISS LEBOW (mouthing) Coffee? It would seem not. Bock waves a listless hand, exits into... BOCK'S PRIVATE OFFICE The modestly imposing office is lined with medical tomes. Bock slips out of his coat and jacket and hangs them in the closet. In shirtsleeves with his tie a bit askew -- fastidiousness in dress is not Bock's strong point -- he crosses to his desk and sits, breathing more heavily than his small exertions would seem to warrant. He seems exhausted. There is a KNOCK on the door. Miss Lebow enters, holding a filing envelope stuffed with papers. MISS LEBOW A few things have been piling up. Would you like to go into them? A guttural noise indicates yes. Miss Lebow pulls up a chair, opens her folder. MISS LEBOW A quickie. Dr. Esterhazy wants to start hiring temporary people to cover the summer vacations. He says last year some of the replacement people didn't receive their checks until they waited six months. He wonders if you could do something about getting these people paid more promptly. She places a sheet of paper on the desk in front of Bock. He tries to give his attention to it. MISS LEBOW (drones on) Miss Aronovici complains the lab reports are coming in slow into the E.R. I called Dr. Immelman about that, and she said three microscopes have been stolen out of her lab in the last two months. Charley Waters also complains about pilferage. I've clumped all those together for you... (she lays a sheaf of memos in front of Bock, who stares at them blankly) Now, as you know, Doctor, we've agreed to take over the local ambulance cases as part of the hospital's commitment to the community, and it's created a serious overload in the E.R. I don't know why this was dumped in our lap, but... Bock obviously isn't up to all this. He waves a limp hand to stop Miss Lebow's morning report. BOCK (staring at his desktop) Find out if Dr. Einhorn is in his office yet. MISS LEBOW Which Dr. Einhorn? Ophthalmology or Psychiatry? BOCK Psychiatry. (suddenly stands) Never mind. I'll look in myself. He lumbers across the room and out into... BOCK'S OUTER OFFICE ...and down past Miss McGuire, rattling away on her IBM, and out into... HOLLY PAVILION, SEVENTH FLOOR, CORRIDOR ...down past several closed doors, stopping at a door marked DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHIATRY, DR. JOSEPH EINHORN. He enters. DR. EINHORN'S OFFICE, SECRETARY'S OFFICE A secretary at her desk, sips coffee and reads a paperback novel. BOCK Is he in? The doctor is obviously in. He can be seen through the open door sitting at his desk writing in a notebook. Bock leans in. BOCK Can you give me a few minutes, Joe? EINHORN (short, chunky, bespectacled, late fifties) Of course. Bock goes in, closes the door behind himself. DR. EINHORN'S OFFICE Bock looks only at the floor. BOCK (ill at ease) I've been having periods of acute depression recently. Apparently, it's becoming noticeable. A number of people have remarked on it. Anyway, John Sundstrom thought it might be a good idea if I spoke to you about it. EINHORN Do you want to sit down, Herb? BOCK No. I'm not good at confessional. (he ambles around) Well, what can I tell you? The last year, two, three... it goes way back, I suppose. I can remember entertaining suicidal thoughts as a college student. At any rate, I've always found life demanding. I'm an only child of lower-middle-class people. I was the glory of my parents. My son the doctor. Well, you know. I was always top of my class. Scholarship to Harvard. The boy genius, the brilliant eccentric. Terrified of women, clumsy at sports. God, Joe, how the hell do I go about this? EINHORN I understand you just separated from your wife. BOCK I left her a dozen times. She left me a dozen times. We stayed together through a process of attrition. Obviously sado-masochistic dependency. My home is hell. We've got a twenty- three-year-old boy I threw out of the house last year. A shaggy-haired Maoist. I don't know where he is, presumably building bombs in basements as an expression of his universal brotherhood. I've got a seventeen- year-old daughter who's had two abortions in two years and got arrested last week at a rock festival for pushing drugs. They let her off. The typical affluent American family. I don't mean to be facile about this. Indeed, he does not. He is horrified by the fact his eyes are wet and he is verging on tears. He turns away quickly. BOCK I blame myself for those two useless young people. I never exercised parental authority. I'm no good at that. Oh, God, I'm no good at this either. Joe, let's just forget the whole thing. I'm sorry I bothered you. He starts for the door. EINHORN How serious are your suicidal speculations, Herb? BOCK (at the door) I amuse myself with different ways of killing myself that don't look like suicide. I wouldn't want to do my family out of the insurance. EINHORN Digitalis will give you an arrhythmia. BOCK A good toxologist would find traces. Potassium's much better. Sixty milli equivalent. Instantaneous. Of course, then you're stuck with how to get rid of the hypodermic. Forty milli equivalent. Gives you plenty of time to dispose of the evidence. EINHORN You seem to have given considerable thought to the matter. BOCK You ought to know a man who talks about it all the time never does it. EINHORN I don't know. I see a man who's exhausted, emotionally drained, riddled with guilt, and has been systematically stripping himself of his wife, children, friends, isolating himself from the world. Are you impotent? BOCK Intermittently. EINHORN What does that mean? BOCK It means I haven't tried in so long, I don't know. Let's just drop the whole thing, Joe. I feel humiliated and stupid. All I have to do is pull myself together and get back into my work. I'm sorry I troubled you. Take care of yourself. I'll see you. Before Einhorn can say a word, he slips away and disappears into his own office. HOLLY PAVILION. 8:30 A.M. The score of protesters outside the pavilion still move in an uneven ellipse and shout: "Two -- Four! Help the Poor!" Ives, the bespectacled demonstrator who shouted at Sundstrom earlier, is removing his sandwich boards and giving them to his replacement. He hurries across the walk and into... HOLLY PAVILION, LOBBY Ives cuts through the congestion of people and moves swiftly up the long corridor leading to the Farkis Building, unbuttoning his overcoat as he goes into... THE FARKIS BUILDING, FIFTH FLOOR ...and comes out, as the elevator opens. This is a laboratory floor, and the corridors are empty except for a white- uniformed orderly leaning against a wall and for one young woman in a white smock in the background, who waves to the young man before disappearing into one of the rooms. Ives fishes out a ring of keys and unlocks the door to his own lab. He enters into... FARKIS BUILDING, NEPHROLOGY LAB Dingy and cheerless place, as labs go. Ives hangs his coat in the cupboard, loosens his tie, unbuttons his suit jacket, squats on a stool, reaches over for a loose file on the work table, opens the file and begins to read the papers inside. A door CLICKS open behind him, and without looking up, he waves briefly to whoever has entered. CAMERA DOLLIES to FULL SHOT of Ives frowning over his notes. We are suddenly conscious of a white-uniformed presence behind him. We know it's medical personnel, but we can't see the face. Ives starts to turn to the presence behind him, when suddenly a small hospital sandbag is whipped down on his head, and he slumps forward, his forehead thumping against the black surface of the lab table. DISSOLVE TO: HOSPITAL. NOON HIGH ANGLE SHOT establishing the passing of hours. Sun high overhead, traffic on First Avenue an impenetrable river of HONKS and HOOTS. At a crosswalk, a loose procession of fifty or so shouting demonstrators, bearing placards, flows toward the main gates. Their posters read: "FIGHT DOPE -- NOT DOPES!" "DRUGS YES! TRANSPLANTS NO!" and "SAVE OUR KIDS FROM THE SKIDS!" which is what they now chant: "Save our kids! From the Skids!" The demonstration moves through a handful of city cops where our original group of twenty still ramble around, chanting: "Two -- Four! Help the Poor!" HOLLY PAVILION, EIGHTH FLOOR The staff elevator doors open and Bock comes out, wearing his long white doctor's coat unbuttoned. Hanging about the Nurses' Station are Dr. Brubaker and a few young men in white. They come quickly to respectful attention at Bock's entrance. CLATTERING TRAYS dominate the lunchtime atmosphere. BOCK All set? BRUBAKER Yes, sir. The doctors move off toward the solarium on the east corridor overlooking the river. They pass a curious quartet of people consisting of a very handsome YOUNG WOMAN in her late twenties in an out-of-fashion miniskirt (She has great legs, long and tanned.); an ELDERLY MAN, uncomfortable in city clothes and unmistakably an INDIAN; a tall overcoated man in his forties wearing a MINISTER's white collar; and a DISTINGUISHED MAN dressed in fashionable gray who is trying to persuade the young woman of something. The young woman and the Indian stand absolutely still, silent, impassive. The minister is more fidgety. BOCK (to Brubaker en passant) Who's that exotic group? BRUBAKER (murmurs) You got me. They've been here about an hour. ONE YOUNG DOCTOR I think they're with the old man in Eight-O-Six. Bock and Brubaker, trailed by young doctors, move into the TV room. BOCK Dr. Perry said he picked the tuberculosis and the liver nodes for today, right? BRUBAKER Yes, sir. BOCK Good. Because that's the one I studied up. A hell of a case. EIGHTH FLOOR, TV ROOM Some twenty-five or thirty young doctors, two or three of them black, three or four of them women, fill the room. At Bock's entrance, they find places around the walls, sofas, soft chairs and benches. The TV set has been pushed into a corner, and a large portable blackboard has been set up. This is the Chief of Service Round, attended by every available intern and resident. Somebody closes the door, just as two young doctors come hurrying in. BOCK All right, who's presenting? EMERGENCY AREA, WAITING ROOM People of all ages sit around on aluminum chairs arranged around the walls of the room. All are in streetclothes. Some speak to each other. A line of people, extending into the hallway and holding their charts, waits for a lady from the accounting department taking Blue Cross numbers. This lady from accounting is MRS. CUSHING, late forties, bespectacled and testy. She calls out at large. MRS. CUSHING Is there anybody seated who hasn't been to see me first? Is there anyone here who hasn't given me their health insurance number? Her phone RINGS. She picks it up. MRS. CUSHING Emergency Room... Well, I don't know, Sybil. What's his name? To a man on line at her desk, thrusting his chart out to her. MRS. CUSHING Would you wait a moment, please. I'm on the phone, can't you see I'm on the phone? (rummaging through a stack of charts, large paper forms in quadruplicate) ...Of course not, do they ever? (hangs up, takes two charts from the desk, pushes through the waiting line) Would you mind, please. I have to get through, do you mind? She makes her way to the door and goes out into... EMERGENCY AREA, ENTRANCE LOBBY ...which is congested. Mrs. Cushing enters... EMERGENCY, ADMITTING AND TREATMENT ROOMS NURSE (on phone) Give me that one again... thirty- two? Facing the desk are six curtained treatment rooms, mostly open to view. Behind the desk are a supply room and another treatment room. Both are occupied, the former by a PARANOID LADY wringing her hands in a paranoid rush and listened to by a very patient young intern. PARANOID LADY They follow me everywhere. Three big black men. Naked, completely exposed. Right in the street. Hanging down to their knees. Disgusting. They're waiting out there for me now... ...and in the other room, a man in his thirties is being treated for some sort of head lacerations. In one treatment room, the Chief of Emergency Service, DR. SPEZIO, a man in his late thirties, along with an intern, an anesthesiologist and a nurse, is bent over a naked and comatose young black woman of eighteen, covered somewhat with a sheet. She's a junkie, being intubated, i.e. a small endotracheal tube has been inserted into her mouth. This is the most melodramatic of the varied activity here. A middle-aged man complaining of chest pains is lying clothed in another treatment room; a nurse attends him. An asthmatic middle-aged woman sits in still another room being administered her 500 mg. of amenophylene subcutaneously. The curtains on another room are drawn for privacy. On chairs in the corner sit a teenage boy with a badly sprained ankle and an elderly man bathing his hand in an enamel basin held in his lap. A young mother with a five-year-old daughter with a badly cut arm is being attended to by the back wall. The Emergency Room Nursing Supervisor, MISS ARONOVICI, a pretty woman in her mid-twenties, is sterilizing the little girl's wound. Mrs. Cushing makes her way to Miss Aronovici. They detest each other. MRS. CUSHING Did you call upstairs and tell them to admit a patient named Mitgang? MRS. ARONOVICI (continuing to treat the little girl) The concussion? MRS. CUSHING I don't know. They just called me. They said you didn't fill out the chart. And where do you come off sending anyone up to Admitting without my okay? Miss Aronovici turns to Mrs. Cushing, regarding her sweetly. MRS. ARONOVICI Sally, would you get the fuck out of here. The patient's in the Holding Room. You want his Blue Cross number, you go in and you get his Blue Cross number. Mrs. Cushing elbows back through the line of patients waiting at the Admitting desk. MRS. CUSHING Do you mind, please... There are now three nurses behind the desk, all of them on phones. One nurse calls to Dr. Spezio. NURSE O.P.D. wants to know how that asthmatic they sent down is. DR. SPEZIO (just leaving the group around the junkie) She's fine. We'd like to keep her here a little while. Spezio heads for the door where he is intercepted by Mrs. Cushing. MRS. CUSHING May I see you a moment, Doctor, if you don't mind. DR. SPEZIO (sighs, calls back to the triage nurse) I'll be right back. He goes out, followed by Mrs. Cushing, into... EMERGENCY AREA, LOBBY Spezio and Mrs. Cushing move between laundry and supply carts. MRS. CUSHING (thrusting some papers at the doctor) If you don't mind, Doctor, is this your handwriting? Spezio stops, sighs, examines the paper. MRS. CUSHING Am I supposed to read that? Was it a sprain? Was it a broken wrist? I can't read that scribbling. I mean, I have to bill these people. I know you doctors are the ministering angels, and I'm just the bitch from the Accounting Department, but I have my job to do too. I mean, if you don't mind, Doctor...? DR. SPEZIO (studies the paper) The kid had a collar fracture. We had him in the O.R. We reduced it and we gave him a small cast. He strides off. MRS. CUSHING (calls after him) But did you give him a sling? You must have taken X-rays. How am I supposed to make up the charges? She turns into... EMERGENCY AREA, HOLDING ROOM Designed to hold patients who've been examined and wait to be admitted to a room upstairs, it's in fact used for examination, treatment, storage. The room is quiet. Two male patients lie on comfortable stretchers, apparently sedated and resting. Mrs. Cushing turns to the patient immediately to her right as she enters. To the still figure she poses her questions. MRS. CUSHING Are you Mitgang? She gets no answer from that bed. From another direction, a voice. MITGANG I'm Mitgang. She turns to Mitgang. Something bothers her about the first patient. She finds Mitgang's chart tucked in under his pillow, takes out her pencil. MRS. CUSHING Do you carry Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Mr. Mitgang, if you don't mind? Mitgang, eyes closed, emits a sound. MRS. CUSHING Do you have your card with you? (no answer) Do you know your number? Negative grunt from Mitgang. MRS. CUSHING Mr. Mitgang, you're not leaving this room until I have this information. NURSE (enters for some chore) Will you leave that man alone? In a fit of temper, Mrs. Cushing throws the chart and her pencil down on the floor. MRS. CUSHING (indicating the other patient) Do you mind if I at least ask this gentleman to fill out his chart? She pulls his chart from under his pillow, bends and retrieves her pencil from the floor, straightens. She speaks to the silent patient. MRS. CUSHING May I have your A.H.S. policy number, sir? No answer. CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY IN on the patient. We now recognize him as the bespectacled young activist Dr. Ives, so recently coshed over the head with a sandbag. MRS. CUSHING (looming) Do you carry Blue Cross? Blue Shield? Mrs. Cushing stares at the patient. He is not breathing. Behind her, the nurse exits carrying whatever she came for. Mrs. Cushing turns to her, but she is gone. Frowning, Mrs. Cushing backs out... ...as Dr. Spezio and others come down the corridor. MRS. CUSHING (as Spezio approaches, with spiteful relish) I think one of your patients in here is dead, Dr. Spezio. DR. SPEZIO (enters the Holding Room) Why do you say that, Mrs. Cushing? MRS. CUSHING Because he wouldn't give me his Blue Cross number, Dr. Spezio. HOLDING ROOM Spezio regards the death mask of a face. DR. SPEZIO Oh, Christ. He moves quickly forward to raise the dead man's eyelid. Behind him, a nurse enters. He wheels on her angrily. DR. SPEZIO How the hell long has this man been lying here? Isn't this that doctor who came in around nine o'clock? MILTON MEAD'S OFFICE. 2:00 P.M. MILTON MEAD, late thirties, lean, efficient but under constant strain, is having his daily staff luncheon conference, which consists of a CHIEF ENGINEER, the ASSISTANT ADMINISTRATOR OF PERSONNEL, three residents in administration, including Hitchcock, sandwiches and coffee. CHIEF ENGINEER I mean, they gave me a hard time, Con Ed. "For Pete's Sake," I said, "this is a hospital. One of our feedlines just blew..." Mead's phone RINGS and he picks it up. MILTON MEAD Yeah? (it's another annoyance; he sighs with irritation) CHIEF ENGINEER I mean, it's lucky we traced it in time. MILTON MEAD (on phone) No, I'll be right up. (hangs up, stands) Have we covered about everything? ADMINISTRATIVE RESIDENT Dr. Kish has been driving me nuts with the O.R. schedule. MILTON MEAD He's supposed to see me about that. He moves across his office into... MEAD'S SECRETARY'S OFFICE Actually a communal office with desks for three secretaries. MEAD'S SECRETARY (looks up to Mead from talking on the phone) This is the Emergency Room. One of the doctors just died of a heart attack. MILTON MEAD (pauses) One of our staff? MEAD'S SECRETARY I think so. Mead frowns, leans back into his own office. MILTON MEAD (to Hitchcock) Tom, you want to go down to the Emergency Room? One of our doctors just died. HITCHCOCK What? Another one? MILTON MEAD Yeah, see what that's about. (en passant to secretary) I'll be on Holly Eight. I'll be right back. HOLLY PAVILION, EIGHTH FLOOR The staff elevator door opens, and Milton Mead comes out. He has apparently been buttonholed in the elevator by a woman in a doctor's coat, DR. IMMELMAN, Pathology, who follows him out... DR. IMMELMEN It's no longer pilferage, Milton. It's reached the point of piracy. That's the third microscope this month. MILTON MEAD Why don't we get together on this sometime this afternoon, Fran? DR. IMMELMAN One o'clock? MILTON MEAD One o'clock will be fine. He turns left and heads for... HOLLY PAVILION, EIGHTH FLOOR, NURSES' STATION ...where Head Nurse Donovan is bent over her paperwork. In the background, we see normal morning hospital activity. Nurse's Aid, SHARLENE STONE, takes towels into a room. R.N. Felicia Chile comes out of another, bearing her enamel tray of instruments. Also in the background, the curious quartet from before -- the beautiful woman, the elderly Indian, the minister, Dr. Sutcliffe. Mead hardly notices them as he makes for the desk. MRS. DONOVAN (without pausing or looking up) Your brother's in the room, Mr. Mead. MILTON MEAD What room is it? MRS. DONOVAN Eight-O-Six. Mead bobs his head thank you and heads for the west corridor. EIGHTH FLOOR, ROOM As Milton Mead enters, his elder brother, WILLIAM MEAD, mid- forties, a smaller and manifestly nervous man, is seated sullenly puffing a cigar, fidgeting, still wearing his coat and hat. He looks up briefly when Milton enters and avoids his brother's eye. His wife, MARILYN, late thirties, is standing in suppressed exasperation, staring out the window. Out of respect for the COMATOSE PATIENT, the ensuing agitated scene is held in whispers. MILTON MEAD For heaven's sake, Willie, you're going to be in the hospital for two lousy days. What're you making such a fuss about? WILLIAM MEAD You're supposed to be such a big wheel here. MILTON MEAD There are no private rooms available. If they brought in Jesus Christ fresh off the cross, I couldn't get Him a private room. WILLIAM MEAD I'm not going to stay in a room with a dying man... MARILYN MEAD He's not dying. They'll screen him off. You won't even know he's here. MILTON MEAD If you want a private room, go on home, and I'll call you the first one that comes up. But you're the one who phoned me in a panic, you're going on a vacation. For heaven's sake, Willie, they'll cut this polyp out tomorrow morning. You'll be home Thursday, you'll be in Miami Friday. Marilyn, will you talk some sense into this lunatic? MARILYN MEAD Well, you said it, he's a lunatic. WILLIAM MEAD Big wheel, can't even get me a private room. MILTON MEAD I'll get you a tranquilizer... He exits. EIGHTH FLOOR, TV ROOM Bock -- excited, vivid, alive -- is in full flush with his lecture. He moves around in front of the blackboard, chalk in hand. The blackboard itself is scrawled with formulae and diagrams. He is writing the words "full abdomen," as the fifth in a list reading "(1) parexia, (2) hepatomegaly, (3) splenomegaly, (4) episodes of arthralgia." The audience is forty young doctors rapt with attention. There is a good deal of note-taking. BOCK ...five, a full abdomen contrasted to wasting elsewhere; six, ascites with a protein content above four grams; unexplained anemia, leukopenia, unexplained elevation of the serum gamma globulin level, especially abnormal flocculation tests, and of course, a positive P.P.D. All these findings assume special significance among Negroes. This has been a very commendable workup, as commendable a workup of an F.U.O. as I can remember. The staff of this floor is to be applauded. (spots Brubaker among the others) It's a reportable case, Brubaker. Write it up. (a brief, rare smile) Well, let's go have a look at the girl. He rumbles toward the door. The class of doctors dissolves into hospital murmurs and mutters and a general dispersal. They follow Bock out to... EIGHTH FLOOR, EAST CORRIDOR ...where Dr. Sutfcliffe, the beautiful young woman, the elderly Indian and the minister are engaged in agitated discussion. The girl and the Indian retain their stoic impassivity. Dr. Sutcliffe leaves them and moves down the corridor to the counter of... EIGHTH FLOOR NURSES' STATION SUTCLIFFE Nurse! Nurse, who's the Senior Resident on this floor? NURSE That would be Dr. Brubaker. But I'm afraid he's at Chief of Service rounds right now. Sutcliffe points off right. SUTCLIFFE That's... this way? The nurse nods indifferently. ACROSS to Bock coming out of the TV room, followed by some dozen young doctors. Bock is in very good spirits indeed. He quizzes his young doctors en route: BOCK I wonder if there might not be some correlation between hepatic tuberculosis and drug addiction. Presumably, there was an early consideration of S.B.E. BRUBAKER (off-screen) Yes, sir. We discounted it after repeated blood cultures were negative. BOCK You, Ambler. Is that right, Ambler? AMBLER Yes, sir. BOCK What else do you look for in bacterial endocarditis? AMBLER (nervous) Some sort of embolic phenomena, sir. BOCK Good. SUTCLIFFE (flagging Brubaker) Dr. Brubaker, I wonder if I could see you for a moment? Brubaker detaches himself from his group to join Sutcliffe. CAMERA STAYS with Bock and his entourage, following them down the east corridor, Bock still happily conducting class. Bock strides into... ROOM 819 Past two beds, they group around the foot of a third bed on the right side of the room. Bock checks the patient lying in the bed. BOCK Still a little icteric. Who's got an opthalmoscope? One of the young men hands his to Bock, who leans over the patient to look through it. BOCK Did anyone note Roth spots? The doctors exchange a look as Bock rises, moves toward them, laughing. BOCK Well, don't worry about it. There aren't any. Ambler, you're our big man on S.B.E. What was the latex- fixation? BIEGELMAN It wasn't done, sir. BOCK Don't you think that's an important test to differentiate S.B.E. from miliary T.B.? BIEGELMAN (off-screen) No, s... BOCK Not you, Biegelman. Ambler. AMBLER Well, there's about a seventy percent incidence of false-positive latex in S.B.E. Bock hands the opthalmoscope to Ambler. BOCK You have been reading up. If the diagnosis were S.B.E., would a positive latex indicate anything in the therapy? AMBLER We'd expect the latex to become negative. BOCK If...? AMBLER If the antibiotic therapy were successful. BOCK Are you applying for your internship here? AMBLER I'm not sure. BOCK Come and see me. (to the patient, helping her up) Would you sit up for a minute? Bock turns to the off-screen patient, helping her sit up and forward, percussing her back as the students look on. EIGHTH FLOOR, EAST CORRIDOR Brubaker and Sutcliffe are now both involved in discussion with the woman, the Indian and the minister, as Bock drifts through the background, followed by the band of young doctors now dispersing. Bock crosses past the foreground group to the staff elevator. He pushes the button. Brubaker approaches Bock. They confer quietly in the hallway. BRUBAKER We've got a little thing over here, Doctor. The girl over there is the daughter of the patient in Eight-O- Six. He is at the moment comatose and requires intravenous feeding and meds. The elevator comes and goes, disgorging some, taking on others. Bock, who greeted Brubaker with a rare, benign smile, has begun to look a bit sodden. Poor Brubaker, aware of the gathering storm in Bock's demeanor, sighs and continues regardless. BRUBAKER The thing is, the daughter wants to take the father out of the hospital and back to Mexico where they live. The patient's name is Drummond. He's apparently a Methodist missionary, and he and his daughter run some kind of religious mission among the Apache Indians. The daughter claims to be a licensed nurse, so she can give the necessary I.V. treatment. I certainly don't think he should be let out of this hospital. The Attending -- he's the guy in gray over there -- concurs. Bock squints at Brubaker. BOCK All right, wait a minute. Let me have all that again. BRUBAKER As a matter of fact, Doctor, this is Dr. Biegelman's case. BOCK Never mind the professional ethics, what happened? BRUBAKER (sighs) I don't know why I'm covering for that sonofabitch in Farkis Pavilion anyway. (sighs and begins) The patient, a man of fifty-six, was admitted to the hospital ten days ago for a check-up, in good health, no visible distress. We did the mandatory work-up on him. Blood cultures, stool, L.E. preps, chest, E.K.G., all negative. But there was apparently some evidence of protein in his urine. I don't know how that sonofabitch in Farkis Pavilion ever found out about it. Maybe he had some kind of deal with one of the girls in the lab. Anyway, he turned up the next day, conned the patient into signing an authorization for a biopsy... BOCK What sonofabitch in Farkis Pavilion? BRUBAKER Some post-grad fellow named Ives. Elroy Ives. I never met him. He's on one of the immunology research programs. BOCK Are you trying to tell me some post- grad fellow came up here and did a biopsy on the patient? BRUBAKER Yes, sir. He conned Biegelman with that old story about... BOCK ...protein in the urine? BRUBAKER Yes, sir. BOCK And he biopsied the man? BRUBAKER And he nicked a vessel, and at two o'clock in the morning, they woke up Biegelman because the nurse found the patient in shock. Biegelman called the kidney people for a consult right away. What was there to see? The man was sour and bleeding. We spoke to this fellow Sutcliffe, and he referred us to a surgeon named Welbeck... BOCK Welbeck?! That barber! BRUBAKER You ain't heard nothing yet. So we finally got Welbeck around four in the morning. He said, go ahead. So they laid on the surgery for eight. Welbeck turns up, half-stoned, orders an I.V.P., clears him for allergies... BOCK ...without actually testing. BRUBAKER Right. BOCK And the patient went into shock... BRUBAKER ...and tubular necrosis. They lopped out the bleeding kidney, ran him back to the room, and we sat around waiting for three days to see how obstructed he was. Fever began spiking like hell, euremia, vomiting, so we arranged hemodialysis. He's putting out good water now. But some nurse goofed on his last treatment. A leak in the tube, something. His blood pressure plunged. They ran him right up to I.C.U., checked out vital signs, all normal except he's comatose. That was two days ago. BOCK In short, a man came into this hospital in perfectly good health, and, in the space of one week, we chopped out one kidney, damaged the other, reduced him to coma and damn near killed him. BRUBAKER Yes, sir. A great sad serenity has settled over Bock. BOCK You know, Brubaker, last night I sat in my hotel room, reviewing the shambles of my life and contemplating suicide. Then I said "No, Bock, don't do it. You're a doctor, a healer. You're the Chief of Medicine at one of the great hospitals of the world. You're a necessary person. Your life is meaningful." Then I came in this morning and find out one of my doctors was killed by a couple of nurses who mistook him for a patient because he screwed a technician from the nephrology lab... BRUBAKER Hematology, sir. BOCK And now you come to me with this gothic horror story in which the entire machinery of modern medicine has apparently conspired to destroy one lousy patient. How am I to sustain my feeling of meaningfulness in the face of this? You know, Brubaker, if there was an oven around, I'd stick my head in it. What was the name of that sonofabitch from Farkis Pavilion again? BRUBAKER Ives, sir. Elroy Ives. Somebody ought to ream his ass. The gathering storm erupts. Rage suffuses Bock's face. Out of respect for the hospital corridor and the people working around him and Brubaker, he keeps it glacial. But there is no mistaking the volcanic fury he feels. BOCK (barely containing himself) I'm going to ream his ass. And I'm going to break that barber Welbeck's back. I'm going to defrock those two cannibals. They won't practice in my hospital, I'll tell you that! BRUBAKER What'll I tell the girl, sir? She says we have no legal right to stop her from taking her father out. She's willing to sign an A.O.R. form. BOCK Let him go. Before we kill him. The elevator door opens. A couple of nurses come out. Bock strides in. SEVENTH FLOOR, DEPT. OF MEDICINE CORRIDOR Bock advances in a cold fury down to his office. He wrenches the door open. BOCK'S OFFICE, OUTER OFFICE Miss Lebow and Miss McGuire clatter away at typewriters. Sitting on a chair in the crowded office is a senior staff doctor, a man in his late forties, wearing a coat similar to Bock's. He is DR. LAGERMAN. He looks up from the magazine he's been leafing through as Bock storms in. DR. LAGERMAN Hi, Herb... Bock acknowledges him with a brusque nod, storms over to Miss Lebow. BOCK Get me Dr. Gilley. Put him on page if you have to. I want to talk to him right now. I don't care if he's operating. (wheels around to Miss McGuire) And you get me some monkey named Ives. Ives. I-V-E-S, first name Elroy. He's in the Farkis Pavilion. DR. LAGERMAN Herb... BOCK I want to talk to you, Joe. Would you mind coming into my office? He strides, followed by Dr. Lagerman, into... BOCK'S PRIVATE OFFICE ...and slams the door shut behind him. BOCK Have you got some punk named Ives rotating in your department? DR. LAGERMAN Listen, Herb... BOCK (sits at his desk) I also want to know what the hell kind of a dialysis room you're running. I just came from... The phone RINGS. Bock seizes it. BOCK Yeah... Gilley? Put him on. Bock. Didn't you tell me a couple of months ago you were going to cut off all privileges for that assassin, Welbeck? Yeah. Wellbeck. He just butchered another one of my patients... Oh, come on, Harry! The man's a buccaneer! I want him brought before the Medical Executive Committee... He's in your department, Harry, not mine. He's putatively a surgeon!... I'll be here! (slams receiver down, stares at Lagerman) Listen, Joe, I think you should know that you've got a research guy in your department named Ives who's been doing some very dubious biopsies. We're having enough trouble squeezing grants out of the Nixon administration... DR. LAGERMAN Ives is dead, Herb. That's why I'm here. This gives Bock pause. He blinks at Lagerman. BOCK What do you mean, Ives is dead? DR. LAGERMAN I mean he's dead. He had a heart attack in the Emergency Room. BOCK He had a heart attack in the Emergency Room? DR. LAGERMAN Yeah. BOCK (blinking) What the hell is this? Some kind of plague? (stands) Where is he now? DR. LAGERMAN They were just taking him down to Pathology. HOLLY PAVILION, FIRST FLOOR, PATHOLOGY DEPT Bock, Lagerman and Hitchcock have gathered across the shrouded figure of Dr. Ives on a stretcher. We are in the lab section of Pathology; in the background, through the glass part of the door separating the lab from the surgery room, we can see the autopsy on Dr. Schaefer being performed. Schaefer's naked white cadaver is stretched out on an operating table. He has been opened up and all his vital organs are being excised. It's bloody. The autopsy is being performed by DR. BREWSTER, the Resident in Pathology, dressed in surgical scrub. HITCHCOCK ...and the next thing anybody knew, about three hours later, Mrs. Cushing from Accounting came in and said there was a dead man in the Holding Room. BOCK You don't find anything grotesque about all this? HITCHCOCK What do you mean? BOCK I mean, at half past eight this morning, we meet over a doctor who's been killed intravenously, and here we are again, four hours later, with another doctor who had a heart attack in the Emergency Room. HITCHCOCK Well, what're you suggesting Doctor? Do you think we have a mad killer stalking the halls of the hospital? Presumably, Dr. Ives died of a heart attack and Schaefer in a diabetic coma. People do die of these things. It's all perhaps coincidental, but I don't think I'd call it grotesque. BOCK How long are they going to be on Schaefer's post? He knocks on the glass window of the door separating the laboratory from the operating room. Dr. Brewster turns from his gory chore. Bock makes a gesture saying, "How much longer?" Brewster raises ten blood-drenched rubber-gloved fingers. Bock turns and shuffles across the lab for the door out. BOCK (pauses at door, to Lagerman) I don't suppose you'd like to call next of kin? DR. LAGERMAN No thanks. BOCK (deeply depressed) Oh God, I need a drink. He goes down... THE PATHOLOGY CORRIDOR ...and is soon lost in the normal traffic of the area. THE HOSPITAL. NIGHT CRASH of THUNDER. CRACKLE of LIGHTNING. A horror-film rainstorm lashes the vast dark complex of buildings. SEVENTH FLOOR, DEPT. OF MEDICINE CORRIDOR Dark, empty, silent. One lonely light at the lobby end of the long, closed corridor of offices. The door to Bock's office stands ajar and issues a trace of light. BOCK'S OFFICE ACROSS the silent, dark, typewriter-covered desks of the two secretaries through the doorway to Bock's private office, we can see Bock at his desk, lit by the desk lamp. He has a bottle of booze on his desk. He gets up from his desk. He has made a decision. HOLLY PAVILION, EIGHTH FLOOR The corridors are silent; the night lights are on, subdued. Head Evening Nurse Mrs. Dunne is back at her desk, hunched over paperwork. Resident Brubaker passes by. EIGHTH FLOOR, PHARMACY Nurse SHERLEE DEVINE, a black woman in her mid-twenties, has a porcelain tray on the shelf onto which she puts a small jar of alcohol, cotton swabs, a wrapped hypodermic needle and syringe. She moves out into... NURSES' STATION ...where Mrs. Dunne looks up as she passes. NURSE DEVINE Mead. Mrs. Dunne nods. Nurse Devine makes her way silently down the sleeping doors to... ROOM 806 Dark, sleeping. The bathroom light is on, but only a thin stream of yellow light trickles through the door. THUNDER CRASHES. William Mead sleeps fitfully. The other patient is entirely curtained off. Nurse Devine sets her tray on Mead's bedtable, turns on the goose-neck lamp, keeping it from his eyes. She unwraps the hypodermic syringe, sets in the needle, draws the required dosage, reaches over and gently shakes Mead by the shoulder. NURSE DEVINE (softly) Mr. Mead... Mr. Mead, I have an injection for you. Mead sleeps on. Expressionlessly, Nurse Devine extracts Mead's right arm from under the sheets, wets a swab with alcohol and rubs down the vein. The needle slides into Mead's vein. OVER THIS, we begin to hear a distant sibilant HISSING, indistinct like the leakage of a bad heart. There is also an occasional distinctly human but not quite civilized sound. CAMERA PULLS BACK SLOWLY to Nurse Devine withdrawing the needle, looking up, for she too has heard the soft, strange sounds. They emanate from behind the curtains of the other bed. Nurse Devine returns the syringe to the tray, gathers her things and pads silently around Mead's bed to Drummond's bed. With her free hand, she opens the curtains a little and stares in. NURSE DEVINE What the hell is going on in there? NURSE DEVINE'S P.O.V.: THE INDIAN AND BARBARA DRUMMOND BEND OVER DRUMMOND PERFORMING SOME PAGAN RITUAL. THE HISSING IS BARBARA'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE CEREMONY. (IT SOUNDS LIKE PIS- PIS, AND IS IN FACT AN IMITATION OF THE NIGHTHAWK, MEANT TO APPEASE THE SPIRIT OF THE THUNDER.) The old Indian has stripped to the waist and marked his body with smears of dye and tule pollen. He wears a ceremonial hat, a sort of beaded beanie. He holds a small buckskin bag of pollen in his cupped palms and is facing north, east, south and west, offering the bag and prayers under his breath as he does. A beaded amulet lies stretched across the white sheet covering the comatose Drummond. When Nurse Devine draws the curtains, Barbara frowns at Nurse Devine, holds a cautioning finger to her lips and draws the curtains closed again. Nurse Devine, carrying her porcelain tray, exits. EIGHTH FLOOR, NURSES' STATION Bock comes out of the elevator, jacketed now, fairly drunk but holding it well. He heads for the Nurses' Station as Nurse Devine comes down the west corridor. Bock grunts at Mrs. Dunne and goes into... PHARMACY ...where he quickly runs his finger along the second shelf until he comes to the bottle of potassium which he filches off the shelf and slips into his pocket. He rummages through the drawers for a hypodermic syringe. Through the open doorway, we see Nurse Devine making her way swiftly up to Mrs. Dunne at the desk. NURSE DEVINE Well, honey, we got a witch-doctor in Eight-O-Six, and you better go in there. You know that Indian that was sitting in Eight-O-Six all night? He's still there, and the girl's there, and they're doing some voodoo in there, and I ain't kidding. Behind Mrs. Dunne, Bock appears in the doorway to the pharmacy where he stands listening. MRS. DUNNE (looking up) What are you talking about? NURSE DEVINE I mean that Indian's in there, half- naked and going pis-pis-pis with a little bag. You just better get in there, Mrs. Dunne. Mrs. Dunne, annoyed, gets up and heads for the west corridor, followed by Nurse Devine and by an intrigued Dr. Bock at a few paces behind. NURSE DEVINE (to NURSE WEITZENBAUM, coming out of another room) You want to see somethin', baby? You jus' come here. As the small procession bears down, Barbara Drummond slips out of that room to intercept them. BARBARA (keeping her voice low) Look, it's a perfectly harmless ceremony, nothing to get excited about. It'll be over in a few minutes anyway. Mr. Blacktree is a shaman who gets his power from the thunder, and it's imperative he conclude his rituals while the storm is still going on. NURSE DUNNE Visiting hours were over at nine o'clock, Miss. Bock reaches for the door to the room. BARBARA All that's going on in there, Doctor, is a simple Apache prayer for my father's recovery. Bock makes a vague noise, neither contradicting her nor assenting, and continues around her into... ROOM 806 As Bock slides in, a bit of the corridor light comes in with him. The curtains have been left sufficiently open to reveal Mr. Blacktree. He is still stripped to the waist and marked with crosses of pollen. He extends two twigs to the four directions after which he places the twigs carefully on the white sheet covering Drummond in a pattern around the amulet already there. Behind Bock, Mrs. Dunne can be seen peeking in. The Indian is oblivious to both of them. Bock watches it all with interest for a moment and then backs out into... EIGHTH FLOOR CORRIDOR ...closing the door after him. BARBARA The markings he's made on my father's arms are from the pollen of the tule plant. The twigs have no significance other than they've been struck by lightning and are consequently appeals to the spirit of lightning. It's all entirely harmless, a religious ceremony, not a medical one. BOCK You don't seriously believe all that mumbo-jumbo will cure him? BARBARA On the other hand, it won't kill him, Doctor. They regard each other levelly. BOCK (grunts) Okay. Go ahead. He wheels and clumps off for the stairway exit. BARBARA Thank you. Nurse Weitzenbaum opens the door of the room and peeks in. At the stairway exit, Bock pauses to look back at all the women in front of Room 806. BOCK Miss Drummond, are you still taking your father out? BARBARA Yes. I still have to arrange an ambulance service. Is there a phone around I could use? BOCK Use my office. BARBARA Thank you. Bock exits. Barbara edges past Weitzenbaum, who is still peeking into the room. ROOM 806 Barbara comes in, gathers her coat and purse from a chair and moves to the Indian, now occupied with what seems to be the rolling of a cigarette. The two exchange a brief dialogue in Apache. The old Indian nods. Barbara turns and exits, taking Nurse Weitzenbaum out with her and closing the door. The room is dark and hushed again. Blacktree lights his cigarette and "sends the smoke up," a ritual which consists of puffing smoke to each of the four directions, muttering in Apache "May all be well" after each puff. CAMERA SLOWLY PANS to the other bed where William Mead sleeps fitfully. The Apache words and pis-pis-pis penetrate Mead's drugged sleep. He opens one eyelid and stares glazedly at the dark air. The SOUNDS persist. Blacktree chooses this moment to sidle out from behind the curtains and continue his ritual in the less-confined space at the head of Drummond's bed. It's quite a sight for a nervous, sedated man to wake to. Thunder RUMBLES and the rain SLASHES and a sudden, savage STREAK of lightning illuminates it all. Mead figures it's all a bad dream and, after a moment of dully regarding the odd spectacle, closes his one eye and goes back to sleep. BOCK'S OFFICE, OUTER OFFICE Barbara Drummond comes in. Bock has apparently turned the lights on for her, but Bock himself is not immediately visible. She looks through the half-open door to Bock's private office, and there he is, staring blankly at the bottle. Barbara starts to say something, thinks better of it, lays down her coat, and looking around, spots a Manhattan classified directory which she hauls up from its shelf and sets on Miss Lebow's desk. She sits, quickly flips through the pages. Barbara flips through the directory. Bock is partially visible in the background at his desk. He sits soddenly. Barbara finds what she wants, opens her purse and takes out two airplane tickets. She dials. The CLICKING of the dial catches Bock's ear. He looks up for a moment. BARBARA (on phone) Hello. I'd like to arrange an ambulance for one-thirty tomorrow afternoon... Thank you... REVERSE ACROSS Bock at his desk with Barbara partially visible at Miss Lebow's desk. All he can see are her great long tanned legs. BARBARA (in background on phone) ...Drummond, first name, Barbara. I'll pay cash... Bock stands a little unsteadily and moves around his desk to get a better look at those legs. BARBARA (on phone) No, you're to pick up my father, Drummond, Edward, at the Manhattan Medical Center, Holly Pavilion, Room Eight-O-Six. It's a stretcher case. I presume you provide the stretcher. She senses Bock watching her, turns, smiles. She's a very beautiful girl. She returns to the phone. BARBARA He's to be taken to American Airlines, Yes... No... Kennedy Airport, Flight Seven-Two-Nine to Yuma, Arizona. I'll accompany the patient... Yes, thank you. She returns the receiver to its cradle. When she looks up again, Bock is no longer there. She returns the flight tickets to her purse, snaps it shut, stands and moves to the doorway, enters a step into... BOCK'S OFFICE Bock, back at his desk, looks up. BOCK You believe in witchcraft, Miss Drummond? BARBARA I believe in everything, Doctor. BOCK Like a drink? BARBARA Yes. Bock drains his glass and pours her a hefty shot of bourbon. BARBARA (from the door suddenly) My father, you should know, was a very successful doctor in Boston, a member of the Harvard Medical Faculty. He was a widower, and I was his only child. He was not an especially religious man, a sober Methodist. One evening, seven years ago, he attended a Pentecostal meeting in the commons rooms at Harvard and suddenly found himself speaking in tongues. (she takes her drink and crosses to the sofa) That is to say, he suddenly sank to his knees at the back of the room and began to talk fluently in a language which no one had ever heard before. This sort of thing happens frequently at Pentecostal meetings, and they began to happen regularly to my father. (she sits) It was not unusual to walk into our home and find my father sitting in his office, utterly serene and happily speaking to the air in this strange foreign tongue. I was, at that time twenty years old and having my obligatory affair with a minority group, in my case a Hopi Indian, a post-graduate fellow at Harvard doing his doctorate in the aboriginal languages of the Southwest. One day, I brought the Indian boy home just as my father was sinking to his knees in the entrance foyer in one of his trances. The Indian wheeled in his tracks and said, "Well, I'll be a sonofabitch." You see, my father was speaking an Apache dialect, an obscure dialect at that, spoken only by a ragged band of unreconstructed Indians who had rejected the reservation and were living in total isolation in the Sierra Madre Mountains of northern Mexico. Well! What do you say to that, Dr. Bock? BOCK (who has been staring at her as if she were insane) What the hell am I supposed to say to that, Miss Drummond? Barbara throws back her head and roars with laughter. BOCK I'm sitting here boozing and, all of a sudden, you start telling me some demented story about your father's religious conversion. BARBARA No, no, you miss the point, Doctor. Not my father's conversion -- mine. You see, I had been hitting the acid pretty regularly at that time. I had achieved a few minor sensory deformities, some suicidal despairs, but nothing as wild as fluency in an obscure Apache dialect. I mean, like wow, man! I mean, here was living afflatus right before my eyes! Within a week, my father had closed his Beacon Hill practice and set out to start a mission in the Mexican mountains. And I turned in my S.D.S. card and my crash helmet and followed him. It was a disaster, at least for me. My father had received the revelation, not I. He stood gaunt on a mountain slope and preached the apocalypse to solemnly amused Indians. I masturbated a great deal. We lived in a grass wickiup and ate raw rabbit and crushed pi?on nuts. It was hideous. Within two months, I was back in Boston, a hollow shell and dizzy with dengue, disenchanted with everything. I turned to austerity, combed my hair tight and entered nursing school. I became haggard, driven and had shamelessly incestuous dreams about my father. I took up with some of the senior staff at the hospital. One of them, a portly psychiatrist, explained I was generated by an unresolved lust for my father. I apparently cracked up. One day, they found me walking to work naked and screaming obscenities. There was talk of institutionalizing me, so I packed a bag and went back to my father in the Sierra Madre Mountains. I've been there ever since. That's three years. My father is, of course, mad as a hatter. I watch over him and have been curiously content. You see, Doctor, I believe in everything. She pauses, her story over. Throughout, Bock has been trying to keep his glowering eye on the desktop. During her long narrative, he once seized the bottle and took a swig. Mostly he is finding the experience murkily sensual. His glance keeps darting out from under his brows to surreptitiously look at the beautiful long tanned legs; or, when she bends for the drink she set on the floor, to peer down the flapping open scalloped neck of her dress; she is bra-less. She, on the other hand, has been crossing and uncrossing her legs, bending, stretching, so that her short dress has ridden up almost to her waist and is saved from utter exhibitionism only by the darkness of the shadows. She seems unaffected by Bock's voyeuristic interest in her, but she is surely not unaware of it. It is hard to believe she is not courting his attention. BOCK Now what was that all about, Miss Drummond? BARBARA I thought I was obvious as hell. I'm trying to tell you I have a thing for middle-aged men. BOCK I admire your candor. BARBARA You've been admiring a lot more than that. Bock looks up, and they suddenly find their eyes locked. The dark, dense air in the room fairly steams with incipient sexuality. BOCK (looks down again) You're wasting your time. I've been impotent for years. BARBARA Rubbish. With a crash of his fist on the desktop, Bock stands; he is in a drunken rage. BOCK (lurches about) What the hell's wrong with being impotent? My God, you kids are more hung up on sex than the Victorians! I've got a son, twenty-three. I threw him out of the house last year. Pietistic little humbug. He preached universal love and despised everyone. He had a blanket contempt for the middle class, even its decencies. He detested my mother because she had petit bourgeois pride in her son the doctor. I cannot tell you how brutishly he ignored that rather good old lady. When she died, he didn't even come to the funeral. He thought the chapel service an hypocrisy. His generation didn't live with lies, he told me. "Everybody lives with lies," I said. I grabbed him by his poncho, dragged him the full length of our seven-room despicably affluent middle-class apartment and flung him out. I haven't seen him since. But do you know what he said to me as he stood there on that landing on the verge of tears. He shrieked at me: "You old fink! You can't even get it up anymore!" That was it, you see. That was his real revolution. It wasn't racism and the oppressed poor and the war in Vietnam. The ultimate American societal sickness was a limp dingus. Hah! (he lurches about, laughing rustily) My God, if there is a despised and misunderstood minority in this country, it's us poor impotent bastards. Well, I'm impotent and proud of it! Impotence is beautiful, baby! (he raises a militant fist) Power to the Impotent! Right on, baby! BARBARA (smiling) Right on. BOCK (stares drunkenly at her) When I say impotent, I don't mean merely limp. Disagreeable as it may be for a woman, a man may sometimes lust for other things, something less transient than an erection, some sense of permanent worth. That's what medicine was for me, my reason for being. When I was thirty-four, Miss Drummond, I presented a paper before the annual convention of the Society of Clinical Investigation that pioneered the whole goddam field of immunology. A breakthrough! I'm in all the textbooks. I happen to be an eminent man, Miss Drummond. And you want to know something, Miss Drummond? I don't give a goddam. When I say I'm impotent, I mean I've lost even my desire for work, which is a hell of a lot more primal a passion than sex. I've lost my raison d'etre, my purpose, the only thing I ever truly loved. It's all rubbish anyway. Transplants, antibodies, we manufacture genes, we can produce birth ectogenetically, we can practically clone people like carrots, and half the kids in this ghetto haven't even been inoculated for polio! We have assembled the most enormous medical establishment ever conceived, and people are sicker than ever! We cure nothing! We heal nothing! The whole goddam wretched world is strangulating in front of our eyes! That's what I mean when I say impotent! You don't know what the hell I'm talking about, do you? BARBARA Of course, I do. BOCK I'm tired, I'm terribly tired, Miss Drummond. And I hurt, and I've got nothing going for me anymore. Can you understand that? BARBARA Yes, of course. BOCK Then can you understand that the only admissable matter left is death? He suspects he is going to cry and turns quickly away. He sits heavily and fights his tears. BARBARA Sounds to me like a familiar case of morbid menopause. BOCK Oh Christ. BARBARA Well, it's hard for me to take your despair very seriously, Doctor. You obviously enjoy it so much. BOCK Oh, bugger off. That's all I need now, clinical insights. Some cockamamie twenty-five-year-old... BARBARA Twenty-seven. BOCK ...acidhead's going to reassure me about menopause now. Look, I'd like to be alone, so why don't you beat it? Close the door and turn off the lights on your way out. They are both suddenly conscious of a third presence in the room. They look to the door where Mr. Blacktree, fully clothed again and carrying his coat, is standing in the doorway. Barbara uncrosses her long legs and stands. BARBARA (crossing to the door) Mr. Blacktree disapproves of my miniskirt, but it was the only thing I had to come to the city with. Back at the tribe, I wear ankle-length buckskin. BOCK Swell. Just close the door and turn off the lights. Barbara regards his hunched form and, murmuring in Apache, she exits, closing the door. In the subsequent hush, thunder RUMBLES and CRASHES. Wind sweeps the rain against the window panes. The sounds go unheeded by Bock, still as marble. Slowly, he raises his head and sighs and then fishes about in his jacket pockets to bring out the bottle of potassium and syringe. He takes off his jacket, rolling up his shirtsleeve, poking about for the vein. He removes his trouser belt, which he ties tightly about his upper arm for a tourniquet. Now, he tears the wrapping of the syringe and fits the needle to it. Fiddling about in the pockets of his jacket, he finally finds a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He lights one and returns to the business of killing himself, puffing expressionlessly as he does. Thunder RUMBLES and rain SLASHES. He carefully draws just the right amount of potassium from the bottle to the syringe, peering at the procedure against the light of his desk lamp. He sets the cigarette on the ashtray, switches the hypodermic to his right hand, holds his left arm rigidly out under the light of the lamp... BARBARA'S VOICE (off-screen) What're you shooting, Doc? He turns slowly to the doorway, his bare left arm still rigidly extended, the belt dangling, the hypodermic clenched in his other hand. Barbara is perfectly framed in the doorway. He stares at her, slowly suffusing with the numb, blind, total rage of the aborted suicide. The thunder CRASHES. BOCK (barely gets the words out) Leave me alone... She approaches the desk affably, turns the potassium around to read the label. BARBARA Potassium. You take enough of this stuff, it'll kill you, Doc. (moves toward the couch) It occurred to me that I might have read you wrong, that you really were suicidal. So I came back. Bock's rage erupts. He crashes the hypodermic syringe down, shattering it. The potassium puddles on the wood. BOCK (hysterical rage) Who the hell asked you! He moves around the desk, a shambling bear of a man, a leather belt dangling dementedly from his arm, tears coursing down his cheeks. He advances on her in a stuperous shuffle. BOCK Who the hell asked you! She regards his lumbering approach with a faint, grotesquely sensual smile. He reaches with his naked left arm to the neck of her dress and, with one savage wrench, rips her stark naked, sobbing through hysterical tears. BOCK Leave me alone! Why the hell don't you leave me alone! He is on her, crushing her down into the shadows of the couch, ravenous at her neck and shoulders in a brutish assault, sobbing. BOCK Why didn't you let me do it? Who the hell asked you! Throughout the scene, CAMERA MOVES SLOWLY IN through the flesh and fury to an INTENSE TWO-SHOT of this terrified act of love. Then slowly over Bock's plunging shoulder to the woman's face. She gasps at the moment of penetration, then her lovely face slowly shapes into smiling serenity. Bock sobs; even in the shadows we can see the path of the tears on his cheek. ABRUPT SILENCE. OUTSIDE THE HOSPITAL, NIGHT. 4:00 A.M. The quiet, black streets glisten wetly in the puddles of lamplight. THE STEINMETZ PAVILION, TENTH FLOOR The night shift is finishing up. THERESA CAMPANELLA, R.N., a high-strung girl in her early twenties, stands at a water tap holding a glass and popping some pills in her mouth. To the room: CAMPANELLA Well, I'll see you. TENTH FLOOR CORRIDOR. NIGHT Campanella comes out of the Dialysis room, puts on her coat and walks to... HOLLY PAVILION LOBBY. NIGHT Campanella moves down the empty corridor. All the doors are closed now; only the overhead light in the background of the corridor glows weakly. Campanella puts a cigarette in her mouth, pauses to look for matches; she hasn't any. Scowling with annoyance, she continues to the lobby and stops by a partially visible white-jacketed figure reading a newspaper. CAMPANELLA Do you have a match, Doctor? She takes the matches, lights her cigarette, inhaling deeply, when he suddenly sandbags her from behind. She goes down. BOCK'S OFFICE. DAYBREAK, WEDNESDAY Covered by Bock's overcoat, Barbara tosses and turns on the couch in a small nightmare. Through the windows comes the first gray wash of dawn. FULL SHOT of Barbara, awake and up on one elbow on the verge of a scream. She looks around the room. It is dark, empty, silent. ACROSS Barbara looking through the door to the secretarial office. It is likewise dark, but suddenly the lights go on and, a moment later, Bock enters. He holds a container of coffee in each hand and has something white draped over his forearm. From under Bock's bulky coat, Barbara watches him lumber to his desk, where he sets the containers of coffee down. He drops the whitish garment over the back of a chair and then sits. He hoists a bulging folder of correspondence from his filing tray and hunches to work, reading. After a moment, he regards the silent figure on the couch across the room. BOCK You wouldn't be awake. BARBARA What time is it? He rises, picks up the second container and white dress from the chair. She reaches out an arm for the coffee. Bock holds up -- a nurse's uniform. BOCK I swiped this for you out of the nurses' locker room. I'll make good on your dress. I'm afraid it's torn beyond repair. Buy yourself a new one or, if you like, give me your size and I'll send it on to you. But I want to talk to you about that. BARBARA Talk to me about what? BOCK About your father. You really shouldn't move him in his condition. I just had a look at his chart. There's no reason to presume brain damage. You know as well as I you can't predict anything in these instances. He could pull out of that coma at any time. I think you should let him stay here. I'll personally look after him. He has perched on the edge of the couch, and she rests her cheek against the long, bent curve of his back, smiling. BARBARA Is this your way of saying you'd like me to stay in town a few more days? He turns to look at her, smiles back. BOCK Well, that would be nice, too. She sips her coffee. BOCK What do you say, Miss Drummond? BARBARA I expect you can call me Barbara, considering you ravished me three times last night. BOCK Three times? BARBARA Oh, look at him, pretending he didn't count. You were as puffed up as a toad about it. Punched a couple of holes in your crusade for universal impotence, didn't it? I think we're on a first name basis by now. I'll call you Herb. BOCK Let's give your father a week, Barbara, what do you say? BARBARA (a frown darkens her face) No, I don't want my father in this hospital. I had a dream about this hospital. (some of the terror shows on her face) I dreamt this enormous starched white tile building suddenly erupted like a volcano, and all the patients, doctors, nurses, attendants, orderlies, the whole line staff, the food service people, the aged, the lame -- and you right in the middle -- were stampeding in one hideous screaming suicidal mass into the sea. (she stares at him wide-eyed, reliving the dream) I'm taking my father out of here -- and as quickly as I can. They stare at each other, she in terror, he with affection. BOCK You're a real fruitcake, you know? She sets her coffee down on the couch and decides to wear Bock's overcoat rather than use it as a cover. She searches for the sleeves. Bock assists her. BARBARA Well, let me put it this way. I love you. I fancied you from the first moment you came lumbering down that hallway upstairs. I said to Mr. Blacktree, "Who's that hulking bear of a man?" The Apaches are reverential about bears. They won't eat bear meat; they never skin bears. Bear is thought of as both benign and evil, but very strong power. Men with bear power are highly respected and are frequently said to be great healers. By now she's standing, the overcoat reaching her toes. She looks down at Bock perched on the couch. BARBARA I said to Mr. Blacktree, "That man gets his power from the bear." BOCK Swell. Now, look, do you have a hotel, some sort of accommodations where you can stay for a week or so? Barbara reaches for her coffee, sips, moves around in her tent of a coat. BARBARA All right, let me put it this way, Herb. My father and I accept the implacability of death. If he dies, he dies, but I'm taking him out of here and back to Mexico about one o'clock this afternoon. I want you to come with us, because I love you and want children. BOCK I'm afraid Mexico sounds a little too remote for me. BARBARA We could use you down there, you know. There's a curiously high incidence of T.B. And you'd be a doctor again, Herb. You'd be necessary again. If you love me, I don't see what other choice you have. BOCK What do you mean, if I love you? I raped you in a suicidal rage. How did we get to love and children all of a sudden? BARBARA Oh, for heaven's sake, Herb, I ought to know if a man loves me or not. You must have told me half a hundred times last night you loved me. You murmured it, shouted it; one time, you opened the window and bellowed it out into the street. BOCK I think those were more expressions of gratitude than love. BARBARA Gratitude for what? BOCK Well, my God, for resurrecting feelings of life in me I thought dead. BARBARA Well, my God, what do you think love is? BOCK Okay, I love you, and you love me. I'm not about to argue with so relentless a romantic. Well, then, since we have this great passion going for us, I don't see why you won't stay on here in New York for a week or ten days... BARBARA It's up to ten days now. BOCK As long as it takes for your father's condition to improve. BARBARA No. I've had these prophetic dreams for seven nights. Seven is a sinister number. The meaning of these dreams is very clear, seven times as clear. I am to get my father and you out of this hospital before we are all destroyed. BOCK (throws up his hands) You're certifiable! My God, half the time you're a perfectly intelligent young woman, and then suddenly you turn into a goddam cabalist who believes in dreams, witchcraft and bear power! And I don't like the way you dismiss my whole life as unnecessary. I do a lot of healing right here in Manhattan. I don't have to go to Mexico for it. I also teach. I send out eighty doctors a year into the world, sometimes inspirited, at least competent. I've built up one of the best damned departments of medicine in the world. We've got a hell of a heart unit here and a hell of a kidney group. A lot of people come into this hospital in big trouble, Miss Drummond, and go out better for the experience. So don't tell me how unnecessary I am. BARBARA (who's been slipping into the nurse's uniform) Yeah? BOCK Yeah. BARBARA So how come, eight hours ago, you were trying to kill yourself with an overdose of potassium? BOCK Where are you going now? This last in reference to Barbara crossing to the secretaries' office, zippering her uniform. BOCK'S SECRETARIES' OFFICE BARBARA (gathering her coat and purse) My hotel. I have to check out. Mr. Blacktree doesn't speak any English. BOCK (from the connecting doorway) Well, you're coming back, of course. BARBARA Of course. I have to settle the bill here and pack my father. And I think you need a few hours alone to make your decisions. BOCK What decisions? BARBARA You're a very tired and very damaged man. You've had a hideous marriage and I assume a few tacky affairs along the way. You're understandably reluctant to get involved again. And, on top of that, here I am with the preposterous idea you throw everything up and go off with me to some barren mountains of Mexico. It sounds utterly mad, I know. On the other hand, you obviously find this world as desolate as I do. You did try to kill yourself last night. So that's it, Herb. Either me and the mountains or the bottle of potassium. I'll be back in an hour or so. I'll be in my father's room. She slips into her coat and exits, as Bock looks after her thoughtfully, then turns back to his own office. BOCK'S OFFICE He shuffles around distractedly, not knowing how to articulate the exuberance he feels. Suddenly, he opens the window, leans out and bellows to the empty air. BOCK All right. I love you! (softly) My God! FIRST AVENUE, CONSTRUCTION AREA. DAWN A construction sign fills the screen. It reads ON THIS LOCATION, THE NEW YORK MEDICAL UNIVERSITY CENTER WILL BUILD A DRUG REHABILITATION COMMUNITY CENTER, TO BE COMPLETED IN 1973. E.F. SCHLAGER & CO., CONTRACTORS. Suddenly, the sign comes crashing down into CAMERA. It has been wrenched off the wooden fence protecting the row of tenements and brownstones being demolished. About a dozen young and loud militants have torn it down. CAMERA PANS to show the row of houses behind the fence, two of which have already been reduced to rubble; the others have been boarded up. The demolition generators and cranes are parked silently along the curb. In the dark of 5:00 A.M., three black families, carrying children, and children carrying household effects, mattresses, pots, pans, bags of groceries, etc., are repossessing the condemned buildings. FIRST AVENUE, CONSTRUCTION AREA. DAY, 10:00 A.M. Strong sun overhead. The street has been roped off, and police are all over the place. A sparse crowd of a hundred or so throng the sidestreets off First Avenue. Signs read, "People S?, Doctors No." A Channel 11 mobile news crew, newspaper photographers, and a radio newscaster are recording the situation with desultory interest. A POLICE CAPTAIN stands in the middle of the cordoned street, bullhorning the occupiers of the condemned brownstones, who can be seen through the broken windows. POLICE CAPTAIN I repeat. I'm asking you to come out peacefully. These buildings are condemned and unfit for habitation. A piece of brick arches down from the roof of a building and cracks the street a few feet from the Captain. POLICE CAPTAIN (sighs, tries again) You people are possessing this building illegally and in violation of the law. I'm asking you to come out peacefully... HOLLY PAVILION, ENTRANCE LOBBY. DAY A small press conference is going on in a corner of the lobby. Reporters cluster, and TV cameras surround the Press Representative of the Hospital, a young woman in her thirties named EVELYN BASSEY, who is trying to read a statement, squinting under her mod glasses at the blaze of lights set up by the camera crews. MRS. BASSEY (reading) ...complete sympathy with the tenants. So the hospital has assumed the responsibility of finding 400 housing units in good buildings. The hospital wishes to point out that this particular row of buildings on First Avenue was condemned by the City before the hospital acquired ownership, and even then, only after responsible leaders in the community had approved the building of our new drug rehabilitation center. SUNDSTROM'S OFFICE SUNDSTROM (explodes on the phone) Goddammit, Barry, I've got a dozen community leaders waiting for me in the library! We've been trying to work out some kind of negotiable formula for two years! And with no help from you people in the Urban Affairs Division, I might add! DR. WELBECK appears in the doorway. He's in his fifties, gray, distinguished and very tanned with terribly, terribly kindly old country doctor eyes. He wears a camel hair topcoat. He smiles benignly and twinkles at Sundstrom from one of the leather chairs across the desk from the Director. SUNDSTROM (hardly notices Welbeck) And I'm not going to throw all that down the drain because some cockamamie activist group is show-boating for the television cameras! You get those people out of those buildings before a wall collapses or a fire breaks out and we've got a riot on our hands!... Okay! He hangs up, sighs, turns to the man across the desk. WELBECK (smiles, twinkles) Having your troubles, eh? Well, I won't take much of your time. My name's Welbeck. I've been associated with this hospital for six years, and, yesterday afternoon, Dr. Gilley called me to say he was cutting off my privileges at the hospital. Do you know anything about it? SUNDSTROM (glances at his watch) It's news to me. WELBECK He said he sent the report on. SUNDSTROM I'll probably get it tomorrow. Report on what? WELBECK Well, I'm not sure myself. I did a nephrectomy on a man about seven days ago. Emergency, called in at four in the morning. The man was hemorrhaging, he'd gone sour... SUNDSTROM Welbeck, I'm terribly sorry, but I do have this meeting. (crosses to the door) In any event, there's nothing I can do about it. If Gilley wants to cut your privileges, he's Chief of Surgery, it's within his province. You'll have to have the hearing... He exits, followed by Welbeck into the... DIRECTOR'S SUITE, SECRETARIES' OFFICES Buzzing now. Typewriters clicking. Phones ringing. WELBECK I have a laparotomy laid on for this morning. I assume I'll be allowed to go through with that. SUNDSTROM Of course. WELBECK (huffing a little) I've been associated with this hospital for six years... SUNDSTROM Now, now, Welbeck. It seems to me I've had your name down here before for something... (to his secretary en passant) I'll be in the staff room. He and Welbeck pass out into the... EXECUTIVE CORRIDOR Flowing with a normal stream of traffic, Sundstrom and Welbeck turn right and head down to the last room of the corridor. Something comes to him, and Sundstrom pauses. SUNDSTROM Wait a minute. You're the fellow with the Medicaid collecting business who incorporated and went public, right? I mean, something like that? Milton Mead was telling me about you just the other day. You're a whole medical conglomerate. You've got a Factoring service, a computerized billing company, and a few proprietary hospitals, a few nursing homes. Good heavens, Welbeck, you shouldn't be brought up before a committee of mere doctors. You should be investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. You'll have to go through with the hearing, Welbeck. I don't interfere in these things. He opens the door of the staff room and strides in. Even before he enters, we get a blast of angry voices, both male and female. For the moment the door is ajar, we see a harried Milton Mead being assailed by angry blacks and Puerto Ricans and young white activist doctors. HOSPITAL LIBRARY VOICES (all overlapping) ...no goddam halfway house, no way, baby! We ain't gonna wait 'til 1973 to deal with this problem! We want to kill the drug thing right now!... imperializing the Blackaporican community, and we reject the bourgie- ass middle-class black traitors and flunkies who are selling out the Blackaporican proletariat masses to the expansionist, racist policies of this shit hospital!... WOMAN Let's get back to the abortion issue! VOICE Sit down, Woman! WOMAN What the hell does the male establishment know about abortions? There's an agitated reaction in the crowd. BLACK WOMAN Who the hell raised the issue of birth control? The issue at hand is the control of drug addiction in this community and in the ghetto generally. A black man jumps up and points off right. BLACK MAN We don't want no goddam abortion... A white doctor jumps in from the left. WHITE DOCTOR Let's... let's get down to the core of this matter. More murmuring. A Che Guevara -- styled revolutionary moves toward Mead and Sundstrom at the table. MAN The point is that this hospital is the landlord for those buildings and they should've turned them down. Angrily, he leans over the table facing Sundstrom. MAN Those buildings are imperialistic extensions of the medical establishment. This hospital ought to be rebuilding those tenements, give those people decent housing. Sundstrom raises his hands for quiet and starts to rise. The hostile din has gotten to him. SUNDSTROM Please, please, please! HOLLY PAVILION, ROOM William Mead is transferred from his bed to a rolling stretcher by an orderly in shirt and trousers and by Nurse Felicia Chile. Nurse Chile tucks Mead in. He opens his eyes to look at her drowsily. WILLIAM MEAD (under sedation) You know, I hallucinated last night. I hallucinated there was an Indian doing a war dance in here. NURSE CHILE (affably) You weren't hallucinating, Mr. Mead. There was an Indian in here last night. WILLIAM MEAD (staring through his sedation at her) There was? They wheel him out into... HOLLY PAVILION, SURGICAL AREA CORRIDOR Mead is wheeled down the corridor by the orderly. At the far end, an anesthetized patient, blue in the harsh light, fresh from surgery, is being wheeled into a recovery room. Surgery is busy and efficient but not as clinically tidy as we'd like. Linens and equipment and surgical gear are piled into corners or on empty stretchers. Green-uniformed nurses, doctors and orderlies go in and out of the many doors flanking the corridor. This is the non-sterilized area, where doctors and nurses confer in the corridors; three black orderlies await an assignment, sit on stretchers, chuckle, mutter. Phones can be heard RINGING. The orderly wheeling Mead turns left into the... SURGICAL AREA, CENTRAL PLAZA ...a small, cluttered central area with the office of the Operating Room Nursing Supervisor on the right and the Holding (for Anesthesia) Room on the left. The O.R. is like the Emergency Ward, desperately busy but staffed by people grown so accustomed to it that they display a calm, almost casual but febrile efficiency. A large blackboard faces the Supervisor's Office with the day's schedule of operations neatly chalked in. It is full. A middle-aged surgeon, still in his overcoat, is studying the schedule. A green-uniformed NURSE swings through the glass doors from the Operating Room area to lean into the Supervisor's Office. NURSE Dr. Norris says about half an hour. SECOND NURSE Tell Shirley it was just an ovarian cyst. The THIRD NURSE leans back into the Supervisor's Office to relay this information. THIRD NURSE Shirley, it was just an ovarian cyst! This is apparently good news, for we hear someone saying VOICE (off-screen) Oh, thank God. An orderly rumbles by with an E.K.G. machine. O.R. Nursing Supervisor DOROTHY KIMBALL, a pleasant lady in her late thirties, leans out of her office to speak to one of the lounging orderlies. MRS. KIMBALL (handing the orderly a slip) All right, Jerry, go up to Holly Six. The orderly detaches himself from his cronies and exits. It is into this atmosphere of subdued febrility that William Mead is wheeled. ORDERLY (to Mrs. Kimball) William Mead from Holly Eight. MRS. KIMBALL Hold him there, Tom. We've got somebody coming out right now. Indeed, a stretcher is being wheeled out of the Holding Room. The patient is sedated and covered. As the orderly wheels her past CAMERA, we may recognize the pale, sleeping profile of Miss Campanella, the nurse who had been coshed with a sandbag not many scenes ago. A CIRCULATING NURSE comes through the glass doors, examines the chart dangling from the stretcher. MRS. KIMBALL (to this nurse) Who's that? Mangafranni? CIRCULATING NURSE (checking wristband) Yeah. (to orderly) Number three, Marty. The orderly wheels the silent Miss Campanella off to Operating Room Three, as Dr. Welbeck, in his natty blue suit, carrying his camel coat, turns in from the outer corridor and examines the blackboard. He goes back to... OUTER CORRIDOR ...Welbeck crosses, opens a door and enters... SURGEONS' LOCKER ROOM All four walls are lined with lockers. Shelves and cartons of green surgical clothes, caps, masks, trousers, shoe- coverings. Obviously, surgeons dress for their operations here. Two surgeons, one middle-aged and the other a young RESIDENT, are changing. The resident turns to Welbeck on his entrance and says: RESIDENT It's legal for a doctor to incorporate in New York, isn't it, Doctor? WELBECK (en route to phone) Since last September. If they had that when I was your age, I'd have put away a couple of million by now. (dials) It gives you a variety of deferral devices, profit-sharing for example. Let's say you pick yourself an October 31-fiscal. You declare a bonus payable in '71. An accrued item payable to a principle share-holder must be paid within two and half months after the close of the year to get the deduction in the prior year. But your corporation doesn't pay that tax, because we've eliminated the taxable income with the bonus. With two taxable entities, you can bury a hell of a lot of expenses... (on phone) Hello, this is Welbeck, any messages?... Well, I'm at the hospital. I have to cut open some guy in a couple of minutes. I'll try to make it as fast as I can. How urgent did he say it was?... Well, Dr. Hogan made those arrangements with the underwriters. The Registration Statement was filed with the S.E.C. well over a year ago... If he calls again, have me paged here. (hangs up, turns back to the attentive young doctors to conduct his class in medical finance while changing into surgical scrub) The really big money is in health leasing, of course. Dr. Hogan, the eminent orthopedic surgeon, and I incorporated a leasing company and went public last year. I hold a controlling interest in a number of proprietary hospitals, nursing homes and rest farms, and I've been leasing hospital equipment to my own hospitals at excessive rates. Why, you ask, am I draining my own hospitals? Well, my hospitals are taxed at 48 percent, and I'm giving my leasing company a hell of a price-earnings ratio, which'll balloon the market value of the stock. I hold three hundred thousand shares of that stock, lettered of course, but in a year, I'll dump those shares at a capital gain and walk off with a bundle... OPERATING ROOM THREE Just like on TV -- well, almost. The surgeon, DR. MALLORY, a bad-tempered man in his fifties, sits on a stool with his gloved hands wrapped in a towel, waiting for the two surgical RESIDENTS to finish painting the operable area, which happens to be the abdomen. It's a hysterectomy. The patient is sheeted except for the small square of abdominal area. DR. MALLORY Mangafranni, right? SCRUB NURSE Right. DR. MALLORY (grumbles to one of the residents) What do you say, huh? We're not going to hang it in the Louvre, you know. The anesthesiologist, DR. CHU, injects pentathol in the I.V. tube. DR. CHU Bring a mask over. The RESIDENT ANESTHESIOLOGIST trundles over the oxygen tank, takes the hypodermic syringe from Dr. Chu, who now applies the oxygen mask to the enmarbled profile of the patient. He studies the gauges and equipment around him at the head of the operating table. RESIDENT ANESTHESIOLOGIST There's no pulse, Doctor. DR. CHU What's the pressure? RESIDENT ANESTHESIOLOGIST There's no blood pressure, Doctor. DR. CHU No pulse. Get the tube and E.K.G. DR. MALLORY What's the matter? RESIDENT I can't feel a thing, sir. The room galvanizes into the swift, silent activity of a chest massage. Dr. Mallory, standing and stretching in the back of the room, turns and moves toward the off-screen patient. He begins a vigorous rhythmic massage of the patient's rib cage over the heart. DR. MALLORY What the hell happened? Dr. Mallory thumps the patient's chest hard with his fist, and the others, likewise, go to work. DR. CHU I don't know. She must have thrown an embolus. She was doing fine up to now. (to Resident Anesthesiologist) Did you check the gasses? RESIDENT ANESTHESIOLOGIST I did, sir. DR. CHU The only time I ever saw anybody conk out like this, some jerk switched the nitrous oxide and the gas lines. The scrub nurse is applying electrode paste to the defibrillators. Dr. Mallory yanks the sheets and hospital shirt off the patient and begins very rigorous massage of the exposed ribs; we can hear one rib crack. DR. MALLORY Get the damn leads on. For Chrissakes, what the hell is this?! RESIDENT She's just a young woman, sir. Do you think we should open the chest? DR. MALLORY (defibrillating) She's fifty-three, you buttonhead! RESIDENT (off-screen) Bicarb? Dr. Chu, who has been inserting some suprel and bicarbonate into the tube of the patient's I.V., is frowning at her rigid, white-capped face. He leans over to check the E.K.G. readings. DR. CHU She's fibrillating, Doctor. Mallory straddles the patient. He's doing heavy heart massage. DR. MALLORY Jesus H. Christ! DR. CHU Okay, stop for a minute... Doctor... Dr. Chu pushes back, the operating cap on the patient's head, revealing jet-black hair. Mallory starts to massage again. DR. MALLORY (barking at the scrub nurse) You got those paddles ready? Dr. Chu stares blankly at the patient's face, then looks up at the sweating surgeon, perched on the operating table, rhythmically crushing away at the patient's rib cage. DR. CHU I may be crazy, Doctor, but I don't think this is your patient. Dr. Mallory, now pausing for a moment, looks up. He is beaded with sweat. DR. MALLORY What the hell are you talking about? He massages away. Another rib cracks. HOLLY PAVILION, BOCK'S OFFICE The Supervisor of Nurses, Mrs. Christie, is sitting on a chair reading a report. Bock, now in his doctor's coat, is hunched over his desk, hands clasped. BOCK Now, I don't want to get into an institutional hassle with you, Mrs. Christie. The malpractice here is monumental. As you see, Dr. Schaefer's blood sugar was twenty-three. No glucose solution is going to do that. The only thing that will do that is at least fifty units of insulin, probably more. The only presumption is that one of those nurses on the Eighth Floor shot fifty units of insulin into Schaefer's blood stream, either by injection or through the I.V., although how in God's name... Mrs. Christie's electric pocket-pager BEEPS. MRS. CHRISTIE I'm very sorry, Doctor. (reaches for a phone) May I? Miss McGuire leans in from the secretaries' office. MISS MCGUIRE (to Bock) Doctor, did you ask the head nurse on the eighth floor to let you know when a Miss Drummond got there? BOCK Yes. MISS MCGUIRE Well, she just got there. BOCK Thank you. MRS. CHRISTIE (on phone) Oh, dear me, Dorothy. I better get right down there directly. Have you called the O.O.D.? And you better call Dr. Gilley. And you better call Mr. Sloan... Yes, I'll be down directly. (hangs up; to Bock) I'm very sorry, Doctor, but there's a real nasty one in the O.R. They've just operated on the wrong patient... O.R. NURSING SUPERVISOR'S OFFICE Crowded now. The administrative resident, Hitchcock, is here and a uniformed man in his fifties, MR. SLOAN, the Chief of Safety and Traffic. Sloan represents the Hospital's security force. Mrs. Kimball is at her desk, on the phone. MRS. KIMBALL (on phone) ...well, I don't understand, is she back in her room? When did she get back to her room? Who brought her back?... (she stares at Hitchcock) She's back in her room. HITCHCOCK Who? MRS. KIMBALL Mrs. Mangafranni, the woman who was supposed to have been operated on... (calls to a nurse passing) Are they still working on that woman in Three? NURSE Yeah. MRS. KIMBALL (back on phone) I'm sorry, Mrs. Fried, would you say that again?... Well, nobody in this office sent her back up... Well, all right, Mrs. Fried, I'll have to call you back. She hangs up, stands, goes out into... THE OPERATING AREA, PLAZA ...where three orderlies lounge about. MRS. KIMBALL Did any of you take a woman named Mangafranni out of the Holding Room back up to Holly Five around ten o'clock? Apparently, none of these three. Mrs. Christie turns in from the outer corridor. Normal Operating Room activity flows by: patients wheeled to and from their various surgeries, surgeons checking the blackboard, staff doctors, orderlies keeping the noise level low but steady. MRS. CHRISTIE (to Hitchcock in the doorway) What happened? Hitchcock shrugs helplessly. MRS. KIMBALL (to Mrs. Christie) I don't know what happened. A patient named Mangafranni was scheduled for a hysterectomy at ten o'clock -- Dr. Mallory. I talked to Sylvia in the Holding Room who admitted her, so she was here. And now I just spoke to Mrs. Fried on Holly Five, and she says an orderly brought Mrs. Mangafranni back to her room about twenty minutes ago. Now Mrs. Mangafranni is in her room sleeping. MRS. CHRISTIE Well, who's the woman in the operating room? MRS. KIMBALL I don't know. Mrs. Kimball, Mrs. Christie, Hitchcock and Sloan push through the glass doors to the crossroads of the operating rooms. Through each window, we see operating crews hacking away. MRS. CHRISTIE Is she dead? MRS. KIMBALL Well, they had to open her up, and that's not good. They gather in anticipation outside O.R. Three and peer over each other's shoulders into the room where the operating crew is hunched over the open-heart massage. The masked circulating nurse looks up, notices the audience at the door, and gives a hopeless shrug. HITCHCOCK I better get Mr. Mead. HOLLY PAVILION, THE STAFF ROOM Milton Mead is sitting in a back seat of the Staff Room -- a lounge with couches, easy chairs and magazine racks -- gives half an ear to the several opinions being simultaneously expressed by: LADY FROM WOMEN'S LIB ...abortion? The clinic should be under the supervision and entirely staffed by women and administered by a member of the Women's Committee for Medical Liberation! and by YOUNG WHITE ACTIVIST ...let's get to the core of the matter which is the criminal and gangster collusion between the American medical establishment and the drug, insurance and tobacco companies who, through their combined racketeering efforts, have produced a dual system of health care. Everything for the rich and nothing for the poor! and by BLACK PANTHER ...abortion clinic! That's genocide, baby! You're just killing off blacks! We consider proliferation elemental to the class struggle! and by SUNDSTROM (who has lost his cool altogether and is screaming right along with everyone else) ...for God's sake! We've got eleven people in these buildings, and we've got to get them out of there! We can rectify the injustices of the world tomorrow, but right now, for God's sake, can we get those people out of those buildings? Will you people please listen to me? Will you people please shut up and listen to me? Will you people please call a halt to this participatory democracy and address ourselves to the immediate problem?! During this maelstrom, the phone at Mead's elbow RINGS. Mead answers it, listens, nods, returns the receiver, stand and slips out of the room into the delicious silence of the... HOLLY PAVILION, EXECUTIVE CORRIDOR ...where Hitchcock emerges from the Administration offices. The two men move down the hall toward each other. MILTON MEAD How long ago did this happen? HITCHCOCK About half an hour. MILTON MEAD Have you called the Medical Examiner? HITCHCOCK Not yet. MILTON MEAD Well, you'd better do that now. And you better call the precinct station house as well. OPERATING ROOM THREE Dr. Mallory is wrenching off his blood-drenched rubber gloves and flinging them to the floor in a rage. The door to the room opens, and Mrs. Kimball, Mrs. Christie and Mr. Sloan enter. Dr. Mallory is stupefied with anger. Dr. Chu, blessed with Eastern containment, blandly gathers his equipment together, nods to Mrs. Christie. DR. CHU Good morning. MRS. CHRISTIE Good morning, Doctor. DR. CHU This is really something, isn't it? I thought she looked a little different when they brought her in. I even said to one of the nurses, "She looks a little younger without her dentures." I'd only talked to her half an hour before. MRS. CHRISTIE Does anybody know who she is? Dr. Mallory can only stare at her numbly. He turns and stares numbly at Mr. Sloan. MRS. CHRISTIE (to Mrs. Kimball, examining the chart dangling from the operating table) What's her chart say? CIRCULATING RESIDENT Her chart says Mangafranni. Her bracelet says Mangafranni. The only thing that isn't Mangafranni is the woman. Dr. Mallory finally explodes. DR. MALLORY Jesus H. Christ! I've been chopping out three uteruses a day for twenty years, and is it too much to expect for you people to bring in the right goddam Jesus Christ uterus?! DR. CHU I had just been talking to her in the Holding Room. She was perfectly fine. A little drowsy. I thought it was funny that when they brought her in, she was out cold. DR. MALLORY (shuffling around in aimless circles) Jesus H. Kee-rist! Mrs. Christie stares down at the face of the dead patient on the table, who has had her chest spread wide open so that the organs are exposed. MRS. CHRISTIE Well, we'll just all have to stay here until Mr. Mead or someone from the O.O.D. comes back. DR. MALLORY Well, I'm not taking the rap for this! I've already got one malpractice suit pending, and I'm not taking the rap for this one! HOLLY PAVILION, ROOM William Mead's bed is empty. The Reverend Drummond's suit, still on its hanger, is lying on it. Drummond himself lies comatose and rigged out with I.V.s and catheters. Barbara Drummond is packing her father's things into an open one- suiter valise. The door opens. She looks up. It's Bock. They look at each other -- two people in love. BOCK Look, you're not going. I love you, and I'm not going to let you go. He picks up the suit lying on the bed. BOCK Come on, let's start putting your father's things back. He's staying here. (hangs the suit in the closet) I'll find an apartment somewhere. I'm staying in a filthy little hotel room. We can't use that. His eyes are caught by a white doctor's uniform hanging in the armoire along with the suits and overcoats of the two patients in the room. He bends over to peer at the nameplate over the breast pocket. BARBARA I can't make it here, Herb. I'll crack up. I cracked up once already. One week here, and I'd be running naked through the streets screaming again. I can retain my sanity only in a simple society. BOCK For God's sake, Barbara, you can't seriously see me living in a grass shack hunting jackrabbits for dinner? Be sensible for God's sake. BARBARA I am being sensible. What is it you're so afraid of leaving here? Your plastic home? Your conditioned air? Your synthetic clothes? Your instant food? I'm offering you green silence and solitude, the natural order of things. Mostly, I'm offering me. I think we're beautiful, Herb. BOCK (utterly in love) You make it sound almost plausible. BARBARA I don't know why you even hesitate. What's holding you here? Is it your wife? BOCK No, that's all over. I suppose if I'm married to anything, it's this hospital. It's been my whole life. I just can't walk out on it as if it never mattered. I'm middle-class. Among us middle-class, love doesn't triumph over all. Responsibility does. BARBARA Herb, don't ask me to stay here with you, because I love you, and I will. And we'll both be destroyed. He turns to her again. They both look away. BARBARA I've got the bill here to pay yet. BOCK I'll come with you. She gathers her raincoat and goes. Bock follows her out into the... HOLLY PAVILION, EIGHTH FLOOR, CORRIDOR ...where Dr. Joseph Lagerman, Head of Nephrology, perhaps remembered from an earlier scene, has been waiting for Bock. He joins them en route to the elevators. LAGERMAN Herb, you asked me to find that dialysis nurse. BOCK What dialysis nurse? Barbara has continued walking. Bock starts to follow her. BARBARA I'll go pay the bill. LAGERMAN The one who goofed on your patient, Drummond. Bock turns back to Lagerman. LAGERMAN Well, her name is Theresa Campanella, but you are not going to believe this, Herb. She died on the operating table in O. R. Three about an hour ago. Barbara is disappearing into an elevator. Bock starts after her, then turns back to Lagerman. BOCK What do you mean, she died on the operating table in O.R. Three? They hurry down the corridor to the elevators. BOCK You mean she was the one? LAGERMAN That's the one. I just identified her. BOCK What the hell's going on around here? Every time I try to find somebody in this hospital, they either died of a heart attack in Emergency or of anesthesia shock in an operating room. Elevator doors open. A nurse and visitor get out. Bock and Lagerman go into... THE ELEVATOR Two or three people besides the elevator operator are there, as well as a patient on a stretcher and an orderly. LAGERMAN Listen, I just came from the O.R. They're trying to find a Dr. Schaefer. Don't you have a kid named Schaefer in your service? BOCK (scowls, mutters) I had a Schaefer. He died yesterday of an overdose of insulin. What do they want Schaefer for? LAGERMAN The Holding Room nurse says there was a Dr. Schaefer hanging around the Holding Room. It wouldn't have been your Schaefer anyway. The nurse says it was senior staff, a middle- aged man. BOCK There's no senior staff named Schaefer in this hospital. LAGERMAN I told them that. I said, I don't know any senior staff around here named Schaefer. They've got detectives down there, everything. It's a whole big investigation. The elevator stops at the seventh floor. The doors open and Bock and Lagerman stroll into... HOLLY PAVILION, SEVENTH FLOOR, CORRIDOR Bock lumbers down the west corridor, turns into... ROOM 806 William Mead, sedated and apparently zonked out cold, is being transferred from a stretcher back into bed by an O.R. orderly and nurse's aid. Bock rolls back the curtains around Drummond's bed revealing the comatose patient, his face sculptured against the white pillow, an I.V. tube in his right arm, a catheter projecting from under the sheet. Bock lowers the protective railing, leans in, takes the man's pulse on his neck, raises one closed eyelid, then the other. The pupils stare vacuously back at him; the eyelids drop closed as soon as they are released. In the background, the orderly and aid finish tucking in William Mead and exit, wheeling their creaking stretcher out. The room is shockingly silent. Bock goes to the window and frowns in thought. HOLD ACROSS the patient Drummond, on Bock in the background at the window with his back to us. Suddenly, Drummond's eyes open. He lies rigid, his eyes staring dementedly into the air above him. Slowly, his left hand reaches out and carefully withdraws the catheter from his bladder, lays it on the white sheet beside him, and silently reaches over to withdraw the I.V. needle from his right arm. He lets the needle dangle, dripping onto the bed. Carefully, he twists out from under his sheet, swings his legs over the side of the bed and sits up. REVERSE ACROSS Bock at the window, pondering. With a swift lash of movement, the double tubes of a stethoscope are whipped over his head and tightened around his throat. DRUMMOND (mad as a hatter) I am the Fool for Christ and the Paraclete of Caborca. CLOSE TWO SHOT of Bock being strangled, Drummond's face frozen in bland dementia behind him. BARBARA'S VOICE (off-screen) For heaven's sake, Dad! What the hell's going on? Drummond pauses in his strangling and, releasing the poor man altogether, turns to his daughter in the doorway. CAMERA DOLLIES to include all three -- Bock recuperating; Drummond staring madly; and Barbara infuriated with her father. BARBARA (annoyed) We all thought you were at Death's Door! What're you doing out of bed? Drummond, abashed, stands there, a scolded schoolboy, a rawboned figure in a hospital shift, a stethoscope dangling from his right hand. BARBARA (to Bock) What happened? Did he say anything to you? BOCK (sufficiently recovered) As a matter of fact, he said, "I am the Fool for Christ and the Paraclete of Caborca." And you'd better close the door, because if he's going to tell everyone who walks in here he's the Fool for Christ and the Paraclete of Caborca, they'll put us all away. He's already killed two doctors and one nurse. DRUMMOND I am the wrath of the lamb and the angel of the bottomless pit. BARBARA What do you mean he killed two doctors and a nurse? BOCK I mean, he's killed two doctors and a nurse! And he just tried to kill me! He has something against doctors. Somehow he got hold of a thousand units of insulin and put it in Dr. Schaefer's intravenous solution. And somehow he got Dr. Ives to die of a heart attack in the middle of the Emergency Room. And somehow he got a dialysis nurse named Campanella to die of anesthesia shock on an operating table! (opens the closet, points to the white doctor's uniform hanging there) He's been running around the hospital wearing Dr. Schaefer's uniform. Right now, they're looking all over the place for this mysterious Dr. Schaefer. I know this all sounds as grotesque to you as it does to me, but you can see for yourself your father is not the helpless comatose patient we thought he was. Don't look at me like I'm the one who's crazy. Ask your crazy father! DRUMMOND I was merely an instrument of God. I killed no one. They all three died by their own hands, ritual victims of their own institutions, murdered by irony, an eye for an eye, biblical retribution. Schaefer was first, you see, because he killed God. God was admitted to this hospital last Monday under the name of Guernsey... ROOM 806. MORNING. (FLASHBACK) A cheerless, gray sunlight fills the room as the fragile, white-haired and bearded old Guernsey (whose admittance to the hospital was the opening scene of the film) is being helped into the room by Nurse Felicia Chile. She solicitously helps the wispy old man off with his coat and jacket and hat which she puts in the armoire. With palsied fingers, the little old man unknots his stringy tie and unbuttons the collar, which is three sizes too large. In the other bed, Drummond's eyes slowly open. DRUMMOND (off-screen) I was instantly aware of a divine presence. The old man is slipping out of his clothes to expose a thin little body in a torn nightshirt. DRUMMOND (off-screen) I was convinced this porcelain old man was, in fact, an Angel of the Lord... The old man sits back, wheezing a little. Nurse Chile smiles nicely at him and takes her leave. For a moment, Drummond lies rigidly on his bed, staring dully into the air and the old man sits with his hunched back to us. The room is silent except for his rheumy wheeze. DRUMMOND (off-screen) ...perhaps even Christ Himself. After a moment, the old man rises and goes to the washbasin and, with some wheezing, spits into it. He shuffles back to bed. Dr. Schaefer comes into the room with a professional smile and the patient Guernsey's chart. DRUMMOND (off-screen) Our Savior was, it seems, suffering from emphysema. Schaefer perches on the bed beside Guernsey and begins to take his history. DRUMMOND (off-screen) He was relentlessly subjected to the benefits of modern medicine. He was misdiagnosed, mismedicated, and put into shock by Dr. Schaefer; raced off to Intensive Care, where the resident compounded the blunder and induced a coma. I can tell you with authority that God is indeed dead. He died last Monday under the name of Guernsey. CLOSE-UP of Drummond in deep shadow shows him sleeping. DRUMMOND (off-screen) A few hours later, he appeared to me in a revelation. ROOM 806. NIGHT, 7:00 P.M. The room is lit only by the yellow light from the half-opened bathroom door. Guernsey walks out of the shadows, hands raised. He shuffles to Drummond's bedside and looks down on him from his frail height. GUERNSEY (softly) Rise up, Drummond. You are dead, now you are restored. Drummond's eyes open and roll to the direction of the voice. DRUMMOND'S P.O.V.: Guernsey, dressed only in his hospital shift, is shuffling up and down the aisle of the room, hands clasped behind his back like a Mittel-European intellectual, head hunched forward -- a little old man with a white beard talking to himself. GUERNSEY Those who killed you and those who killed me will die in our place. You are the Paraclete of Caborca, the wrath of the lamb. The angel of the bottomless pit. Guernsey closes his eyes in religious ecstacy. GUERNSEY In this fashion has it been revealed to you. Drummond starts to sob and slowly sits up in his bed, imbued with belief. He looks mutely up at the frail old man, who now raises his right hand and his face is transfigured into vast majesty. GUERNSEY (thunders out) The age is closed! The end is at hand! The seal is broken! So saying, he reverts to the little old man he was, wheezing a bit, and with some effort, climbs back on his bed and lies there, eyes closed. His thin, high nose projects from the whiteness of his face. He sighs the rattling last sigh of life and dies. CAMERA DOLLIES slowly to CLOSE-UP of Drummond lying motionless on his bed. His eyes are wide, glinting in the shadows, a man imbued. His cheeks are wet with tears of exaltation. DRUMMOND (off-screen) Well! Not quite the burning bush perhaps but prodigal enough for me. I was to avenge the death of God and my own brutalization. I was to kill Doctors Schaefer, Ives and Welbeck and the dialysis nurse Miss Campanella, whose negligence caused my coma. FULL SHOT of Drummond. He raises his left hand, flexing his fingers. Then he moves his other arm, his head, his shoulders. Obviously, he is regaining his faculties. DRUMMOND (off-screen) I awaited a further sign from God, which was given to me later that evening. Dr. Schaefer, it seems, had arranged an assignation with a girl from the hematology lab named Sheila. ACROSS Drummond to the now empty other bed. All the lights are on. PAN on Nurse Penny Canduso and an orderly wheeling away the wrapped body of Guernsey. Intern Schaefer, at the door, considers the empty bed with interest. Moving to the bedtable, he picks up the receiver of the phone. SCHAEFER (on phone) Hey Sheila, this is Howard, Sheila. Hey listen, I got us a bed for tonight. A real, honest-to-god bed. ROOM 806. NIGHT REPRISE the scene originally played UNDER CREDITS where Dr. Schaefer and his girlfriend Sheila sneak into the room and undress. Giggles and shushings, gooses and fondles. SHEILA Boy, I sure hope nobody walks in. During the replay, however, an additional segment is added. At one point, the girl, hanging her dress in the armoire, turns and holds something up. SHEILA What's this in your pocket? SCHAEFER That's my insulin. Put it back. SHEILA What do you take insulin for? Diabetes? I didn't know you were a diabetic. SCHAEFER It ain't contagious, don't worry about it. They head for the unoccupied bed. CLOSE-UP on Drummond's profile. ROOM 806 Dark, hushed. Schaefer's girl is leaving; she tiptoes to the door, peeks out. Apparently, the coast is clear. She quickly slips out. ROOM 806. DAY Drummond on his chair. Barbara perched on one side of her father's bed, Bock on the other. William Mead sleeps on. BOCK And you put Schaefer's insulin into the I.V. jar. DRUMMOND Yes. And then a second nurse came and plugged the I.V. jar into Schaefer. God clearly intended a measure of irony here. The hospital was to do all the killing for me. All I need do was arrange for the doctors to become patients in their own hospital. Accordingly, the next morning, I set out for Dr. Ives. I put on Dr. Schaefer's uniform, pinched some digoxine from the pharmacy and a sandbag from a utility cart, and found my way to Dr. Ives' laboratory. I coshed him with the sandbag, gave him a massive shot of the digoxine. This, you see, brought on an instant condition of cardiac arrhythmia. When he came to, I brought him down to the Emergency Room. EMERGENCY ROOM AREA, LOBBY. DAY The usual E.R. crush and motion goes on in the background. Drummond escorts an obviously ill Dr. Ives to the Admitting Room. Drummond's voice under the narration explains matters to Miss Aronovici at the desk. DRUMMOND This is Dr. Ives. He's in the Nephrology Lab. I was in there a little while ago, and he was suddenly taken ill, and I thought I'd better get him over here right away. DRUMMOND (off-screen) He had at that time perhaps an hour to live. Prompt treatment would have saved his life. They go into the... EMERGENCY ADMITTING AND TREATMENT ROOMS Ives, seated on a table in evident distress, breathes heavily. DRUMMOND (voice-off) As a staff doctor, he was seen without preliminaries... An attendant takes his pulse, pressure and respiration. Ives collapses. DRUMMOND (voice-off) His vital signs were taken, an electrocardiogram... PAN SLOWLY across the Emergency Room to catch its state of contained febrility. Every curtained treatment room is occupied, including the storage room in the back. The triage nurse and a second nurse behind the desk are busy on the phones. The triage nurse takes the history of the first in a line of five people seeking admission even as she answers her phone. We watch Miss Aronovici and the other nurse and Dr. Spezio and his two interns, the two attendants -- all busy with one patient or another. DRUMMOND (voice-off) ...which revealed occasional ventricular premature contractions. An intern took his history... ACROSS Drummond, white-uniformed, standing in the back against the filing cabinets and linens, watching the the new patients trickle and crowd in. DRUMMOND (voice-off) ...and then he was promptly... At the Admitting Desk, a MAN in his forties is being signed in by a uniformed cop. DRUMMOND (voice-off) ...simply... forgotten to death. Simply mislaid... CAMERA JUST STARES at the pageant of pain. DRUMMOND (voice-off) ...mislaid among the broken wrists, the chest pains, scalp lacerations, the man whose fingers were crushed in a taxi door, the infant with the skin rash, the child swiped by a car, the old lady mugged in the subway, the derelict beaten by sailors, the teenage suicide, the paranoids, drunks, asthmatics, the rapes, the septic abortions, the overdosed addicts... EMERGENCY ROOM AREA, LOBBY Looking to the street doors as two ambulance attendants, bearing a seventeen-year-old black girl on a stretcher, burst in. AMBULANCE ATTENDANTS (shouting) Not breathing! Not breathing! They hurry into the Admitting Room past a nurse and into the... EMERGENCY ADMITTING AND TREATMENT ROOMS ...which is already galvanized into action. Miss Aronovici is at the girl's pulse even as she is being transferred to the bed that has just been cleared of Mr. Mitgang and his concussion case. INTERN (instructing attendant with Mitgang) Better put him in the Holding Room. MISS ARONOVICI (with the seventeen- year-old girl) She's taking a little pulse. DR. SPEZIO (to triage nurse) Get an anesthesiologist, one-five- one-five... On screen we continue watching the scene of the overdose case treatment, as the live-action sound in the room fades behind Drummond's tale. DRUMMOND (off-screen) ...the fractures, infarcts, hemorrhages, concussions, boils, abrasions, the colonic cancers, the cardiac arrests -- the whole wounded madhouse of our times... REACTION SHOT of Drummond staring at this ceaseless panorama of pain, tears streaking down his cheeks. MAN'S VOICE (off-screen) I wonder if I could have a minute of your time, Doctor... Drummond turns to the voice. CAMERA PULLS BACK to include the man who had been brought into the E.R. by a uniformed cop. DRUMMOND I am the fool for Christ and the Paraclete of Caborca. NAMELESS MAN Well, it's an honor and a privilege, Doctor. I've been here ten minutes, I can't seem to get anybody to help me. I'm suffering from some sort of amnesia. I can't remember my name. As a matter of fact, it's pretty screwy. I got mugged. Two hours ago, walking out of a coffee shop on Fifty- Seventh Street and Second Avenue, eight o'clock in the morning, broad daylight, I got mugged. A sixteen- year-old girl walks up to me, shows me a knife about a yard long and says, "Give me your wallet." I thought she was kidding. I mean there's hundreds of people walking right by. Well, she wasn't kidding. "Listen," I said, "all I got's about twenty bucks." So she takes the wallet anyway. So I said, "How about leaving me my identification?" I mean, I had my driver's license, my Diner's Club, my credit cards. But she took them all, the whole damn wallet, credit cards, everything. So I stopped some guy, I said, "Hey, you see that girl there, walking away?" He says, "Yeah." I said, "She just stole my wallet, credit cards and everything." He says, "Well, that's what they want, the credit cards." So I started looking for a cop. I mean, go find a cop, right? Well, I finally find a cop. The girl's halfway to South America by now, probably bought the ticket with my credit cards. So the cop says, "What's your name?" And you want to know something? I couldn't think of my name. The girl took all my identification, you know what I mean? She took all my credit cards. So I said, "You know this is screwy. I can't think of my name." So he took me to the station house. The sergeant says, "What's your name?" I said, "I don't know! She took all my credit cards!" So they took me down here. So what do you think, Doctor? I'm nuts, right? I finally flipped. PAN SLOWLY to Drummond who stares at the Nameless Man. In BACKGROUND the door opens and Mrs. Cushing, the lady from accounting, enters. She calls out in her annoying voice from a chart. MRS. CUSHING Who's number 7-6-8-0-2-S? Is there anybody here who is that number? DRUMMOND (off-screen) In this way was it revealed to me the manner of Nurse Campanella's death. She was to die of the great American plague -- vestigial identity. RETURN FROM FLASHBACK: ROOM 806. DAY Drummond in his hospital shift, gaunt and mad as a prophet, sits rigidly on his chair. Barbara perches on her father's bed. Bock wanders disorientedly about the room, staring incredulously first at Barbara and then at her father. DRUMMOND So last night, I coshed Miss Campanella with a sandbag, sedated her with thorazine, shaved her, prepped her, and parked her in a corridor of the X-Ray Department for five hours. BOCK Why X-Ray? DRUMMOND Well, at X-Ray, a sedated body lying around unattended for five hours wouldn't seem unusual. BOCK Of course. DRUMMOND Her operation -- that is to say, Mrs. Mangafranni's operation -- was not scheduled until nine-thirty. So at nine-fifteen this morning, I rang for my nurse... BOCK You rang for your nurse? DRUMMOND To insure one full hour of uninterrupted privacy. BOCK Oh yes. DRUMMOND I got up, wheeled Miss Campanella off to the operating rooms, replaced her bed with Mrs. Mangafranni's, exchanged charts and identity bracelets. She died officially of anesthesia shock. But, in point of fact, she died because she was wearing another woman's identity. BARBARA (to Bock) God, what do we do now? Let me take him back to Mexico. It's a simple world there. If you turn him in, they'll just cage him in the Rockland State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Let me take him back, Herb. BOCK Are you kidding? We'll both take him. I'm going with you! Get him dressed. We're getting out of here before the police put us all in Rockland State. DRUMMOND I haven't finished my work here. I have this Welbeck to dispose of. I am the angel of the bottomless pit and the wrath of the lamb. BARBARA Oh dear, he's having another revelation. Bock holds Drummond's coat and hat and crosses to take his arm. He finds the entranced Drummond as rigid as a statue. BOCK Look, that ambulance must be here by now. You go down and get them. I'll give him a shot of something to knock him out. We'll take him to the airport in the ambulance. They both hurry out of the room. Drummond remains enmarbled in his trance. CAMERA SUDDENLY MOVES DOWN to William Mead, whose eyes now open; he has heard it all. In background, Drummond, suddenly released from his catatonic trance, heads for the armoire and extracts the white trousers of Dr. Schaefer's uniform. He puts them on, tucking in the tails of his hospital shift. He notices William Mead staring at him. DRUMMOND You're hallucinating again. William Mead just stares at Drummond. EIGHTH FLOOR, NURSES' STATION AND LOBBY AREA Bock and Barbara come hurrying around the corner from the west corridor. Barbara heads for the elevators. Bock heads for the Nurses' Station. The Eighth Floor is going about its normal 1:15 P.M. activity. Mrs. Donovan is at her desk on the phone. MRS. DONOVAN ...Edwards never showed up. I'm short- staffed as hell. It's just me and Felicia. It's like Sunday. Nobody's here. DR. BIEGELMAN I'll be at lunch... A nurse's aid, a bathrobed patient and two of his visitors stroll by. It's the end of the lunch hour, when the kitchen workers bring used trays back. MRS. DONOVAN Yeah, you gotta send me somebody... Oh yeah? Bock moves past Mrs. Donovan and into the pharmacy where we see him scouring the shelves for thorazine and a syringe. An elevator arrives, disgorging Milton Mead and his resident assistant, Thomas Hitchcock and, of all people, Dr. Richard Welbeck himself. Barbara and Dr. Biegelman go into the elevator. The doors close. Milton Mead and Hitchcock head for the west corridor. Welbeck, in his natty double-breasted suit and carrying his cashmere coat, heads straight for the Nurses' Station. MEAD We'll be in Eight-O-Six. MRS. DONOVAN (chuckles into phone) ...then what did she say? WELBECK (to Mrs. Donovan) I'm Dr. Welbeck. I have a patient on this floor named Drummond, and I'd like to see his chart. MRS. DONOVAN I'll call you back. Bock immediately emerges from the pharmacy holding a bottle of thorazine and a wrapped hypodermic syringe. He scowls at Welbeck, who scowls back. WELBECK Oh, Dr. Bock. Can I have a few minutes of your time, sir? BOCK No. He starts to pass Mrs. Donovan and would continue, but Welbeck lays a restraining hand on his arm. WELBECK Dr. Gilley tells me you're the one who initiated these proceedings against me. BOCK I'm busy, Welbeck. WELBECK I'd like to know what you have against me. BOCK You turned up half-stoned for a simple nephrectomy eight days ago, botched it, put the patient into failure and damn near killed him. Then, pausing only to send in your bill, you flew off on the wings of man to an island of sun in Montego Bay. This is the third time in two years we've had to patch up your patients; the other two died. You're greedy, unfeeling, inept, indifferent, self-inflating and unconscionably profitable. Aside from that, I have nothing against you. I'm sure you play a hell of a game of golf. What else do you want to know? Welbeck's pocket-beeper BEEPS. WELBECK Excuse me for a moment, Doctor. (he reaches over the nurses' desk for a phone) This is Dr. Welbeck. Were you paging me? (regarding Bock with cold scorn) How much do you make a year, Bock? For a guy who makes a lousy forty, fifty grand... (on phone) Hello, Arthur, I understand you've been trying to reach me all morning... Bock turns and heads back for... EIGHTH FLOOR, WEST CORRIDOR ...and down that through the kitchen workers and strolling patients to... ROOM 806 ...which he enters. He is startled to find Milton Mead and Hitchcock leaning over William Mead, who is up on one elbow and in a state. WILLIAM MEAD I'm telling you, Milton, he pulls out all the wires and the tubes, and he gets up and puts on a doctor's uniform, and he goes out, and he murders doctors! He just went out ten seconds before you came in! Indeed, there is no Drummond to be seen. His bed is empty. Bock nods to Milton Mead and Hitchcock, who nod back, and crosses quickly to look into the bathroom which is likewise empty. WILLIAM MEAD And I'll tell you something else about this crazy place you got here! There was a naked Indian in here last night doing a war dance! That's the kind of crazy place you're running here, Milton! You got to get me out of here, Milton. This is a crazy place, Milton! Milton Mead's pocket-beeper BEEPS. Milton Mead reaches for the phone. WILLIAM MEAD (appealing to Bock) I wake up last night, there's a goddam Indian in here, a naked Indian! What kind of hospital is this? MILTON MEAD (on phone) This is Mr. Mead, are you paging me? WILLIAM MEAD A couple of hours later I wake up again, and the guy in that bed there is getting out of the bed... MILTON MEAD (to Hitchcock) Are the police still in the building? HITCHCOCK Yes. MILTON MEAD You'd better get them up here. Yes. WILLIAM MEAD All day long, he lays there like a dead man. All of a sudden, in the middle of the night, he gets out of bed! I thought I was going crazy! MILTON MEAD (on phone) Yes, this is Mead... Oh, dear. When?... WILLIAM MEAD You know what he says to me? He says, you're hallucinating. Listen, I just saw a naked Indian. Now, I'm seeing a ghost. I got to figure he's right, I'm hallucinating, right? MILTON MEAD I'll be down directly. (hangs up) Never rains but it pours. A fire just broke out in one of those condemned buildings. The squatters in the building came out. The police tried to arrest them and, apparently, the situation has erupted into a riot. (to Bock as he heads for the door) I'm sure you're wondering what this is all about, Herb. WILLIAM MEAD You're not going to leave me alone in this crazy place, Milton! MILTON MEAD (at the door with Bock) Mr. Hitchcock is staying with you. (to Hitchcock) You better call the cops, Tom. WILLIAM MEAD Milton! Milton! Milton!!! The door slams. WEST CORRIDOR AND NURSES' STATION Bock and Milton Mead stride up the corridor through the linen wagons and kitchen carts. MILTON MEAD I haven't the time now, and I'm not even going to try to tell you this curious story my brother just told me. I'll fill you in on it at lunch some time. He waves his hand helplessly to indicate the utter incredulity of it all. MILTON MEAD (rushes not to miss the elevator) Hold it! They reach an open elevator. Mead goes in, the doors close. The doors of a second elevator then open, and Barbara comes out. She and Bock stare at each other. In background, Welbeck is on the phone at the Nurses' Station. BARBARA The ambulance is here. BOCK Yeah, but your father isn't. He's disappeared. He put on Schaefer's uniform and has gone out to do God's work, presumably the murder of Dr. Welbeck. Except, that fellow on the phone over there is Dr. Welbeck. WELBECK (in background on phone) Oh my God, Arthur! What are you talking about? Have you talked to Dr. Hogan about this? BOCK And, on top of everything else, the other patient in your father's room overheard his whole confession and just told the Chief Administrator of the hospital. They're sending for the cops. REVERSE ACROSS Welbeck on phone at Nurses' Station. In the background, Bock and Barbara stare at him. WELBECK (almost apoplectic on phone) Oh, my God, Arthur. Well, who held title? Do the underwriters know about this yet?... Oh my God! Arthur, what're you waiting for? Arrest the son of a bitch! Turn him in!... Oh my God! When?... Of course, Arthur, call me right back. I'm at the Holly Pavilion, Eighth Floor. Please! Right away! He hangs up. BOCK Are you all right, Welbeck? WELBECK All right?! That son of a bitch is trying to wipe me out! My partner, the eminent orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Noel Hogan, is a miserable thief. And he's trying to wipe me out! MRS. DONOVAN (extending a chart) Mr. Drummond's chart, Doctor. WELBECK (angrily seizes the chart) What room is it? MRS. DONOVAN Eight-O-Six. WELBECK I'm expecting a phone call. Put it straight through to me in that room. He strides off angrily, followed by an anxious Bock and Barbara, for the... EIGHTH FLOOR, WEST CORRIDOR Bock and Barbara hurry along in Welbeck's wake. WELBECK The son of a bitch has been draining the company with phony purchase orders on another company, of which, it now turns out, his wife is the principal stockholder! Transparent fraud! I'll send him up for twenty years! He wrenches open the door of 806, marches in, followed by Bock and Barbara. EIGHTH FLOOR, ROOM Welbeck advances on William Mead's bed, since he is the only patient in the room. (Hitchcock is on the phone.) WELBECK Well, Drummond, you don't seem that much the worse for the wear. William Mead stares dully at Welbeck. Then he looks dully at Bock. WELBECK (to Hitchcock) Would you mind using some other phone? I'm expecting an important call. WILLIAM MEAD What is this? Who... who is this guy? HITCHCOCK (on phone) Yes, well, I'll be at the Nurses' Desk, Sergeant. It would be futile for me to try to explain this to you over the phone. WELBECK (leafing through Drummond's chart) You've got a bit of fever, Drummond, but you're coming along very well. WILLIAM MEAD I'm not Drummond, you monkey! Drummond's the other bed! The phone now BUZZES. Welbeck and Hitchcock both head for it. WELBECK That's mine. (on phone) It's Welbeck here... Yes, Arthur, go ahead... William Mead is painfully trying to get off his bed. WILLIAM MEAD I'm getting out of this nuthouse! BOCK (pushing him gently back) All right, take it easy, Mr. Mead. Hitchcock, satisfied the call is not for him, exits. WILLIAM MEAD I came in here just to get a lousy polyp cut out. WELBECK (on phone) Oh, my God, what do you mean? How many transactions were there? Bu... but Arthur, I... I borrowed against that stock! I'm in the hole for over three hundred thousand!... WILLIAM MEAD (appealing to the gods) I'm a sick man! I'm supposed to have peace and quiet! WELBECK (on phone and apoplectic) What do you mean, Brazil?! I just spoke to Hogan's office yesterday, and they just told me... The phone slips from his fingers. He turns to stare at Bock and Barbara. WELBECK I'm wiped out. The S.E.C. has suspended trading in my stock! He keels over like a felled tree, falling face-up on Drummond's bed, his legs dangling to the floor. William Mead promptly hides his head under his sheet. Bock moves quickly to the prostrate Welbeck, feels his throat for the carotid pulse, pulls out his stethoscope, rips Welbeck's shirt open, and listens for heartsounds. He picks up the dangling telephone receiver, gets a dial tone. BOCK (on phone) Cardiac arrest, Holly Eight. Barbara strips off her coat. She is still in nurse's uniform. She leans into the hall and calls a passing nurse. BARBARA We have an emergency here. BOCK (rips off Welbeck's natty jacket) Breathe him. Barbara helps Bock get Welbeck's dead weight onto the floor. On his knees, Bock straddles Welbeck's prone form, balls his fist and belts Welbeck on his chest. He begins intensive heart massage. Barbara gets down on her knees, opens Welbeck's mouth and commences mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. In the background, the P.A. system blandly echoes: P.A. SYSTEM (off-screen) C.A.C. Holly Eight. Please clear all corridors. Mrs. Donovan and aides move C.A.C. into the room, immediately followed by Intern Chandler rushing past them. MRS. DONOVAN Where's Biegelman? CHANDLER He went to lunch. MRS. DONOVAN Natch. Get that other bed out of here. William Mead, of course, is still huddled under his sheet. He peers out from under his covers in wide-eyed disbelief and ducks under again. Bock massages Welbeck's heart. Barbara continues mouth-to-mouth. Nurse Felicia Chile hurries in, pushing the emergency cart before her. BARBARA (to Nurse Chile as others begin moving William Mead's bed out of the room) Give him an ambu bag and an airway. VOICE (off-screen) What's been happening? Nurse Chile has shunted the emergency cart aside to let the bed out and is extracting an ambu bag and tube from the cart's lower shelf. CHANDLER (to Seventh Floor Nursing Supervisor just outside door) Watch it... P.A. SYSTEM (off-screen) C.A.C. Holly Eight. Please clear all corridors. Nurse Chile hands the Berman airway and ambu bag to Barbara, who inserts the airway and the ambu tube into Welbeck's mouth and pumps in air by hand. Bock massages away. EIGHTH FLOOR, WEST CORRIDOR Mrs. Donovan and Intern Chandler finally get Mead and his bed out into the corridor where they park it. In background, emergency activity on all sides. The resident cardiologist, DR. GEOFFREY MORSE, and anesthesiologist, DR. LAWRENCE LOOMIS, both thirty-three, come hurtling around the corner. DR. MORSE In here? MRS. DONOVAN Yeah. She follows Morse in as, from the lobby corner, two technicians come racing a max cart and an I.V. stand before them. Behind them, a bewildered Hitchcock moves into view, trying to determine what's going on. HITCHCOCK (to Intern Chandler) Who is it? P.A. SYSTEM (off-screen) Dr. Robert Jackson. CHANDLER One of the patients had a cardiac arrest. Hitchcock looks down at the sheeted figure hunched on the bed parked in the hallway and slowly pulls the sheet off his head. William Mead stares up at him like a hunted animal. Hitchcock covers Mead's head again. ROOM 806 Bock still massages, sweating bullets by now. Barbara works the ambu bag. Dr. Morse is feeling Welbeck's groin for his femoral pulse. DR. MORSE What do you have, Dr. Bock? BOCK Total cardiac arrest. P.A. SYSTEM (off-screen) Dr. Rigby. Dr. Rigby. Dr. Lilac. DR. MORSE How long has he been like this? BOCK About a minute. No pulse, no heartbeat, no respiration... If we can see anything of Welbeck through other bodies, we notice almost all his clothes have been ripped off his body. Dr. Loomis replaces Barbara. DR. LOOMIS All right, I'll take over. The two nursing supervisors have been getting the max cart ready, snapping up the gateleg-footrest and attaching the I.V. tube to the oxygen jar, and that to the ambu bag. BOCK Endotrachial tube. DONOVAN (rushing in background with others) I'm sorry, Doctor, but we have another emergency in 823. CHANDLER Endotrachial tube. DR. LOOMIS Shall we get him up on the cart? DR. MORSE Yeah. Drs. Loomis, Bock and Morse struggle to lift the the nearly naked dead weight of Dr. Welbeck up from the floor and onto the max cart. Dr. Morse has picked up Drummond's chart from the bed where Welbeck had left it. DR. MORSE All right, who is this patient? What's the story on this patient? CLOSE-UP of Bock trying to hoist Welbeck and looking up slowly. DR. MORSE Is this his chart, Dr. Bock? Bock cocks his head to him. DR. MORSE What's his name? Drummond? Bock looks across to Barbara, now helping out at the max cart. She looks back at Bock. She shrugs. He shrugs. They exchange a smile. BOCK Yes, his name's Drummond. That's his chart. Straining under the effort, the three doctors get Welbeck off the floor. DR. MORSE (studying the chart) Oh Christ, the poor son of a bitch just had a nephrectomy a week ago. Mrs. Donovan exits into... EIGHTH FLOOR, WEST CORRIDOR ...as Mrs. Donovan comes out, Hitchcock turns to her. HITCHCOCK Was it Drummond? MRS. DONOVAN Who else would it be? Hitchcock silently thanks God. ROOM 806 DR. MORSE (off-screen) Pick him up. Put him on it. Stop the massage. Welbeck's body is finally on the max cart. Nurses and doctors converge on him. Dr. Loomis sets about intubating Welbeck, and the Nursing Supervisor begins clamping the metal bands of the E.K.G. machine on each of Welbeck's extremities. While all this goes on, Bock and Barbara have picked up the remnants of Welbeck's jacket, trousers, shirt and underwear. Dr. Morse is squatting by the max-cart reading the E.K.G. script as it rolls slowly out of the cart. DR. MORSE Ventricular fibrillation. Get me the paddles. Push another amp of bicarb. The Nursing Supervisor starts applying electrode paste to the defibrillating paddles. Another nurse measures off an ampule of bicarbonate of soda which Dr. Loomis injects into the I.V. tube. DR. MORSE Set it for two hundred. Barbara unsnaps her father's valise and stuffs Welbeck's garments in it. Bock takes Welbeck's coat and piles Drummond's things on top of that. The Nursing Supervisor hands Dr. Morse the defibrillating paddles to place on Welbeck's left breast. NURSE (off-screen) That's two hundred. DR. MORSE Everybody bock away. All back away from the max-cart. Bock and Barbara are at the window, piled up with valise and coats; they look like they're off for Europe. DR. MORSE (off-screen) One-two-three... He pushes the defibrillating button, sending an electric shock through Welbeck's body so as to bounce it into the air. Bock and Barbara remain at the window with heart-resuscitation team in background. Barbara slips into her own coat, in preparation for escape. DR. MORSE (in background) Did he convert? DR. LOOMIS (in background) No, he's still fibrillating. DR. MORSE (in background) Let's go to four hundred. BARBARA (sotto voce to Bock) What do we do now? Bock is staring out the window. Barbara stares out with him. THEIR P.O.V.: looking down onto the U-shaped drive of the entrance plaza of the hospital and First Avenue full of traffic. A band of some fifty black and Puerto Rican youths, including females and young white revolutionaries, most in Che Guevara garb, have broken past the security guards at the gates and spill across the drive. Some policemen and security guards move tentatively out of the hospital to intercept them. The shouting can't be heard from up here. Off-screen we hear the activities of the resuscitation team. NURSING SUPERVISOR (off-screen) It's four hundred. DR. MORSE (off-screen) Everybody back One-two-three... SOUND of the shock. DR. MORSE (off-screen) That didn't work either. FIRST AVENUE. HIGH SHOT Low crowd noises. Bock looks out the window at the protesting mob below. DR. MORSE (off-screen) All right. Let me have a c.c. of Adrenaline and intercardiac needle. CAMERA PANS SLOWLY UP over the melee in the plaza to the fence. Barbara and Bock stare down at the crowd. DR. MORSE (off-screen) Stop the massage. Ventricular fibrillation. Put another amp of bicarb. Two hundred. ZOOM DOWN into the maelstrom to FULL SHOT of the Reverend Drummond dressed in Schaefer's white uniform, standing on the slim island separating the uptown traffic from the downtown traffic. Drummond is a private island of his own, hands stretched to the skies. He is prophesying. DRUMMOND (barely audible above the traffic rumbling heedlessly around him) Let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, for the age is closed, the season of the seventh seal is at hand! ROOM 806 Bock and Barbara slip through doctors and nurses, heading for the door. DR. MORSE Hang isopril, two in five hundred. Let's take one more crack with the paddles. Everybody back off the cart. Bock, carrying two overcoats, and Barbara, wearing hers and carrying her father's valise, exit into... EIGHTH FLOOR, WEST CORRIDOR ...as Bock and Barbara come out, the activity is normal, with the exception of William Mead's bed along the wall. Hitchcock and two overcoated men are in the hallway, and Hitchcock hurries to Bock. HITCHCOCK Is he dead? BOCK They can't get him out of fib. I don't think he'll make it. HITCHCOCK Thank God. (sighs, turns to the two detectives) This should close the case, Sergeant. Bock and Barbara hurry toward the elevators. THE HOSPITAL, HOLLY PAVILION, LOBBY The small army of militants and activists has broken through the security into the lobby. Their entrance is greeted by one small scream from a woman in the lobby. A LEADER of the invading troop calls out. LEADER Everybody take it easy! Nobody's going to be hurt! We just want the Director! Others in the troop shout reassurances, but it doesn't really reassure anybody. The lady in the gift shop closes her door and locks up. People crowd in a solid block in the doorway to the coffee shop to see what's going on. From the long tunnels of corridors, nurses, doctors, administrative personnel pause in their chores and errands and missions to watch the tide of events in the lobby. HOLLY PAVILION, EXECUTIVE CORRIDOR The exit door is wrenched open, and Bock comes hurtling into the carpeted executive corridor toward the lobby, and at that moment the troop of militants come rumbling in from the other end. Every door of the corridor fills with secretaries and administrators unsure of what's happening. Then, Sundstrom elbows his way through the clutch of secretaries in his doorway and comes into the corridor. He regards the militants moving down the corridor toward him. SHOUTING CROWD We want Sundstrom! We want Sundstrom! Community control! Community control! Hip-hip-Hippocrates! Up with service! Down with fees! SUNDSTROM You people want to see me? FIRST MILITANT Yeah, baby, we want to see you... SECOND MILITANT We're taking over this hospital, man... SUNDSTROM I've had it up to here. I'm not dealing with this kind of cheap blackmail! LEADER Now look, man. Now wait a minute there! FIRST MILITANT We're looking for a hostage! LEADER Fourteen people just got arrested for doing... In the background, one of their fellow revolutionaries speaks up... MAN Lookit, man, where's the TV camera? ...but he's shut up by the Leader. LEADER Would you be cool, man? (now yelling) Fourteen people got arrested for doing nothing but living in their homes, which you people threw them out of. CROWD Right on! LEADER So now we're going to arrest you. We're going to hold you hostage and we ain't letting you go un... Ambler, the medical student we met during Bock's teaching rounds, pushes in front of the Leader to face Sundstrom. AMBLER We, the members of the Doctors Liberation Committee indict this hospital for the criminal neglect of the community in which it is situated! We demand an immediate dissolution of the governing and executive boards. SHOUT What are you going to do about those fourteen ghetto people? As the shouts continue, Sundstrom raises a hand to quiet the crowd. SUNDSTROM I am not going to do anything... about anything. SHOUT Yes, you are! SUNDSTROM By God, if you want to take over this hospital, you take it over! SHOUTS We will! Right on! SUNDSTROM You run it! I am finished! I quit! You run it! You pay the bills! You fight the city! MILITANT We will! SUNDSTROM You fight the state! You fight the unions. You fight the community! You... you think you can do a better job, you do it! Now I am finished! I quit! It's all yours! Eyes filled with tears of rage, Sundstrom lowers his head and moves into the mass of militants, which parts for him to leave. CROWD Quit! Quit! The mass engulfs Sundstrom, moving back out into the lobby with him, pushing him, shoving him, humiliating him. REACTION SHOT of Bock watching it all from the far end of the corridor. He closes his eyes and the pain of watching all this shows on his face. He opens his eyes. The corridor is now silent and empty. He hurries to... HOLLY PAVILION, THE LOBBY Bock rushes in, as the milling throng dissolves into the bystanders, security police and city cops. Common sense has settled in and the general tenor is to avoid any further trouble. We can hear the rhythmic patter of cops. SHOUTS OF COPS All right, come on... come on -- Let's clear the area. -- Come on, let's clear this place... Keep cool. Everybody keep cool. Bock elbows his way through the throng as it drifts toward the doors to... THE HOSPITAL, ENTRANCE PLAZA. DAY ...and goes through the gathering police. A mobile TV camera crew and a few reporters are hurrying up through the gates from First Avenue. FIRST AVENUE. DAY The Reverend Drummond stands, a solitary human island, among the shrill ROAR of the city. The protesters protest endlessly, CHANTING, SHOUTING. Absolutely no one pays any attention to the gaunt, doctor-clad sixty-year-old man standing on an island. Except, of course, for Bock, who must pause to wait for a red light. Bock hustles through the traffic to where Drummond stands. DRUMMOND Let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, for the age is closed, the season of the seventh seal is at hand! The age is closed! The season of the seventh se... BOCK Dr. Welbeck is dead. They thought he was you. DRUMMOND Yes, I know. We must arrange to have his body shipped to my Apache village where we will bury him with full tribal rites. In a day or two, somebody'll ask, "Whatever happened to Dr. Welbeck?" And it will be assumed he absconded to Brazil to join his partner, the eminent orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Noel Hogan. Welbeck, too, was mislaid, overlooked, forgotten to death, you see. The ambulance pulls up and Barbara gets out of it. BARBARA (taking her father around to the back) We have to hurry, Dad. The light turns green. The traffic starts flowing around them, disjoined by the ambulance blocking one lane on each side of the dividing island. An ambulance attendant has opened the back doors to get Drummond in. Barbara hurries toward the front, climbs in, holds the door open for Bock. He stands a few paces back. BOCK I'm not going. (he moves to the ambulance, closes the door) The hospital's coming apart. I can't walk out on it when it's coming apart. Somebody has to be responsible, Barbara. Everybody's hitting the road, running to the hills, running away. Somebody's got to be responsible. (across Barbara to the driver) Kennedy Airport. You've got a two- thirty flight to make. He turns, and the ambulance pulls away. Bock goes back to the sidewalk where he meets Sundstrom, now wearing his coat. BOCK You going back in? SUNDSTROM Yeah. They make their way back toward... THE HOSPITAL, ENTRANCE PLAZA The two physicians trudge across the U-drive. SUNDSTROM (matter-of-factly) It's like pissing in the wind, right, Herb? BOCK Right. FADE OUT. THE END