He used some equipment that she recognized a glass still, titration equipment, a centrifuge. There were two refrigerators, one of which was not a refrigerator at all, for she could see the large indicator on the door. It stood at 70 F. It came to her that a modern refrigerator is perfectly adaptable to the demand for controlled environ-ment, even a warm one.
But all that and the equipment she did not recognize was only furniture. It was the man who was worth watching, the man who kept her occupied so that not once in all the long time she sat there was she tempted toward the bookshelves.
At last he finished a long sequence at the bench, threw some switches, picked up a tall stool and came over to her. He perched on the stool, hung his heels on the cross-spoke and lay a pair of long brown hands over his knees.
“Scared.”
He made it a statement.
“I suppose I am.”
“You don’t have to stay.”
“Considering the alternative” she began bravely but the courage-sound somehow oozed out. “It can’t matter much.”
“Very sound,” he said almost cheerfully. “I remember when I was a kid there was a fire scare in the apartment house where we lived. It was a wild scramble to get out and my tea-year-old brother found himself outside in the street with an alarm clock in his hand. It was an old one and it didn’t workbut of all the things in the place he might have snatched up at a time like that, it turned out to be ‘the clock. He’s never been able to figure out why.”
“Have you?”
“Not why he picked that particular thing—no. But I think I know why he did something obviously irrational.
You see, panic is a very special state. Like fear and flight, or fury and attack, it’s a pretty primitive reaction to extreme danger. It’s one of the expressions of the will to survive. What makes it so special is that it’s irrational.
Now, why would the abandonment of reason be a survival mechanism?”
She thought about this seriously. There was that about this man which made serious thought imperative.
“I can’t imagine,” she said finally. “Unless it’s ‘because, in some situations, reason just doesn’t work.”
“You can’t imagine,” he said, again radiating that huge approval, making her glow. “And you just did. If you are in danger and you try reason and reason doesn’t work you abandon it. You can’t say it’s unintelligent to abandon what doesn’t work, right? So then you are in panic. You start to perform random acts. Most of them—far and away most will be useless. Some might even be danger-ous. But that doesn’t matter—you’re in danger already.
Where the survival factor comes in is that away down deep you know that one chance in a million is better than no chance at all. So—here you sit—you’re scared and you could run. Something says you should run but you won’t.”
She nodded.
He went on: “You found a lump. You went to a doctor and he made some tests and gave you the bad news.
Maybe you went to another doctor and he confirmed it.
You then did some research and found out what was to happen next—the exploratory, the radical, the question-able recovery, the whole long agonizing procedure of being what they call a terminal case. You then flipped out. Did some things you hope I won’t ask you about.
Took a trip somewhere, anywhere, wound up in my orchard for no reason.” He spread the good hands and let them go back to their kind of sleep. “Panic. The reason for little boys in their pajamas standing at midnight with a broken alarm clock in their arms and for the existence of quacks.” Something chimed over on the bench and he gave her a quick smile and went back to work, saying over his shoulder, “I’m not a quack, by the way. To qual-ify as a quack you have to claim to be a doctor. I don’t.”
She watched him switch off, switch on, stir, measure and calculate. A little orchestra of equipment chorused and soloed around him as he conducted, whirring, hissing, clicking, flickering. She wanted to laugh, to cry and to scream. She did not one of these things for fear of not stopping, ever.
When he came over again, the conflict was not raging within her but was exerting steady and opposed tensions.
The result was a terrible stasis and all she could do when she saw the instrument in his hand was to widen her eyes.
She quite forgot to breathe.
“Yes, it’s a needle,” he said, his tone almost bantering.
“A long shiny sharp needle. Don’t tell me you are one of those needle-shy people.” He flipped the long power cord that trailed from the black housing around the hypodermic to get some slack, straddled the stool. “Want something to steady your nerves?”
She was afraid to speak. The membrane containing her sane self was very thin, stretched very tight.
He said, “I’d rather you didn’t, because this pharma-ceutical stew is complex enough as it is. But if you need it”
She managed to shake her head a little and again felt the wave of approval from him. There were a thousand questions she wanted to ask—had meant to ask—needed to ask. What was in the needle? How many treatments must she have? What would they be like? How long must she stay and where? And most of all-oh, could she live, could she live?
II
He seemed concerned with the answer to only one of these.
“It’s mostly built around an isotope of potassium. If I told you all I know about it and how I came on it in the first place it would take—well, more time than we’ve got. But here’s the general idea. Theoretically, every atom is electrically balanced—never mind ordinary exceptions.
Likewise all electrical charges in the molecule are supposed to be balanced—so much plus, so much minus, total zero. I happened on the fact that ‘the balance of charges in a wild cell is not zero—not quite. It’s as if there were a submicroscopic thunderstorm going on at ‘the molecular level, with little lightning bolts flashing back and forth and changing the signs. Interfering with oommu-nications-static—and that,” he said, gesturing with the shielded hypo in his hand, “is what this is all about.
When something interferes with communications—especially the RNA mechanism that says. Read this blueprint, build accordingly and stop when it’s done—when that message gets garbled lopsided things get built. Off balance things. Things that do almost what they should, do it almost right-they’re wild cells and the messages they pass on are even worse.
“Okay. Whether these thunderstorms are caused by viruses or chemicals or radiation or physical ‘trauma or even anxiety and don’t think anxiety can’t do—it is secondary. The important thing is to fix it so the thunderstorm can’t happen. If you can do that the cells have plenty of ability all by themselves to repair and replace what’s gone wrong. And biological systems aren’t like ping-pong balls with static charges waiting for the charge to leak away or to discharge into a grounded wire. They have a kind of resilience—I call it forgiveness—that enables them to take on a little more charge, or a little less, and do all right. Well, then say a certain clump of cells is wild and say it carries an aggregate of a hundred units extra on the positive side. Cells immediately around it are affected but not the next layer or the next.
“If they could be opened to the extra charge if they could help to drain it off they would, well, cure the wild cells of the surplus. You see what I mean? And they would be able to handle that little overage themselves or pass it on to other cells and still others who could deal with it. In other words, if I can flood your body with a medium that can drain off and distribute a concentration of this unbalanced charge, the ordinary bodily processes will be free to move in and clear up the wild-cell damage.
And that’s what I have here.”
He held the shielded needle between his knees and from a side pocket of his lab coat he took a plastic box, opened it and drew out an alcohol swab. Still cheerfully talking, he took her terror-numbed arm and scrubbed at the inside of her elbow.