Doctor In The Swim Read Online Free

odd thing about New York. Even though you’ve never been further west before than Ilfracombe, as soon as you hit the place you suffer what the neurologists call the déjà-vu phenomenon – that old I-have-been-here-before feeling. You’re perfectly at home among the apparently topless towers and the apparently endless avenues, the advertisements in Times Square which shoot real smoke rings and real waterfalls in the direction of the passers-by, the cars the size of billiard tables, and the police sirens like banshees with some irritating skin complaint. It’s all just like the films, in fact. And that’s not to mention the hot dogs and Coca-cola, and the drug stores which stay open all day and all night and sell everything from brassieres to breakfast.
    And there’s another thing about New York. It’s a terrific place, of course, but it seems to have got stuck sometime in a state of confusion which makes dear old London look like a rainy early closing day in Stow-on-the-Wold. As I should have spotted from the start, this left Sir Lancelot like some dear elderly gentleman trying to play croquet in an earthquake.
    ‘Pardon me,’ apologized Dr Archbold, a buzz sounding from his armrest as the car reached our hotel in the middle of Manhattan, where the traffic gets so jammed it looks as though they’ll have to send for men with crowbars to get it unstuck again. He picked up a telephone. ‘Dr Archbold here…yeah…well, I guess I can be right over, if I phone my office.’
    ‘I’ll get your office on the other line, Doctor,’ said the secretary, picking up a telephone from her own armrest.
    ‘Good gracious me,’ murmured Sir Lancelot.
    Medicine, of course, is now fully mechanized in America, like pretty well everything else there except sex, and some people don’t put that past IBM in the near future.
    ‘It’s too bad,’ apologized Dr Archbold, putting down the instrument. ‘I guess I’m gonna be mighty inhospitable and leave you guys at your hotel. I’ve got to go right out and examine a banker in Boston. I’ll take the private helicopter,’ he added to the secretary.
    Dr Archbold stepped back into the air-conditioned Cadillac. Sir Lancelot and I stepped into the express elevator, which shot up ninety-six storeys as though making for Venus and stopped like a butterfly alighting on a rose-petal.
    ‘I take a pot of China tea and a digestive biscuit at seven-thirty in the mornings,’ declared the surgeon to a youth in buttons bringing up our luggage.
    ‘Well, I guess there ain’t no law against it, Pop,’ replied the bellboy cheerfully. ‘For me, I take a Seven-Up and a cookie.’
    ‘The servitors here are pretty chummy, sir,’ I explained quickly while Sir Lancelot’s face went through the colours at the lower end of the spectrum. ‘It’s in the great tradition of American equality. Also, most of them earn about as much as a Harley Street surgeon at home.’
    Sir Lancelot then carried on because the television set in his room was larger than the bed, and I was glad enough to get away from the old boy to my own apartment at the far end of the corridor. But I’d hardly time to unpack my toothbrush before the house telephone rang, with Sir Lancelot on the wire.
    ‘Grimsdyke, I do not want to cause unnecessary alarm, nor do I wish to precipitate panic among the guests, but I feel we should take some elementary precautions because the hotel is on fire.’
    ‘On fire, sir?’
    ‘I thought I made myself perfectly plain–’
    ‘Of course, sir.’ I gave a nervous glance in the direction of the street. ‘But where exactly happen to be the smoke and flames, and the other usual things, sir?’
    ‘The conflagration itself is still no doubt undiscovered. But the heat of the blaze has already reached the upper limits of human endurance.’
    ‘Perhaps I’d better come round, sir,’ I suggested quickly.
    Sir Lancelot had turned on the air conditioner to maximum midwinter heat, while trying to make the