"I have examined specimen in great detail, " the little man said carefully. "Track of biopsy needle enters benign adenoma. No cancer there or in any part of breast."
"Are… are you sure? " She could barely speak. "Kate, " Willoughby said, "I reviewed the slides myself. There's no cancer."
"But, there was. I swear there was."
"There was no cancer in my patient, " Green said. "None." His fury at her was clearly under the most marginal control. "You have made a mistake. A terrible, terrible mistake."
Kate stared wide-eyed at the three men. It was a dream, a grotesque nightmare from which she would awake at any moment. Their stone faces blurred in and out of focus as her mind struggled to remember the cells.
There were three breast biopsies, no, two, there were two. Green's patient was the first. The pathology was a bit tricky, but it was nothing she would ever miss in even one case out of a thousand, unless..
.. She remembered the fatigue and the strain of the previous morning, the stress of Jared's being away, the crank phone calls, and the disappearance of Ian Toole. No, her thoughts screamed, she couldn't have made such a mistake. It wasn't as if they were saying she had missed something, although even that kind of error would have been hard to believe, they were claiming she had read a condition that wasn't there.
It was… impossible. There was just no other word. "Did you check the slides from yesterday? " she managed. "The frozens?"
Willoughby nodded grimly. "Benign adenoma. The exact same pathology as in the main specimen." He handed her a plastic box of slides. Green stood up, fists clenched. "I have heard enough. Dr. Bennett, thanks to you, a woman who came to me in trust has had her breast removed unnecessarily. When she sues, even though I will in all likelihood be one of the defendants, I shall also be her best witness."
He started to leave and then turned back to her. "You know, " he said,
"that letter you sent to the papers about Bobby Geary was a pretty rotten thing to do." He slammed the door hard enough to shake the vase of roses on the corner of her desk. Kate could barely hold the slide as she set it on the stage of her microscope. This time, the yellow-white light held no excitement, no adventure for her. She knew, even before she had completed focusing down, that the specimen was benign. It was that clear-cut. Her mistaking the pattern for a cancer would have been as likely as an Olympic diver springing off the wrong end of the board.
"Something's wrong, " she said, her eye still fixed on the cells. The words reverberated in her mind. Something's wrong. She had said that to Bill Zimmermann not half an hour ago. "Kate, " Willoughby said gently,
"I'm sorry."
Only after she looked up from the microscope did she realize she was crying. "Stan, I swear this is not the slide I read yesterday. It can't be." But even as she said the words, she admitted to herself that, as in the situation with Bobby Geary, her only defense was a protestation of innocence. "You've been under a great deal of stress lately, Kate. Do you suppose that-"
"No! " She forced herself to lower her voice. "I remember the biopsy I saw yesterday. It was cancer. I didn't make a mistake."
"Look, " Willoughby said, "I want you to take a few days off. Rest.
After this coming weekend we can talk."
"But-"
"Kate, I'm taking you off the schedule for a while. Now I don't want you coming back into work until after we've had a chance to discuss things next week. Okay? " There was uncharacteristic firmness in the man's voice. Meekly, she nodded. "Okay, but-"
"No buts. Kate, it's for your own good. I'll call you at home and check on how you're doing. Now off you go."
Kate watched her colleagues leave, Stan Willoughby, head down, shuffling a few feet ahead of Liu Huang, who turned for a moment and gave her a timid, but hopeful, thumbs-up sign. Then they were gone. For a time she sat, uncertainly, isolation and self-doubt constricting every muscle in her body, making it difficult to move or even to breathe. With great effort, she pulled the telephone over and lifted the receiver. "I want to place a long-distance call, please, " she heard her voice say. "It's personal, so charge it to my home phone… I'm calling San Diego."
Thursday 20 December
It had taken narcotic painkillers and amphetamines along with his usual pharmacopoeia, but in the end, Becker had prevailed. Now he ached for sleep. He could not remember his last meal.
Catnaps at his desk, cool showers every six or seven hours, bars of chocolate, cups of thick coffee for four days, or was it five?
These had been his only succor. Still, he had endured. In the morning, a messenger would hand deliver his manuscript and box of slides to the editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. The letter accompanying the manuscript would give the man ten days to agree to publish the Estronate studies in their entirety within four months and to oversee the appointment of an international commission to assume responsibility for the initiation of Beckerian population control. The study was in a shambles, with reference books, scrap paper, coffee cups, discarded drafts, candy-bar wrappers, and dirty glasses covering the furniture and much of the floor. Like a prizefighter at the moment of triumph, Willi Becker, more skeleton than man, stood in the midst of the debris and pumped his fists in the air. After forty years and through hardship almost unimaginable, he had finished. Now there was only the matter of gaining acceptance. It was ironic, he acknowledged, that decades of the most meticulous research had come down to a few frenetic days, but that was the way it had to be. With the pathologist Bennett snooping about the Omnicenter and Cyrus Redding's antennae up, time had become a luxury he could no longer afford. Studies in Estronate 250.
Becker cleared off his easy chair, settled down, and indulged in thoughts of the accolades, honors, and other tributes to his genius and dedication certain to result from the publication and implementation of his work. He was nearing receipt of a Nobel Prize when the phone began ringing. It took half a dozen rings to break through his reverie and another four to locate the phone beneath a pile of journals. "Hello?"
"John? Redding here."
The voice brought a painful emptiness to Becker's chest. For several seconds, he could not speak. "John?"
Becker cleared his throat. "Yes, yes, Cyrus. I'm here."
"Good. Fine. Well, I hope I'm not disturbing anything important for you."
"Not at all. I was just… doing a little reading before bed."
Did his voice sound as strained, as strangled, as it felt? "What can I do for you? " Please, he thought, let it be some problem related to their myasthenia. Let it be anything but… "Well, John, I wanted to speak with you a bit about that business at the Omnicenter." Becker's heart sank. "You know, " Redding continued, "the situation with these women having severe scarring of their ovaries and then bleeding to death."
"Yes, what about it?"
"Have you learned anything new about the situation since we spoke last?"
"No. Not really." Becker sensed that he was being toyed with. "Well, John, you know that the whole matter has piqued my curiosity, as well as my concern for the safety of our testing programs. Too many coincidences. Too much smoke for there not to be a fire someplace."
"Perhaps, " Becker said, hanging onto the thread of hope that the man, a master at such maneuvers, was shooting in the dark. For a time, there was silence from Redding's end. Becker shifted nervously in his chair.
"Cyrus? " he asked finally. "I'm here."
"Was there… anything else?"
"John, I won't bandy words with you. We've been through too much together, accomplished too many remarkable things for me to try and humiliate you by letting you trip over one after another of your own lies."