The Terminal Experiment

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Sandra picked up the bottles. Both had small computer-printed labels stuck to them. One said it contained Cardizone-D, which certainly sounded like a heart drug. The other was labeled Nardil. Both had been prescribed by a Dr. H. Miller. The Nardil bottle had a fluorescent orange label on it: “Warning—severe dietary restrictions.”

  “What’s this about dietary restrictions?” asked Sandra.

  “Oh, there was a long list of things he wasn’t supposed to eat. We were always very careful about that.”

  “But he’d been eating take-out food the night he died, according to the medical examiner.”

  “That’s right,” said Bunny. “He did that every Wednesday while I was out at a course. But he always had the same thing, and it had never given him trouble

  before.”

  “Do you have any idea what he’d ordered?”

  “Roast beef, I think.”

  “Do you still have the packaging?”

  “I threw it out,” said Bunny. “It’s probably still in our Blue Box. We haven’t had our trash pick-up yet.”

  “Do you mind if I have a look—and can I keep these pill bottles, please?”

  “Uh, yes. Of course.”

  Sandra slipped the pill bottles into her jacket pocket, then followed her down. The recycling hopper was inside a wicker hamper. Sandra rummaged through it. She soon turned up a small slip of newsprint with Rod’s order from Food Food printed on it.

  “May I keep this, as well?” said Sandra.

  Bunny Churchill nodded.

  Sandra straightened up and put the slip of paper in her pocket. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” she said.

  “I wish you’d tell me what’s going through your mind, detective,” said Bunny.

  “Nothing at all, Mrs. Churchill. Like I said, just loose ends.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Peter had flown to Ottawa for a meeting at Health and Welfare Canada, but it had only lasted only a short time. It could have been done by conference call, but the Minister liked to wield her powers every now and then, summoning people to the capital.

  The soulwave work, of course, wasn’t the only project Hobson Monitoring was involved with. This meeting had been about the still-secret Project Indigo: a plan to produce a sensor that could categorically distinguish between an active smoker and one who had only been exposed to second-hand smoke. That way, the former could be disallowed benefits under provincial health-insurance plans for any illness caused by or exacerbated by smoking.

  Anyway, with the meeting breaking up early, Peter found himself with an unexpected day to spend in Ottawa.

  Ottawa was a government town, full of faceless bureaucrats. It produced nothing except documents and law, legislation and red tape. Still, it had to be a showcase for visiting world leaders—not everything could be in Toronto. Ottawa had many fine museums and galleries, a small amount of interesting shopping, the Rideau Canal (which in winter froze over, letting civil servants skate to work), and the pageantry of the changing of the guard on Parliament Hill. But Peter had seen all those things more than enough times in the past.

  He asked the receptionist if there was a phone he could use, and she directed him to an unoccupied office. With government hiring freezes in their third decade, there were lots of those. The phone was an old audio-only model. Well, thought Peter, if they were going to spend tax dollars putting phones in unused offices, it was good that some restraint was being practiced. Like most Canadian executives, he knew Air Canada’s 800-number by heart. He was about to dial it to see if he could change his flight, but suddenly he found himself dialing 4-1-1 instead.

  A voice said in English, “Directory assistance for what city, please?” Then the same phrase was quickly repeated in French.

  “Ottawa,” said Peter. Video phones could access directory listings at the touch of a few keys, and for those who didn’t have such things, it was cheaper, and more environmentally friendly, to have free directory assistance. About half the time, one got an electronic operator, but Peter could tell by the bored slurring of the words that he’d landed a real live human today.

  “Go ahead,” said the voice, realizing Peter’s language preference from the way he’d said the single word “Ottawa.”

  “Do you have a listing for a Rebecca Keaton?” He spelled it.

  “Nothing under that name, sir.”

  Oh, well. It had been an idle thought. “Thank—” Wait. Although now single, she’d been married for a short time years ago. What had that jerk’s name been? Hunnicut? No. “Cunningham,” said Peter. “Try Rebecca Cunningham, please.”

  “I have an R. L. Cunningham on Slater.”

  Rebecca Louise. “Yes, that would be it.”

  The bored human voice was replaced with a perky computer, which read out the number, then added, “Press the star key to dial that number now.”

  Peter hit the asterisk. He heard a melody of tones then the sound of a phone ringing. Once. Twice. Three times. Four. Oh, well—

  “Hello?”

  “Becky?”

  “Yes. Who’s this?”

  “It’s Peter Hobson. I’m—”

  “Petey! How wonderful to hear your voice. Are you in town?”

  “Yes. I had a meeting this morning at Health and Welfare. It broke up early and my flight’s not till seven this evening. I didn’t even know if you’d be home, but I thought I’d give you a call.”

  “I’m working Sundays through Thursdays. I’m off today.”

  “Ah.”

  “The famous Peter Hobson!” she said. “I saw you on The National.”

  Peter chuckled. “Still the same old guy,” he said. “It’s good to hear your voice, Becky.”

  “And yours, too.”

  Peter felt his throat go dry. “Would you—would you be free for lunch today?”

  “Oh, I’d love that. I’ve got to go by the bank this morning—in fact I was just on my way out to do that— but I could meet you, oh, gee, is eleven-thirty too soon?”

  Not at all. “That would be great. Where?”

  “Do you know Carlo’s on the Sparks Street Mall?”

  “I can find it.”

  “I’ll see you there at 11:30, then.”

  “Great,” said Peter. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  Becky’s voice was full of warmth. “Me, too. Bye!”

  “Bye.”

  Peter left the little office and asked the receptionist if she knew Carlo’s. “Oh, yes,” she said, smiling mischievously. “It’s quite a singles spot in the evening.”

  “I’m going there for lunch,” said Peter, feeling a need to explain himself.

  “Ah, well, it’s a lot more quiet then. Good tortellini, though.”

  “Can you tell me how to get there?”

  “Sure. Are you driving?”

  “I’ll walk if it’s not too far.”

  “It’ll take about half an hour.”

  “That’s no problem,” said Peter.

  “I’ll draw you a little map,” she said, and proceeded to do so. Peter thanked her, took the elevator down to the lobby, and exited onto the street. The walk actually only took him twenty minutes; Peter was famous for his brisk walking speed. That meant he still had close to half an hour to kill. He found an on-demand newspaper box, fed three loonies into the machine, and waited the twenty seconds it took to print off a hardcopy of today’s Ottawa Citizen. He then made his way back to Carlo’s. It was deserted.

  He asked for a table for two, was seated, and ordered black coffee. He looked around the place, trying to imagine it hopping with sweaty flesh in the evenings. He wondered if the receptionist had been pulling his leg. Still, there was a familiar face across the room: the same Molson’s cutie who adorned the wall next to the pay phones at The Bent Bishop. Peter settled into reading the paper, trying to contain his nervousness.

  HEATHER MILLER was a general practitioner with an office in the lower floor of her house. She was about forty-five, short and wide, with che
stnut hair cut in a bob. Her desk was made out of a thick glass sheet supported by marble blocks. When Sandra Philo came in, Miller waved a hand, indicating she should sit in a green leather chair facing the desk. “As I said on the phone, detective, I’m severely constrained in what I can say because of physician-patient confidentiality.”

  Sandra nodded. It was the usual dance, the establishing of turf. “I understand, Doctor. The patient I wish to discuss is Rod Churchill.”

  Miller waited.

  “I don’t know if you’ve heard yet, but Mr. Churchill died last week.”

  The doctor’s jaw dropped open. “I hadn’t heard.”

  “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” said Sandra. “He was found dead in his dining room. The medical examiner said it had likely been an aneurysm. I visited his house and found that you’d been treating him with Nardil, which, according to the label, means he had to watch what he ate. And yet he’d been eating take-out food before he died.”

  “Damn. Damn.” She spread her arms. “I told him to be careful about what he ate, because of the phenelzine.”

  “Phenelzine?”

  “Nardil is a brand name of phenelzine, Detective. It’s an antidepressant.”

  Sandra’s eyebrows went up. Bunny Churchill had thought both her husband’s prescriptions were for his heart condition. “An antidepressant?”

  “Yes,” said Miller. “But it’s also a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.”

  “Which means?”

  “Well, the bottom line is if you’re taking phenelzine, you have to avoid foods high in tyramine. Otherwise your blood pressure will go through the roof—a hypertensive crisis. See, when you’re taking phenelzine, tyramine builds up; it’s not metabolized. That causes vasoconstriction—a pressor effect.”

  “Which means?” said Sandra again. She just loved talking to doctors.

  “Well, that kind of thing could conceivably kill even a healthy young person. For someone like Rod, who had a history of cardiovascular problems, it could very likely be fatal—causing a massive stroke, a heart attack, a neurological event, or, as your medical examiner suggested, a burst aneurysm. I assume he ate the wrong thing. But I warned him about that.”

  Sandra tilted her head. Malpractice was always a possibility. “Did you?”

  “Yes, of course.” Miller’s eyes narrowed. “That’s not the sort of mistake I make, Detective. In fact—” She pushed a button on her desk intercom. “David, bring in the file on Mr. Churchill, please.” Miller looked at Sandra. “Whenever a drug involves substantial risks, my insurance company makes me get the patient’s signature on an information sheet. The sheets for each drug come in duplicate snap-sets. The patient signs them, I keep the duplicate, and he or she takes away the original—with all the warnings spelled out in plain English. So—ah.” The office door opened and a young man walked in holding a file folder. He handed it to Miller, then left. She opened the thin file, pulled out a yellow sheet, and passed it to Sandra.

  Sandra glanced at it, then handed it back. “Why use phenelzine if it has so many risks associated with it?”

  “These days we mostly use reversible MAO inhibitors, but Rod didn’t respond to them. Phenelzine used to be the gold standard in its class, and by checking MedBase, I found that one of his relatives had been successfully treated for the same sort of depression with it, so it seemed worth a try.”

  “And what exactly are the risks? Suppose he ate the wrong food? What would happen?”

  “He would start by having occipital headaches and retro-orbital pain.” The doctor raised a hand. “Excuse me—that’s headaches at the back of the head and pain behind the eye sockets. He’d also have had palpitations, flushing, nausea, and sweating. Then, if he didn’t get immediate treatment, intracerebral bleeding, a stroke, a burst aneurysm, or whatever, to finish him off.”

  “It doesn’t sound like a pleasant way to go,” said Sandra.

  “No,” said Miller, shaking her head sadly. “If he’d gotten to a hospital, five milligrams of phentolamine would have saved him. But if he’d been alone, he could easily have blacked out.”

  “Had Churchill been your patient long?”

  Miller frowned. “About a year. See, Rod was in his sixties. As often happens, his original doctor had been older than him, and he died last year. Rod finally got around to finding a new doctor because he needed his Cardizone prescription renewed.”

  “But you said you were treating him for depression. He hadn’t come to see you specifically for that?”

  “No—but I recognized the signs. He said he’d had insomnia for years and when we got to talking about things, it seemed clear that he was depressed.”

  “What was he sad about?”

  “Clinical depression is a lot more than just being sad, Detective. It’s an illness. The patient is physically and psychologically unable to concentrate and he or she feels dejection and hopelessness.”

  “And you treated his depression with drugs?”

  Miller sighed, picking up the implied criticism in Sandra’s tone. “We’re not stringing these people out, Detective; we’re trying to get their body chemistry back to what it should be. When it works, the patient describes the treatment as being like a curtain drawing away from a window and letting the sun in for the first time in years.” Miller paused, as if considering whether to go on. “In fact, I give Rod a lot of credit. He’d probably been suffering from depression for decades— possibly since he was a teenager. His old doctor had simply failed to recognize the signs. Lots of older people are afraid of having their depression treated, but not Rod. He wanted to be helped.”

  “Why are they afraid?” asked Sandra, genuinely curious.

  Miller spread her arms. “Think about it, Detective. Suppose I told you that for most of your life your ability to function had been severely impaired. Now, for a young person like yourself, you’d probably want that fixed—after all, you’ve got decades ahead of you. But older people very often refuse to believe they’ve been suffering from clinical depression. The regret would be too much to bear—the realization that their lives, which are now almost over, could have been so much better and happier. They prefer to shut out that possibility.”

  “But not Churchill?”

  “No, not him. He was a Phys. Ed. teacher after all— he taught high-school health classes. He accepted the idea and was willing to try the treatments. We were both upset when the reversible inhibitors didn’t work for him, but he was game for trying phenelzine—and he knew how important it was to avoid the wrong foods.”

  “Which are?”

  “Well, ripe cheese for one. It’s full of tyramine as a breakdown product of the amino acid tyrosine. He also couldn’t eat smoked, pickled, or cured meats, fishes, or caviar.”

  “Surely he’d notice if he was eating any of those things.”

  “Well, yes. But you also get tyramine in yeast extract, brewer’s yeast, and meat extracts such as Marmite or Oxo. It’s also in hydrolyzed protein extracts such as those commonly used as a base for soups, gravies, and sauces.”

  “Did you say gravies?”

  “Yes—he should have avoided them.”

  Sandra fished in her pocket for the small, stained slip of newsprint—the receipt from Food Food for Rod Churchill’s last supper. She handed it across the glass desktop to Dr. Miller. “This is what he ate the night he died.”

  Miller read it, then shook her head. “No,” she said. “We talked about Food Food the last time he was in. He’d told me he always ordered their low-calorie gravy—said he’d checked and that it was free of anything he was supposed to avoid.”

  “Maybe he forgot to specify low-cal,” said Sandra.

  Miller handed back the printout. “I doubt that, Detective. Rod Churchill was a very meticulous man.”

  TEN MINUTES EARLY, Becky Cunningham arrived at Carlo’s. Peter got up. He didn’t know what kind of greeting to expect: a smile, a hug, a kiss? Turned out he got all three, with the kiss being a lingering
nuzzle of his cheek. Peter was surprised to find his heart racing slightly. She smelled terrific.

  “Petey, you look wonderful,” she said, sitting down in the chair opposite him.

  “So do you,” said Peter.

  Actually, Becky Cunningham had never been what one would call a beautiful woman. Pleasant-looking, yes, but not beautiful. She had shoulder-length dark-brown hair a bit shorter than was the current style. She was twenty pounds heavier than a fashion magazine would call ideal, or ten pounds more than what any less severe arbiter would suggest. Her face was broad, with archipelagos of freckles on both cheeks. Her green eyes positively twinkled when she talked, an effect enhanced by the network of lines at their corners that had appeared since Peter had last seen her.

  Absolutely wonderful, thought Peter.

  They ordered lunch. Peter took the receptionist’s advice and had the tortellini. They talked about all sorts of things, and there was as much laughter as there were words. Peter felt better than he had for weeks.

  Peter picked up the tab. He tipped twenty-five percent, then helped her put her coat on … something he hadn’t done for Cathy in years.

  “What are you going to do until your flight leaves?” asked Becky.

  “I don’t know. Sightsee, I guess. Whatever.”

  Becky looked into his eyes. This was the natural parting point. Two old friends had gotten together for lunch, caught up on old times, swapped stories of various acquaintances. But now it was time to go their separate ways again, get on with their separate lives.

  “I don’t have anything important to do this afternoon,” said Becky, still looking straight into his eyes. “Mind if I join you?”

  Peter broke her gaze for a moment. He couldn’t think of anything he wanted more in the world. “That would be—” and, after a brief pause, he decided not to censor himself, “perfect.”

  Becky’s eyes danced. She fell in beside him and tucked her arm through his. “Where would you like to go?” she said.

  “It’s your town,” said Peter with a smile.

  “That it is,” said Becky.