Alan shouted for them to let him through, but no one seemed to hear. They kept reaching, touching, calling his name…
He managed to crawl up on the roof of his car, where he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. Eventually they quieted down enough to hear him.
"You've got to back away and let me into the office," he told them. "I'll see you one at a time inside and do what I can for you. Those I don't see today, I'll see tomorrow, and so on. But all of you will be seen eventually. Don't fight, don't push and shove. I know you've all been waiting here a long time. Just be patient a little longer and I'll see you all. I promise."
They parted and let him through. Connie was already inside, having sneaked by while the crowd's attention was on him. She opened the door and quickly locked it behind him.
"I don't like this," she told him. "There's something ugly about this group."
"They've been waiting a long time. You'd be disheveled and short-fused too if you'd been living in a parking lot for two weeks."
She smiled uncertainly. "I guess so. Still…"
"If they make you nervous, here's what we'll do. We'll let them in two at a time. While I'm seeing one, you can be filling out a file on the next. That way we'll keep a good flow going."
Because I'm only going to have an hour or so to do what these people came for.
It began on a sour note, with a surge of pushing and shoving and scuffling to get in when Alan first opened the door. He had to shout and threaten to see no one unless there was order. They quieted. A middle-aged man and a mother with her child were admitted. Both man and child were limping.
Five minutes or so later, Connie brought the mother and child back to the examining room. As Alan stepped into the room, the mother—dressed in a stained housecoat, with dark blue socks piled around her ankles—tugged at the child's hair and it came off. A wig. She was completely bald. Alan noted her pallor and sunken cheeks. She looked to be no more than ten.
"Chemotherapy?''
The mother nodded. "She got leukemia. Least that's what the doctors tell us. Don't matter what they give her, Laurie keeps wastin' away."
The accent was definitely southern, but he couldn't place it. "Where are you from?"
"West Virginny."
"And you came all the way—?"
"Read aboutcha in The Light. Nothin' else's worked. Figure I got nothin' to lose."
Alan turned to the child. Her huge blue eyes shone brightly from deep in their sockets. "How are you feeling, Laurie?"
"Okay, I guess," she said in a small voice.
"She always says that!" the mother said. "But I hear her crying at night. She hurts every hour of the day, but she don't say nothin'. She's the bravest little thing you ever saw. Tell the man the truth, Laurie. Where does it hurt?"
Laurie shrugged. "Everywhere." She pressed her hands over her painfully thin thighs. " 'Specially in my bones. They hurt somethin' awful."
Bone pain, Alan thought. Typical of leukemia. He noticed the scars on her scalp where she had been given intrathecal chemotherapy. She'd been the route, that was for sure.
"Let's take a look at you, Laurie."
He placed a hand on either side of her head and willed all those rotten little malignant centers in her bone marrow to shrivel up and die.
Nothing happened. Alan felt nothing, and neither, apparently, did Laurie.
Alan experienced an instant of panic. Had he miscalculated again?
"Excuse me," he said to the mother, and stepped into his adjoining office. He checked his figures. All the calculations seemed right. The Hour of Power should have started at 4:00 p.m. and here it was 4:05 already. Where had he gone wrong? Or had he? He had never been able to chart the power to the exact minute. It had never failed to appear, but his calculations had been off by as much as fifteen minutes in the past. Hoping the failure a moment ago was due to the quirky margin of error in his charts, he returned to the examining room. Again he placed his hands on Laurie's head.
The charge of ecstasy came, and with it, Laurie's cry of surprise.
"What's the matter, Honeybunch?" the mother said, at her child's side in a flash, pulling her away from Alan.
"Nothin', Ma. Just felt a shock is all. And…" She ran her hands over her legs. "And my bones don't hurt no more!"
"Is that true?" The mother's eyes were wide. "Is that true?
Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!" She turned to Alan. "But is her leukemia cured? How can we tell?"
"Take her back to her hematologist and get a blood count. That will tell you for sure."
Laurie was looking at him with wonder in her eyes. "It doesn't hurt anymore!"
"But how—?" the mother began.
With a quick wave, Alan ducked out and crossed the hall to the next room. He felt exultant, strong, good. It was working! It was still there. The Hour of Power was not perfectly predictable—at least not by him—but he still had it, and he had no time to waste with explanations.
There was work to be done.
Time to quit.
Alan had just effected one of his most satisfying cures. A forty-five-year-old man with a long history of ankylosing spondylitis had come in with the typically rigid spine curved almost to a right angle at the upper back and neck so that his chin was pushed down against his chest.
Sobbing his thanks, the man walked out with his spine straight and his head high.
"That man!" Connie said as she came to the rear. "He was all bent over when he came in!"
Alan nodded. "I know."
"Then it's really true?" Her eyes widened steadily in her round face.
Alan nodded again.
Connie stood before him, gaping. It was making him uncomfortable.
"Is the next patient ready?" he said finally.
She shook herself. "No. You told me to stop bringing them in as of five. It's ten after now."
Five-ten. The Hour of Power was over.
"Then tell them that's it for today. We start again at five tomorrow."
"They're not going to like that," she said and bustled away toward the front.
Alan stretched. It had been a satisfying hour… but he wasn't really practicing medicine. It took no skill, no special knowledge, to lay his hands on someone. The Dat-tay-vao was doing the work; he was merely the carrier, the vessel, the instrument.
With a start he realized that he had become a tool.
The thought disturbed him. The whole situation was bittersweet—emotionally satisfying but intellectually stultifying. He didn't have to get to know the patient or build a relationship. All he had to do was touch them at a certain time of day and wham!—all better. Not his kind of medicine. There was the high of seeing the relief and joy and wonder in their faces, but he was not using any of his training.
Then again, none of his training had anything to do with what he had accomplished today. His fellow doctors would find ways to write off most of the results as "placebo effect" and "spontaneous remission." And why not? In their position he'd do the same. He'd been taught not to believe in miracles.
Miracles—how easily he'd come to accept them after witnessing a few. After causing them. If only he could find a way to get Sylvia to let him try the Touch on Jeffy. She seemed afraid of it and he couldn't understand why. Even if the Touch were useless against Jeffy's autism, he couldn't see how it would hurt to try.
If he could make little Jeffy normal, it would make all the trials he had been through because of the Touch worthwhile. If only Sylvia would give him—