Two flights up, he entered the administrative wing. It was a quick walk to his office suite.

A dour young woman with an impenetrable knot of sprayed-stiff blond hair looked up at him as he entered the outer office. A clunky black Smith-Corona typewriter sat on her desktop.

Miss Purvish was Smith's semipermanent secretary. Although only one woman manned his outer office at a given time, he didn't have just one to do the job.

It was all part of the larger problem of security. Although Smith was careful in the extreme, he could not possibly hope to cover every base. It might just be possible for a secretary to see enough, read enough, piece together enough to get some something of an idea of what was going on at that big, ivy-covered building on Long Island Sound.

But he was head of Folcroft, as well as head of CURE. And as the former, he could not very well greet the families of potential patients personally. A man in his position without a secretary to guard his outer office would raise suspicion. But a secretary-while necessary if only for appearance sake alone-presented an inherent security risk.

Early on he settled on a scheme that seemed to keep a potential problem from exploding into a crisis. As new director of Folcroft, he initiated a policy of cross training. The various Folcroft secretaries were occasionally required to fill duty shifts in the medical wing of the facility. At the same time, some of the female medical personnel were trained in secretarial work. Smith personally oversaw the scheduling of work shifts and even lunch breaks to prevent the women who worked directly for him from coming into contact with one another.

For eight years the schedule seemed to work. No one secretary was with him long enough to learn anything of value.