Chapter 16

Pal had a lot of time to think after Paul Harshman had tom up her rear entrance and almost destroyed the only mental retreat she had -- the memory world peopled only by a pair of twelve-year-old romantic sweethearts.

It took a number of hours of soul-searching contemplation to get back most of her pride and self-confidence. Most, but not all.

She couldn't quite forgive herself for betraying the private, secret relationship between Terry and herself. She tried to convince herself that it was not a serious betrayal, because in all the intervening years, Terry had not searched her out and claimed her as he had promised.

And after all, she told herself, she was only flesh and blood -- female at that -- and could not be expected to suffer physical agony to keep a secret that might have meaning only to herself.

Yet, it had been her own voluntary blurting out of the first treacherous and prideful words that had started it. If she was so quick to betray their treasured relationship out of pride how could she blame it on the fear of pain?

No -- she could never quite regain the entire person that had been Palmyra Weston before that betrayal.

For a while, it had consoled her to delude herself that her underlying motive in blatting out Terry's name was partly to punish Terry for having deserted her; breaking his promise.

But that consolation hadn't lasted long. She had thought too many times through the years of too many reasons why Terry might be unable to get to her. He must remain innocent and true to his promise until she knew otherwise. After all, he might even be dead.

That thought started her off crying again.

With young men all over the country being killed needlessly in wars, traffic accidents, and all sorts of things, it suddenly seemed all too logical that Terry might have been long dead when she betrayed their private love.

But after hours of self-recrimination and repeated arguments with herself that tore her apart over and over again, she had to do something to retain her sanity.

She took the easiest way she knew.

She forced herself to believe that she had done the best she could under the circumstances, and that she could only go on in the future by continuing to stay alive and as undamaged as she could. What happened after she might escape or be rescued somehow from all this, would depend upon Fate.

Then she began once more to think about the possibilities of escape. First, she had to attempt to figure out just what sort of people were Paul Harshman and Jonas Stillwell.

Pal had handled some pretty difficult patients in her short career. Some of them had been termed impossible by other nurses, but Pal had managed them by trying to analyze their problems.

She would have to analyze Paul and Jonas the same way. Figure out what made them the mean bastards they were. Since she had to start somewhere, she decided to take Paul's word for it that Stillwell was the most sadistic. It could pay to unravel the reasons for his sadism first.

She knew that he was terribly sensitive about his malformed penis. It was entirely understandable. A man was apt to be touchy enough if he though he had been shortchanged in that department, according to the texts she had read.

If a fellow could develop an inferiority complex over having less size than he thought he should have, how much more would it bug a man to have a dog-like appendage that elicited laughter from the females he tried to use it on?

Yes, that one thing could be the entire key to his problem.

Jonas Sillwell's reputation in the field of antibiotics was no secret to any contemporary nurse or doctor. And she knew that it would take a very deep-rooted aberration to move such a man to risk his career.

But yet, wait a minute! Hadn't Jonas, with the equipment he had been cursed with, achieved something that she suspected no other man could have accomplished? After all, how many men were there with such a penis? She had read of none in the textbooks.