The tumor did not appear. Concealed among the clouds, he was a spectator to that unfolding of events. Men suffered! Their aspect was similar to the mice in the laboratory and also to the young tumors attacked by the Cyclotron.
Then, a modest figure came forward, asserting that she had seen the cancer cry. It was a school teacher, from a school in the suburbs. In the school there was a small telescope, and with this apparatus she had seen the cancer weeping. “It’s true,” confirmed a bell ringer. “I too have seen him cry.” The gravedigger became angry, but the doctors admitted it was possible. “All living organisms can weep.”
The teacher was a disheveled young woman who believed in invisible things. She proposed they gather together all the children of the city so that the cancer should feel compassion. “After all, we’re here to defend the children, aren’t we?”
The teacher tossed her hair a little more until she won out with her idea. Several hundred children were brought together in the cathedral square, in correct formation, looking upwards. “Why are we doing this?” The children still thought that the Red Egg was a “little ball” or “a top.” Until the schoolteacher told them they were mistaken, and that it was death.
The children, upon hearing this word, burst out crying: they were living organisms. They huddled inside their coats. Some tried to run away. The lyrical project of the teacher, which consisted of loosening childish comets and multicolored balloons inscribed with “PITY” in the direction of the cancer, came tumbling down. No one shared her sensibility, and there was a general disbanding of children.
Shadows began sniffing here and there, touching buildings and faces with the evening mystery. The cancer prepared for action. He was nervous because of the cats, camping on the roofs and the walls. He was nervous because he had been born in a mouse. Besides, he discovered a soldier hidden under an eave, with his rifle poised to shoot. There were the firemen, with the ladders ready, the rumble of the helicopters could be heard nearby, and from the Air Base beams of light scanning the sky. No, he could not underestimate the inhabitants’ will to defend themselves.
The Red Egg felt besieged. There was a certain disproportion between his size and the scandalous forces organized to combat him. But his size was precisely his guarantee of immunity. At this, he pulled himself together. He again absorbed a dose of rust and mold, he nourished himself by inhaling emanations from the gas tank, and he mobilized his self-esteem with a glance at the cemetery, which was his guarantee of effectiveness.
At nine sharp, at the instant in which the Red Egg definitely selected his victim, a scream echoed in the cathedral square, piercing the belly of the tumor. “All right, then—kill me!” a man about forty years old, a chimney sweep by trade, had flung out. He was alone in the world and he understood that his work put him in constant mourning. “Why such hesitation?” repeated the man, looking upward. “Kill me!” He loosened the front of his shirt. Powerful hands covered his mouth and made him shut up. It was necessary that suicides should not disrupt the sequence of events.
The cancer was not to be deflected. He went bounding up the chimney which, as a matter of fact, crowned the hospital building. Once there, he stood at the opening and bid farewell to the moon, to the cats and to the rooftops, “Au revoir,” he said. And he leaned into the chimney with his belly of quills.
He started down the blackened tube which on several occasions had been cleaned by the chimney sweep. Once down, he dragged himself through an aseptic corridor, with white doors on either side. He knew the plan of the building from memory. But his presence there was provocative. At the moment, no one passed by; but he would have to choose between the shadowed halls or the risk of being discovered and dying.
On either side there were cancer patients. He greeted their tumors; the sick experienced an unusual twitch. In a large ward he discovered a man immunized against the tumor. He was a cultivator of bees. Each time they stung him, the bees injected formic acid, which apparently acted its a neutralizes
Finally he arrived without incident at the recently inaugurated Surgery Number Three. The victim was inside! It was the surgeon. The most distinguished man in the city, and the most vigorous. Everyone called him “the Doctor.” His scalpel was the most competent in the land. His fingers were long, agile, elegant. Expert fingers. So much so that according to the data in the hospital file, they were directly responsible for the death of almost a thousand tumors in one year, two years, three. ... He was the most anxious and determined enemy of cancer. Neither the internes nor the radio therapists could compare with him. The internes felt impotent and the radio therapists often injured healthy tissues or induced sterility.
The Doctor was there, while at home his wife and children waited, oppressed. With hands gloved, raised, he prepared to intervene. His assistants, encased in green robes, trembled and would have preferred to watch the door rather than the table where the patient lay. The patient, stretched out on the table, anesthetized, had a cancer, an umbilical cancer. The Red Egg immediately recognized the malignancy, but he could do nothing to prevent its uprooting. He had not been given the power to strike like lightning or with the speed of a heart attack.
The Doctor ordered, “Scissors!” In that moment the Red Egg, sliding surreptitiously, reached the Doctor’s right shoe and rubbed himself in its wax, which also nourished him. He remained there for a few minutes, while the Doctor tore up the sublingual tumor by the roots, completely, assassinating it, frustrating its intent to found a small deadly colony in the patient’s throat.
The Doctor made a gesture of victory and turned. In that instant, the Red Egg climbed up the conic hole of his trouser. He penetrated the body in the region of the liver and murmured, “There! Let’s see you operate on yourself, now!”
The Doctor noticed only a slight tremor. As for the cancer, he adhered rigorously to the tissues and settled himself to rest a full twenty-four hours. It had been a hard day. Now there was nothing to do but wait, since neither the Roentgen rays, nor the cyclotron could reach him there. Now there was nothing else to do but grow, to grow little by little until the Doctor, the superman, the only one in the city who had not interrupted his daily work, became pale, felt himself failing, until he would hear, from the mouth of a colleague the irrevocable verdict.
Of course, a true-bred science-fiction writer would have done it differently; the cancer cell’s consciousness would have been based on the latest RNA-DNA “cell-imprinting” theories, and there wouldn’t have been any flying over rooftops: perhaps an adventurous infiltration of the circulatory system instead.
The point is that the near-incredible breakthroughs in medicine and biochemistry this past decade have once again opened the whole area to unlimited speculation. Who is to say, with any certainty, that individual cells (“normal” or otherwise) do not possess “consciousness,” if they have—as they seem to—a structure for “memory”? How do we determine the “good” or “bad” nature of “drugs”, when the same products are adduced as cures for mental disorders and as causes of psychotic breakdowns? What tests can determine accurately whether the disease or the cure (or both or neither) are psychogenic, when solid evidence is produced for apparent “faith healings”? Whose testimony is more valid in the case of a drug like Krebiozen: the positive claims of those who have used it, without scientific tests or control? Or the laboratory-pure negative report of the Food and Drug Administration—negative in two senses, since it says in effect only what was not found in the product?