“Look it up.”
“No,” he says. “I want you to save me, Shadrach. I want you to prescribe the Antidote for me.”
“I just told you—”
“You knew what I was going to ask. You were trying to head me off.”
“Please, Jim—”
“But you could get the stuff. You’re probably traveling with a hundred ampoules in your little black bag. Shit, man, you’re Genghis Mao’s own doctor! You can do anything. It’s not like being third from the top in a regional office. Look, we were on the same team, we won trophies together, we had our pictures in the paper—”
“It wouldn’t work, Jim.”
“You’re afraid to help me.”
“I ought to be, after what you just told me. You got dropped for illegal diversion of the Antidote, you say, and then you turn around and ask me to do the same thing.”
“It’s different. You’re the doctor of—”
“Even so. There’s no point in giving you the Antidote, for reasons that I’ve just explained. But even if there were, I couldn’t get any for you. I’d never get away with it.”
“You don’t want to risk your ass. Even for an old friend.”
“No, I don’t. And I don’t want to be made to feel guilty for refusing to do something that doesn’t make any sense.” There is nothing gentle in Shadrach’s voice. “The Antidote is useless to you now. Absolutely entirely useless. Get that straight and keep it straight.”
“You wouldn’t even try some on me? Just for an experiment?”
“It’s useless. Useless.”
After a long pause Ehrenreich says, “You know what I wish, old buddy? That you find yourself in bad trouble someday, that you find yourself right on the edge of the cliff and you’re hanging on by your fingernails. And some old buddy of yours comes along, and you yell out to him, Save me, save me, the shits are killing me! And he tromps on your hand and keeps on walking. That’s what I wish. So you’d find out what it’s like. That’s what I wish.”
Shadrach shrugs. He can feel no anger toward a dying man. Nor does he choose to talk about his own problems. He says simply, “If I could heal you, I would. But I can’t.”
“You won’t even try.”
“There’s nothing I can do. Will you believe that?”
“I was sure you’d be the one. You if anybody. Didn’t even remember me. Won’t lift a finger.”
Shadrach says, “Have you ever done any carpentry, Jim?”
“You mean, in the chapels? Never interested me.”
“It might help you. It won’t cure what you have, but it might make it easier for you to live with it. Carpentry shows you patterns that you can’t necessarily see for yourself. It helps you sort what’s real and important from what doesn’t matter much.”
“So you’re a carpentry nut?”
“I go now and then. Whenever things cut too close. There are some chapels down by Fisherman’s Wharf. I wouldn’t mind going now. Suppose you come down there with me. It’ll do you some good.”
“There’s a bar at Washington and Stockton that I go to a lot. Suppose we go there instead. Suppose you buy me some drinks on your PRC card. Do me even more good,”
“Bar first, then chapel?”
“We’ll see,” Ehrenreich says.
The bar is dark, musty, a forlorn place. The bartender is an automatic: card in slot, thumb to identification plate, punch for drinks. They order martinis. Ehrenreich’s truculence subsides after his second drink; he grows morose and maudlin, but he is less bitter now. “I’m sorry I said what I did, man,” he multers.
“Forget it.”
“I really thought you’d be the one.”
“I wish I could be.”
“I don’t wish any trouble on you.”
“I’m in trouble already,” Shadrach says. “Hanging on by my fingernails.” He laughs. A new round of drinks comes from the machine. He lifts his glass. “Never mind. Cheers, friend.”
“Cheers, man.”
“After this one we’ll go to the chapel, right?”
Ehrenreich shakes his head. “Not me. It’s not for me, you know? Not now. Not right now. You go without me. Don’t nag me about it, just go without me.”
“All right,” Shadrach says.
He finishes his drink, touches Ehrenreich’s arm lightly in farewell — the man is glassy-eyed, inarticulate — and finds a cab to take him down to the Wharf. But the chapel gives Shadrach no ease today. His fingers tremble, his eyes will not focus, he is unable to slip into the meditative state. After half an hour he leaves. He sees a car full of Citpols in a lot up the block. They’re still watching him. There is a bearded man in street clothes in the car, also. Ehrenreich? Is that possible? At this distance he can’t make out faces, but the heavy shoulders look about right, the thinning hair is familiar. Shadrach scowls. He hails a taxi, goes back to his hotel, packs, heads for the airport. Three hours later he is on his way to Peking.
23
In Peking, ensconced at the Hundred Gates Hotel in the old legation quarter adjoining the Forbidden City district, where Kublai Khan and Ch’ien-lung once held court, Shadrach begins once more to detect emanations from Genghis Mao. He is still some twelve hundred or thirteen hundred kilometers from Ulan Bator, he calculates — beyond the optimum telemetering range, and so the incoming impulses are blurred and faint. Then, too, after these weeks of separation Shadrach is no longer as much in concord with the broadcast from Genghis Mao’s body as he had been. But when he sits very still, when he tunes his attention perfectly to the task, he finds himself able to read the old warlord’s biodata with gradually sharpening clarity.
The gross functions come in best, of course: heartbeat, blood pressure, respiration, body temperature. The Khan’s major systems all seem to be thundering along at their usual level of irrepressible vitality. Liver and kidney action register in their normal range. Basal metabolic expenditure normal. Neuromus-cular responses normal. It never ceases to amaze Shadrach how healthy, how strong, the old man is. He takes a certain vicarious pride in Genghis Mao’s heroic durability and resilience. Some unexpected puzzles begin to develop, though, as Shadrach extends his reach and starts to bring in the subtler, more refined data. These tend to contradict some of the gross indications. The muscle-firing responses do not seem quite right — phosphate breakdown appears weak, enzyme activity off. Blood viscosity is lower than normal and blood pH is nudging slightly toward the alkaline. Intestinal absorption is minutely down, cholesterol accumulation up, perspiration a trifle above normal. None of these things is cause for real alarm in a man of the Chairman’s age who has recently undergone so much radical surgery — it is hardly reasonable to expect htm to be in perfect health — but the combination of factors is peculiar. Shadrach wonders how much of what he is reading is simply an artifact of distance and noise on the line: he is straining for some of these inputs, and he may not be getting them accurately. Still, the distortions, if distortions they are, are remarkably consistent. He gets the same reading whenever he returns to any sensor.
And a hypothesis is starling to take shape.
Diagnosis at more than a thousand kilometers’ range is tricky. Shadrach misses his medical library and his computers. But he has an idea of what the problem may be, and he knows what data he needs to confirm his theory. What he does not know is whether Buckmaster’s implant system is good enough to transmit analogues of such small-scale phenomena across so great a distance.
If blood viscosity is down and blood pH is alkaline, plasma protein levels are probably subnormal, and osmotic pressure, which draws fluids from the tissues to the capillaries, is going to be low. If the hydrostatic blood pressure is normal, as the gross function modulator is telling him, and the osmotic blood pressure is off, Genghis Mao’s tissues may be building up an accumulation of excess fluids — not serious, not dangerous, not yet, but such fluid accumulations may be leading toward the development of edemas, of watery swellings, and edemas can be symptomatic of impending failure in the kidneys, the liver, perhaps the cardiac system. Bearing down in intense concentration, Shadrach roves Genghis Mao’s body in search of signs of excess fluid. The lymphatic-system checkpoints give him nothing but normal levels, though. The reports from the pericardial, pleural, and peritoneal outposts are positive. Renal and hepatic functions, as before, are fine. Nothing seems to be wrong. Shadrach begins to abandon his hypothesis. Perhaps the Khan is not in difficulties. Those few negative indications were probably just noise on the line, and therefore—