Comeback by Dick Francis

straight ahead. The passage itself turned right.
    “That door,” Ken said, pointing ahead, “is the entry to the theater area from this side. The passage goes round to an outside door.”
    He unlocked the theater door, pressed rows of switches to light our path, and led the way into a vestibule with doors on either side and another across the end.
    “Changing rooms right and left,” Ken said, opening the doors and pointing. “Then we go ahead into the central supply of gowns and gloves and so on. We’d better put gowns and shoe-covers on, if you don’t mind, in the interests of cleanliness in the operating room.”
    He handed me a pair of plastic disposable shoe-covers and a sort of cotton overall, dressing in similar himself, and then supplied us also with hats like shower caps and masks. I began to feel like a hospital movie, only the eyes emoting. “Instruments and drugs are in here too,” he went on, showing me locked glass-fronted cupboards. “This cupboard here opens both ways, from this side and from inside the operating room. The drug cupboard has two locks and unbreakable glass.”
    “A fortress,” I commented.
    “Carey took advice from our insurers as well as the police and the fire inspectors. They all had a go.”
    Ken pointed to a door in the left-hand wall. “That leads towards the small-animal operating room or theater.” A door to the right, he showed me, opened to a scrub room. “You can go through the scrub room into the operating room,” he said, “but we’ll go straight in from here.”
    He pushed open double swing doors ahead—not locked, for once—and walked into the scene of his disasters.
    It was unmistakably an operating theater, though the wide central table must have been almost nine feet long with an upward-pointing leg at each corner, like a four-poster bed. There were unidentifiable (to me) trolleys, carts and wheeled tables round the walls, all of metal. I had an impression of more space than I’d expected.
    Without ado, Ken skirted the table and went to the far wall where, after another clinking of keys, a whole section slid away to reveal another room beyond. I followed Ken into this space and found that the floor was spongy underfoot. I remarked on it, surprised.
    Ken, nodding, said, “The walls are padded too,” and punched his fist against one of the gray plastic-coated panels that lined the whole room. “This stuff is like the mats they put down for gymnasts,” he said. “It absorbs shocks. We anesthetize the horses in here, and the padding stops them hurting themselves when they go down.”
    “Cozy,” I said dryly.
    Ken nodded briefly and pointed upwards. “See those rails in the ceiling, and those chains hanging down? We fasten the horse’s legs into padded cuffs, attach the cuffs to the chains, winch up the horse and he travels along the rails into the theater.” He pointed back through the sliding door. “The rails guide the horse right over the table. Then we lower him into the position we want. The table is mobile too, and can be moved.”
    One lived and learned, I thought. One learned the most extraordinary things.
    “You have to support ... er, to carry ... the head, of course,” Ken said.
    “Of course.”
    He rolled the wall-door into place again and relocked it, then went across the spongy floor to another door, again padded, but opening this time into a short corridor which we crossed to enter what Ken called the preparation room. There was a clutter of treatment carts round the walls there, and more cupboards.
    “Emergency equipment,” he explained briefly. “This is reception, where the horses arrive.” He stepped out of the shoe-covers and gestured to me to do the same, throwing them casually into a discard bin. “From here we go back into the corridor and down there into the outside world.”
    A gust of wind blew specks of ash in through the widening opening of the outside door and Ken gestured me to hurry through after him, relocking