Letters to Jenny by Piers Anthony Page B

squeezed through the door together. But it happened that the staff had been waxing the floor that day, and the surface was just about one degree more slippery than a wet bar of soap on melting ice. The nurse in the lead took a phenomenal spill and landed on the floor, sliding right up to the edge of the bed. The doctor behind her landed on top, and the nurse behind him landed on top of him, until there was a pile like a crazy sandwich just about six nurses, two doctors, one cook and a cleaning woman high.
    Now it just so happened, by the type of coincidence that occurs only in a story like this, that the nurse on the bottom of the pile was the very nurse who had once threatened to give the monster under this bed a loathsome shot in the rump. Now her face was right up close, and she couldn’t move. Suddenly a huge hairy hand came out and tweaked her on the nose. She screamed. “EEEEEEEEKK!!” It was the most piercing eeek ever heard in Warp 7, almost as penetrating as the whistle had been. It shook the entire pile.
    Then, slowly, the pile began to fall. The cleaning woman on top grabbed at her bucket of slop water, but all that accomplished was to dump the bucket on the rest of the pile, wetting six nurses, two doctors and one cook. They all screamed with outrage as they fell. After all, it was suspected that that water was supposed to be saved for the next day’s soup. “Aaaaaahh!!” Then the pile crashed to the floor, scattering arms and legs and whatever everywhere.
    At this point the therapist arrived. Her name was Sue. “What are you all doing here?” she demanded indignantly. “This is supposed to be a private session!” The others scrambled out, humiliated. They never were able to find out who had blown that whistle. It is a mystery that remains to this day, because nobody likes to talk about it. In fact the doctors claim that nothing happened, nothing at all.
    But Sue was unable to do the therapy session, because Jenny was sound asleep, with nothing but the very faintest of smiles on her face. Clutched in her left hand, out of sight under the sheet, was a silver whistle. Could it be? Sue shook her head and tiptoed out, so as not to disturb Jenny from her nap.
    Okay, that’s all I have been able to piece together. I wonder how much of it is true? The folk at the hospital all deny that any such thing happened, of course, and there’s a perfectly good explanation why their uniforms looked like tomorrow’s soup, but there is that whistle, and the monster under the bed seems happier than he’s been in a long time. Your mother said something, but it wasn’t at all like this, so she may be in on the conspiracy of silence. We’ll probably never know for sure. But you can tell me: were you
really
asleep?
    I had an experience with my computers this week. You see, I made a lots of notes two years ago for my big novel
Tatham Mound
, which is about the American Indians who encountered Hernando de Soto, the Spanish conquistador who landed in Florida and discovered the Mississippi River. He was looking for gold, and he wasn’t very nice to the Indians who told him they didn’t have any. So this will be a savage novel, and I have over a hundred books I plan to use for research. But my early notes were in my former computer, and I needed to translate them to this computer. Computers don’t necessarily talk to each other, you see; sometimes you have to use eye blinks or keyboards or whatever to find out what they’re up to. The floppy drives were on the blink: they kept saying I had no disk there, when I did. So we were going to have to call the repairman. But I tried it once more, because you know how things play possum, then work perfectly when the repairman is watching. It still didn’t work. I tried it again and again, and it didn’t work. After about six times I tried something dirty: I took the disk out and told it to read the disk. That gave it a real error to chew on. And would you believe: after that, when