“When?”
“They claim whenever we want.”
“My goodness,” Stephanie said. “That certainly begs one’s curiosity.”
“Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“What about a neurosurgeon?”
“No problem there either. There are several on the island beating the bushes for work. The local hospital even has stereotaxic equipment.”
“That is encouraging.”
“I thought so.”
“My news is good and bad. What do you want to hear first?”
“How bad is bad?”
“Everything is relative. It’s not bad enough to preclude what we are planning, but it is bad enough for us to be wary.”
“Let’s hear the bad to get it over with.”
“The principals at the Wingate Clinic are worse than I remembered. By the way, with whom did you speak when you called the clinic?”
“Two of the principals: Spencer Wingate himself and his majordomo, Paul Saunders. And I must tell you, they are a couple of clowns. Imagine this: They publish their own supposed scientific journal, and the process of writing and editing only involves themselves!”
“You mean there’s no editorial review board?”
“That’s my impression.”
“That’s laughable, unless someone subscribes to the journal and takes whatever’s in the journal as gospel.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“Well, they are a lot worse than clowns,” Stephanie said. “And worse than just perpetrators of unethical reproductive cloning experiments. I used newspaper archives, particularly The Boston Globe’s, to read up on what happened last May when the clinic was suddenly moved offshore to the Bahamas. Remember I mentioned last night in Washington that they had been implicated in the disappearance of a couple of Harvard coeds? Well, it was a lot more than mere implication, according to a couple of extremely credible whistle-blowers who happen to have been Harvard Ph.D. candidates. They had managed to get jobs at the clinic to find out the fate of eggs they had donated. During their sleuthing, they found out a lot more than they had bargained for. At a grand jury hearing, they claimed to have seen the missing women’s ovaries in what they called the clinic’s ‘egg recovery room.’ ”
“Good God!” Daniel said. “Why weren’t Wingate people indicted, with that kind of testimony?”
“Lack of evidence and a high-priced legal defense team! Apparently, the principals had a preplanned evacuation protocol that included the immediate destruction of the clinic and its contents, particularly its research facilities. Everything went up in a maelstrom of flames while the principals left in a helicopter. So an indictment wasn’t handed down. The final irony is that without an indictment, they were able to collect on their insurance for the fire.”
“So what is your take on all this?”
“Simply that these people are definitely not nice, and we should limit our interaction with them. And after what I read, I’d like to know the origin of the eggs they will be supplying us with, just to be sure we’re not supporting something unconscionable.”
“I don’t think that is a good idea. We’ve already decided that taking the ethical high road is a luxury we can’t afford if we are going to save CURE and HTSR. Questioning them at this juncture might cause problems, and I don’t want to jeopardize using their facilities. As I mentioned, they were not overly enthusiastic after I nixed any use of our involvement for promotional purposes.”
Stephanie played with her napkin as she thought over what Daniel had said. She didn’t like dealing with the Wingate Clinic at all, but it was true that she and Daniel didn’t have a lot of choice with the time constraints they were under. It was also true that they were already violating ethics by agreeing to treat Butler.
“Well, what do you say?” Daniel asked. “Can you live with this?”
“I suppose,” Stephanie said without enthusiasm. “We’ll do the procedure and scram.”
“That’s the plan,” Daniel said. “Now let’s move on! What’s your good stuff?”
“The good stuff involves the Shroud of Turin.”
“I’m listening.”
“This afternoon, before I went to the bookstore, I told you that the shroud’s story was more interesting than I had imagined. Well, that was the understatement of the year.”
“How so?”
“My current thinking is that Butler might not be so crazy after all, because the shroud might very well be real. This is a surprising turnaround, since you know how skeptical I am.”
Daniel nodded. “Almost as much as I.”
Stephanie eyed her lover after his last comment in hopes that there would be some evidence of humor like a wry smile, but there wasn’t. She felt a twinge of irritation that Daniel had to be a little more, no matter what the issue. She took a sip of her wine to get her mind back to the subject at hand. “Anyway,” she continued, “I started reading the material at the bookstore, and I had trouble stopping. I mean, I can’t wait to get back to the book I bought. It was written by an Oxford scholar named Ian Wilson. Hopefully, tomorrow I’ll be getting more books, thanks to the Internet.”
Stephanie was interrupted by the arrival of their meal. She and Daniel impatiently watched as the waiter served them. Daniel held off speaking until the waiter had withdrawn. “Okay, you have piqued my curiosity. Let’s hear the basis of this surprising epiphany.”
“I started my reading with the comfortable knowledge the shroud had been carbon-dated by three independent labs to the thirteenth century, the same century in which it had suddenly appeared historically. Knowing the precision of carbon-dating technology, I did not expect my belief that it was a forgery to be challenged. But it was, and it was challenged almost immediately. The reason was simple. If the shroud had been made when the carbon dating suggested, the forger would have had to be shockingly ingenious several quanta above Leonardo da Vinci.”
“You’re going to have to explain,” Daniel said between mouthfuls. Stephanie had paused to start her own dinner.
“Let’s start with some subtle reasons the forger would have to have been superhuman for his time and then move on to more compelling ones. First off, the forger would have had to have knowledge of foreshortening in art, which had yet to be discovered. The image of the man on the shroud had his legs flexed and his head bent forward, probably in rigor mortis.”
“I’ll admit that’s not terribly compelling,” Daniel remarked.
“How about this one: The forger would have had to know the true method of crucifixion used by the Romans in ancient times. This was in contrast to all contemporary thirteenth-century depictions of the crucifixion, of which there were literally hundreds of thousands. In reality, the condemned individual’s wrists were nailed to the crossbeam, not his palms, which would not have been able to hold his weight. Also, the crown of thorns was not a ringlet, but rather like a skullcap.”
Daniel nodded a few times in thought.
“Try this one: The bloodstains block the image on the cloth, meaning this clever artist started with bloodstains and then did the image, which is backward from the way all artists would work. The image would be done first, or at least the outline. Then the details like blood would be added to be certain they would be in the correct locations.”
“That’s interesting, but I’d have to put that one in the category with the foreshortening.”
“Then let’s move on,” Stephanie said. “In 1979, when the shroud was subjected to five days of scientific scrutiny by teams of scientists from the U.S., Italy, and Switzerland, it was unequivocally determined that the shroud’s image was not painted. There were no brushstrokes, there was an infinite gradation of density, and the image was a surface phenomenon only with no imbibition, meaning no fluid of any kind was involved. The only explanation they came up with of the origin of the image was some kind of oxidative process of the surface of the linen fibers, as if they were exposed in the presence of oxygen to a sudden flash of intense light or other strong electromagnetic radiation. Obviously, this was vague and purely speculative.”