Sleep.
Place where wall meets ceiling. Down a bit, late sun-light. Over a little, rusty-gold chrysanthemums in a gold-green glass cornucopia. Something in the way again—his face.
“Can you hear me?”
Yes, but don’t answer. Don’t move. Don’t speak.
Sleep.
It’s a room, a wall, a table, a man pacing—a nighttime window and mums you’d think were alive but don’t you know they’re cut right off and dying?
Do they know that?
“How are you?”
Urgent, urgent.
“Thirsty.”
Cold and a bite to it that aches the hinges of ‘the jaws.
Grapefruit juice. Lying back on his arm while he holds the glass in the other hand.
O/i, no, that’s not …
“Thank you. Thanks very”
Try to sit up. The sheet—my clothes!
“Sorry about that,” he said, the mind—reader-almost-
“Some things that have to be done just aren’t consistent with pantyhose and a minidress. All washed and dried and ready for you, though—any time. Over there.”
The brown wool and the pantyhose and the shoes, on the chair.
He’s respectful, standing back, putting the glass next to an insulated carafe on the night table.
“What things?”
“Throwing up. Bedpans,” he said candidly.
Protective with the sheet, which can hide bodies bat Oh—not embarrassment.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Oh. I must have”
Shake head and he slides back and forth in the vision.
“You went into shock and then you just didn’t come out of it.”
He hesitated. It was the first time she had ever seen him hesitate over anything. She became for a moment an almost-mindreader.
Should I tell her what’s in my mind?
Sure, he should. And he did.
“You didn’t want to come out of it.”
“It’s all gone out of my head.”
“The pear tree, the electroscope. The injection, the electrostatic response.”
“No,” she said, not knowing. Then, knowing: “No!”
“Hang on,” he rapped and next thing she knew he was by the bed, over her, his two hands hard on her cheeks.
“Don’t slip off again. You can handle it. You can handle it because it’s all right now, do you understand that?
You’re all right.”
“You told me I had cancer.”
She sounded pouty, accusing.
He laughed at her, actually laughed.
“You told me you had it.”
“Oh, but I didn’t know.”
“That explains it, then,” he said in a load-off-my-baok tone. “There wasn’t anything in what I did that could cause a three-day withdrawal like that. It had to be something in you.”
“Three days!”
He simply nodded and went on with what he was saying.
“I get a little pompous once in awhile,” he said en-gagingly. “Comes from being right so much of the time.
Took a bit more for granted than I should have, didn’t I?
When I assumed you’d been to a doctor, maybe even had a biopsy? You hadn’t, had you?”
“I was afraid,” she admitted. She looked at him. “My mother died of it—and my aunt—and my sister had a radical mastectomy. I couldn’t bear it. And when you”
“When I told you what you already knew and what you never wanted to hear—you couldn’t take it. You blacked right out, you know. Fainted away. And it had nothing to do’ with the seventy-odd thousand volts of static you were carrying. I caught you.” He put out his aims where they were, on display, until she looked at them and saw the angry red scorch marks on his fore-arms and heavy biceps, as much of them as she could see from under his short-sleeved shirt. “About nine-tenths knocked me out too,” he said. “But at least you didn’t crack your head or anything.”
“Thank you,” she said reflexively and then began to cry. “What am .1 going to do?”
“Do? Go back home, wherever that is—pick up your life again, whatever that might mean.”
“But you said”
“When are you going to get it into your head that what I did was not a diagnostic?”
“Are you—did you—you mean you cured it?”
“I mean you’re curing it right now. I explained it all to you ‘before. You remember that now, don’t you?”
“Not altogether but—yes.” Surreptitiously (but not enough, because he saw her) she felt under it—he sheet for the lump. “It’s still there.”
“If I bopped you over the head with a bat,” he said with slightly exaggerated simplicity, “there would be a lump on it. It would be there tomorrow and the next day.
The day after that it might be smaller. In a week you’d still be able to feel it but it would be gone. Same thing here.”
At last she let the enormity of it touch her. “A one-shot cure for cancer”
“Oh, God,” he said harshly. “I can tell by looking at you that I am going to have to listen to that speech again.
Well, I won’t.”
Startled, she asked, “What speech?”
“The ‘one about my duty to humanity. It comes in two phases and many textures. Phase one has to do with my duty to humanity and really means we could make a classic buck with it. Phase two deals solely with my duty to humanity and I don’t hear that one very often. Phase two utterly overlooks the reluctance humanity has to accept good things unless they arrive from accepted and respectable sources. Phase one is fully aware of this but gets rat shrewd in figuring ways around it.”
She said, “I don’t” but could get no farther.
“The textures,” he overrode her, “are accompanied by the light of revelation, with or without religion and/or mysticism. Or they are cast sternly in the ethical-philoso-phy mold and aim to force me to surrender through guilt mixed—to some degree all the way up to total—with compassion.”
“But I only”
“You,” he said, aiming a long index finger at her, “have robbed yourself of the choicest example of everything I have just said. If my assumptions had been right and you had gone to your friendly local sawbones—and he had diagnosed cancer and referred you to a specialist and he had done likewise and sent you to a colleague for consultation and, in random panic, you had fallen into my hands and been cured—and had gone back to your various doctors to report a miracle, do you know what you’d have gotten from them? ‘Spontaneous remission,’ that’s what you’d have gotten. And it wouldn’t be only doctors,” he went on with a sudden renewal of passion, under which she quailed in her bed. “Everybody has his own commercial. Your nutritionist would have nodded over his wheat germ or his macrobiotic rice cakes, your priest would have dropped to his knees and looked at the sky, your geneticist would have a pet theory about generation-skipping and would assure you that your grandparents probably had spontaneous remissions, too, and never knew it.”
“Please!” she cried but he shouted at her..
“Do you know what I am? I am an engineer twice over, mechanical and electrical—and I have a law degree.
If you were foolish enough to tell anyone about what has happened here (which I hope you aren’t—but if you are I know how to protect myself) I could be jailed for prac-ticing medicine without a license. You could have me up for assault because I stuck a needle into you and even for kidnapping if you could prove I carried you in here from the lab. Nobody would give a damn that I had cured your cancer. You don’t know who I am, do you?”
“No. I don’t even know your name.”
“And I won’t tell you. I don’t know your name either”
“Oh! It’s”
“Don’t tell me! Don’t tell me! I don’t want to hear it. I wanted to be involved with your lump and I was.
I want it and you to be gone as soon as you’re both up to it. Have I made myself absolutely clear?”
“Just let me get dressed,” she said tightly, “and I’ll leave right now.”
“Without making a speech?”