Slade twisted his mouth into a faint grin “Coming from you, Gorste, that’s funny.” Then, apologetically: “That wasn’t meant in any unpleasant way”
“I know what you mean, Slade.”
“Have you told Anne yet?”
Gorste shook his head slowly. “I thought it would be better to wait for a while, until after this research is finished. By then I should know for certain. Tests of that kind take some time, several weeks.”
Slade smiled sardonically. “I can’t help feeling it’s a case of physician heal thyself; only in reverse, if you see what I mean.”
“Yes,” said Gorste solemnly, “I do see what you mean.”
The doctor had been sceptical at first, with the mildly benevolent scepticism of the medical profession. He had sat behind his old-fashioned desk in his brown and gray surgery and had listened carefully to Gorste’s reasoned explanation of his fears. Gorste was sitting on a straight-backed hide chair, uncomfortably poised and slightly uneasy in manner, but his voice was calmly methodical and almost impersonal in tone.
The doctor, whose round pink face seemed to hang from his thick brown hair like a tropical fruit, was holding a silver propelling pencil like a dart, and kept making jabbing motions towards the desk top without ever making actual contact. The habit was irritating, Gorste thought, but harm less; it distracted his mind from the logical train of thought he was pursuing, so that he stopped talking prematurely.
“Interesting” said the doctor immediately. His voice was keen and incisive, like the edge of a lancet. “Of course there have been cases of that type, but they are less common than might be supposed. Only recently the A.M.J. published a survey of…”
“I saw it,” Gorste interrupted. “As a biochemist I naturally try to keep abreast of current medical research.”
“Of course. Then you are familiar with the statistics.”
“Yes, doctor. But I’m not a statistic.”
The doctor flicked his silver pencil towards the desk, misjudged the distance and broke the point. Gorste felt gratified. The doctor twisted the pencil until a new point protruded, then resumed his target practice.
“This accident you mentioned,” he said. “Can you supply a little more detail?”
“It happened about eighteen months ago,” Gorste ex plained. “At that time I was working in a nuclear research establishment under the Department of Supply. My particular job was to investigate the effect of hard radiation — gamma radiation, for instance — on living animals. It’s a subject we know all too little about. One of the objects of the research program was to determine the extent to which ambient gamma radiation in the atmosphere might act as a carcinogenic factor.”
“You were engaged in cancer research?”
“Not exactly, but it came into the sphere of our investigations. We used radioactive materials and in some cases dangerous uranium isotopes in our tests on animals. The isotopes are normally stored in heavy lead containers, and are generally handled by remote control equipment known as a robot hand.”
The doctor nodded briskly and put his silver pencil in his pocket.
“Well, the accident just… happened. It wasn’t really an ‘accident” at all. You see, doctor, one of my colleagues tried to kill me. He was a man called Drewin and there had been some misunderstanding about his wife. It was before I was married, of course.
The doctor leaned forward abruptly, a new alertness gleaming in his eyes. “You mean that you were having an affair with this Drewin’s wife?”
“It wasn’t quite like that; it was what you might call a passing infatuation. It lasted about a month. Then Drewin committed suicide.”
“I see; so the infatuation came to a sudden end.”
“Naturally.”
“You say he tried to kill you.”
Gorste nodded slowly. “I didn’t find out until five weeks later. I was making a Geiger test on a dead animal on my bench in the laboratory, and the needle of the Geiger counter nearly wrapped itself round the stop. There seemed to be a devil of a lot of radioactivity around and it wasn’t all coming from the specimen. Well, I tracked it down.”
Gorste paused, drawing in his lips bitterly. “You may find it difficult to believe, doctor, but this man Drewin had removed a container of uranium isotope from its lead case and had fixed it under my bench. I found the case hidden in a cardboard box under his bench. That was how I knew who had been responsible.”
Breathing heavily, the doctor retrieved his silver pencil from his pocket and held it poised over the desk. “That would kill you, of course.”
“In time. The thing was cleated to the underside of the bench top, near the front. Every day for God knows how many weeks I was being bombarded by hard nuclear radiation. In fact, I developed radiation poisoning.”
“Who treated you for it?”
“Nobody. I kept it to myself.”
The doctor placed his pencil carefully on the desk, then stood up and paced the floor, glancing obliquely at Gorste. His eyes were thoughtful, eyebrows slightly raised.
“Why?” he demanded.
“Well,” said Gorste, shrugging vaguely, “Drewin had gassed himself. There was no good-bye note, or if there was his wife had destroyed it. I wasn’t implicated, and the in quest returned the usual verdict about the balance of the mind being disturbed, and so on. If I’d reported the business of the uranium isotope — if I’d even sought medical aid — the whole story might have come out. For the sake of Drewin’s wife, and Drewin himself, dead though he was, I thought it best to say nothing.”
“You weren’t thinking of yourself, of course.”
“I had nothing to lose, doctor.”
The doctor said nothing for a moment. He returned to his desk and sat down heavily, then picked up the pencil and pointed it accusingly at Gorste.
He said: “About the uranium. How far were you from it when working normally at the bench?”
“Six inches to twelve inches.”
“What was the bench made of?”
“Wood with a plastic surface. It wouldn’t stop any kind of nuclear radiation.”
“And how high was the bench?”
“About three feet, perhaps a little less.”
The doctor’s eyes scanned the seated length of Gorste’s slender body, finally settling on his abdomen. “The stomach and pelvic area,” he stated. “Regions of maximum radio active contamination.”
“When you come to examine me,” Gorste said, “you’ll find traces of a radiation bum just here.” He placed one hand over the lower part of his abdomen.
“And you think that as a result of this, this intensive exposure to nuclear radiation, you have become sterile.”
“I’m absolutely certain of it.”
The doctor stroked his chin thoughtfully. “How long have you been married, Mr. Gorste?”
“About a year, just a little more. We had our first anniversary three weeks ago.”
“Well,” said the doctor heavily, with an air of decision, “it is by no means abnormal for a woman to fail to achieve pregnancy during the first year of marriage. Sometimes it may last for two years, or three, or more. There are many cases where a perfectly fertile man and woman are incapable of having a child at all, and for no good reason that doctors can discover.”
Gorste smiled grimly, as if he knew about doctors and didn’t like what he knew. “My case is different. For one thing I know my wife is fertile. During her first marriage she was pregnant twice, but on each occasion there was a miscarriage. So the fault must lie with myself. In view of the radioactive accident I mentioned I think it’s fairly obvious that I have what you might call an advanced case of induced sterility.”
“Very well,” said the doctor, conceding the point. “I’ll have a laboratory test made. For the moment I propose to make a preliminary examination. It is quite probable that you may be right.”