Chapter 9

Ray Pinsky was an intelligent man, and a pretty well-informed layman when it came to medical matters.

But he didn't half understand the nature of the procedures his doctors were following in their frantic effort to devise a cure.

There were six separate therapies that were attempted, four of them involving injections of one kind or another. Of the other two, one involved a subcutaneous implant procedure and the other featured an experimental process involving oral ingestion, over a six-day period, of a chemical cocktail which no doubt included derivatives of his unborn child's amniotic fluid.

Each procedure was, serially, given a few days to show some indication that it was effecting an improvement in Ray's condition.

None of them did so.

Dr. Lincoln didn't mince words. "Nothing's working," she told Ray. "Your condition continues to deteriorate, and none of the therapies has afforded us any measurable improvement."

"Are you out of ideas?" he asked.

"In my opinion, we're out of good ones," she admitted. "There are three physicians at the University who've proposed some more radical measures, but to date, we've been hesitant."

"More radical - how?"

"Bone marrow transplant procedures, for one," she said.

"Bone marrow from whom?" Ray said, alarmed. "Are you saying..."

"Yes. They believe that fetal bone marrow would be significantly more likely to afford us access to stem cells with a chance of reacting positively if injected into your body."

"Surely you can't safely remove stem cells from a developing fetus?"

"I don't think so, no."

"So what you're saying is, you want to abort the fetus and take stem cells from the aborted baby to save her father."

"Abortion would only be a fallback, if initial efforts to remove marrow from the living fetus were unsuccessful," Dr. Lincoln said.

"And any such effort probably would be, right? Unsuccessful?" Ray said.

"Don't look at me like that, Ray. I didn't say I agreed with the idea."

"It's barbaric," Ray said forcefully. "That baby is healthy. She's going to stay that way. I wouldn't approve any invasion of that child's body for any reason — not even one that you or some other doctor swore to me would be safe."

"We've done stem cell procedures already that are similar to what these doctors are proposing," Lincoln said, "and they've been ineffective. I tend to believe that this new wrinkle would be ineffective as well."

"I don't give a good goddamn whether you think it would be effective or not. I absolutely, positively won't authorize it, period."

"Don't excite yourself, Ray," Dr. Lincoln said. "There aren't any vultures or vampires on our medical staff. Everyone has been working hard to come up with good ideas. You can't fault these young men and women for trying."

"Maybe it's just my time to go," Ray said.

"I don't see things that way," Dr. Lincoln said. "I never got the impression that you did, either. What about all those very-old people you told me about — the denizens of the second-rate nursing homes that you rescued from imminent oblivion? Wasn't it their time to go, when you interfered with fate?"

"Maybe I'm paying the price for that now," Ray said.

Dr. Lincoln sneered at that one. "To employ the appropriate precise medical term, Ray, that's bullshit, and you know it. You didn't take on those peoples' illnesses or infirmities. You simply spent resources of your own in saving them."

"If I'd known it was going to kill my ass, I might have spaced out my cures a little bit better," Ray said.

"How could you know?"

"What I want to know, Doc, is how come I was able to do this for a year and a half without feeling a damned thing? How come suddenly my body starts to go, and goes downhill like this so fast?"

"With all the questions we've asked and failed to answer since you've been here, Ray, it shouldn't come as any great surprise to you when I say, once again in answer to your question, 'Damned if I know.'"

"You remember that time you brought in those people you'd found - the ones I'd cured, early-on, back when I was okay myself, physically? You remember how excited you were, thinking that maybe they could return the favor?

"But I told you then, didn't I, Doc, that it wouldn't work. Hell, even Carolyn had been cured by me, back when we first met. Don't you think that if cured patients could somehow reciprocate - could pay me back with their own bodies - that Carolyn wouldn't have been able to help me long before this?

"Hell, Carolyn and I experimented with stuff like that before you professionals even came on the scene!"

"We had hope that the group of cured people we found would turn out to be in a separate category from Carolyn," Lincoln said. "They were from farther back in your past, when you were still strong and physically sound. From what you've told us, you were already beginning a perceptible physical decline by the time you met Carolyn."

"All right, all right," he said. "Anyway, nice try, but it didn't work."

"You have to hang on, Ray. There's still time for us to come up with something."

"How much time have I got?"

"There's no way to know. That kind of crap is just for the movies, Ray. Real doctors don't say stuff like 'You've got six months, at the outside.'"

"I'd like at least to hang around, see my kid," he told her.

"Baby's due in less than three months," Dr. Lincoln said.

"You think I can hang in, three more months? What would the movie doctors say?"

"They'd say there's always a chance."

"Okay, then," Ray told her. "That's what I'd like you and the other docs to focus on now. Keeping me alive until Hope is born. I've barely had time to get used to the idea of being a daddy, and I'd like to experience it before I check out.

"Maybe it'd be best if y'all would quit injecting me with this and that, and giving me potions to swallow, and just concentrated on keeping me up around ninety-eight-point-six degrees for three more months. Hell, you can put me in the deep freeze, you want to, so long as you can thaw me out after, so I can meet my daughter."

Dr. Lincoln wasn't an equivocator. "It's going to be a pretty close race, Ray, which event happens first. If you have the will to hang on tight, you might see that baby get born. But there's really no telling. Hell, Ray, we haven't even classified whatever it is that's thrown your body into this awful tailspin. If we don't even have a name for it, who can possibly tell you when it's going to finish its work?"

"Just concentrate on maintenance," Ray told her. "Quit trying so hard to cure me. It ain't gonna happen. Just keep me alive - for now."

It was enough to royally piss a man off. Here he was, Ray thought, age twenty nine and a few odd months, facing his own imminent demise.

Still, he had seen a lot of awfully sick folks in his travels over the past two years, and Ray knew, first-hand, that compared to many of them, he had little to complain about.

His little fatal health problem was the stuff of bad Nineteenth-century fiction. He was wasting away - much like the tender young women in their lacy white dresses who used to suffer from what was called "consumption."

Good word, "consumption." Ray's body was being consumed, much in the manner of someone deprived of food for lengthy periods. His weight was down from his normal one-seventy to something like ninety pounds.

Ray knew he resembled a newly liberated prisoner of war, and he wasn't leaving his bed these days. Not any more. Not at all.

He slept twenty hours a day, and was barely communicating in the hours when he was, more or less, awake. The good news was, he wasn't hurting. No pain at all. Just the goddamned relentless wastage.

Well, he had a million bucks worth of medical expertise on the premises, so if there had been pain involved, Ray imagined they'd have given him some of the good stuff to keep it at bay.

But, strangely, painkillers weren't required.

Carolyn was there with him, every day. Her tiny body remained impressively trim despite her advanced pregnancy. She always seemed to be there during the brief periods at odd hours of the day and night when he was conscious.