Free In the Ocean of Night by Gregory Benford

Lubkin said and turned away, shoulders slumped.
    Nigel punched a button on the telephone.
    “Sorry I took so long, I—”
    “Nigel, I’m at Dr. Hufman’s.”
    “What’s—”
    “I, I need you here. Please.” Her voice was thin and oddly distant.
    “What’s going?”
    “He wants to talk to both of us.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know, really. Not totally.”
    “What’s the address?”
    She gave him a number on Thalia. “I’m going down for some lab tests. A half hour or so.”
    Nigel thought. “I don’t know which bus serves that—” “Can’t you…”
    “Certainly. Certainly. I’ll sign off for a Lab car, tell them it’s for business tomorrow.”
    “Thank you, Nigel. I, I just…”
    He pursed his lips. She seemed dazed, distracted, her executive briskness melted away. Usually the efficient manner did not seep from her until evening.
    “Right,” he said. “I’m leaving now.” He replaced the telephone in its cradle.

THREE
     
    A gray haze layer cut off all buildings at the fourth story, giving Thalia Avenue an oddly truncated look. The cramped car labored along with an occasionally irregular
pocketa-pocketa
as Nigel leaned out the window, searching for building numbers. He had never become accustomed to the curious American reticence about disclosing addresses. Immense, imposing steel and concrete masses stood anonymously, challenging the mere pedestrian to discover what lay inside. After some searching, 2636 Thalia proved to be a low building of elegant striated stonework, the most recent addition to the block, clearly assembled well after the twentieth-century splurge of construction materials.
    Dr. Hufman’s waiting room had the hushed antechamber feel to it that marked a private practice. A public medical center would have been all tile and tan partitions and anonymous furniture. As he walked in, Nigel’s attention returned to Alexandria’s unspoken tension and he looked around the waiting room, expecting to see her.
    “Mr. Walmsley?” a nurse said from a glass-encased box that formed one wall of the room. He advanced.
    “Where is she?” He saw no point in wasting time.
    “In the laboratory, next door. I wanted to explain that I didn’t, we didn’t know Miss Ascencio was, ah…”
    “Where’s the lab?”
    “You see, she filled out her form as Single and gave her sister as person to be notified. So we didn’t know—”
    “She was living with me. Right. Where’s—”
    “And Dr. Hufman likes to have both parties present when…”
    “When what?”
    “Well, I, ah, only wanted to apologize. We, I would have asked Miss Ascencio to come with you if we had—”
    “Mr. Walmsley. Come in.”
    Dr. Hufman was an unremarkable man in an ill-fitting brown jacket, no tie, large cushioned shoes. His black hair thinned at the temples, showing a marble-white scalp. He turned and walked back into his office without waiting to see if Nigel would follow.
    The office differed in detail but not general theme from every other doctor’s office Nigel had ever seen. There were old-fashioned books with real bindings, some of them leather or a convincing synthetic. Long lines of medical journals, mostly out of date, marched across the shelves on one wall, punctuated by a model ship here and there. On the desk and a side table were collections of stubby African dolls. Nigel wondered if physicians were given a course in med school in interior decorating, with special emphasis on patient-soothing bric-a-brac, restful paintings and humanizing oddments.
    He began to sit down in the chair Hufman offered when a door opened to his left and Alexandria stepped in. She hesitated when she saw Nigel and then closed the door softly. Her hands seemed bony and white. There was in her manner something Nigel had never seen before.
    “Thank you, dear, for coming so quickly.”
    Nigel nodded. She sat in another chair and both turned toward Hufman, who was sitting behind a vast mahogany desk, peering into a file