by Harry Stein
“I have to call home,” she said. “I have to tell my family.”
“Of course. Let me get you an outside line. Then we’ll give you some privacy.”
As soon as Logan and Sabrina were alone again, back in the doctors’ lounge, he smiled sheepishly. “It got a little sentimental in there, didn’t it?”
Sabrina turned to gaze out the window. A moment later, when she turned back, he was not surprised to see that her eyes were moist also. “Oh, Logan,” she said, throwing her arms wide, “I can hardly believe this.”
He took her in his arms and held her tight. Suddenly, now, she began crying in earnest; and, within moments, her body was racked by sobs.
“Shhh,” he comforted her, squeezing her even tighter. He managed a small laugh. “What’s going on here? This is good news, Sabrina.”
But as she continued on, he fell silent, his face buried in her hair.
He didn’t want her to see that he was crying too.
Gregory Stillman was waiting when the First Lady’s car—a late-model Chevy Caprice—pulled up to the ACF’s Radiation Therapy Center.
“Right on time,” he said, helping her from the car.
“With all you’re doing for me,” she replied, “it’s the very least I can do.”
“Wait around the corner,” he instructed the driver, and ushered her into the nondescript brick building.
As in all such facilities, the floors aboveground were superfluous. For safety’s sake, the radiation equipment is housed deep underground. They proceeded directly to the elevator that would carry them five stories down.
Mrs. Rivers was operating under no illusions. At their first, extended meeting, Dr. Stillman had explained that, in cases like hers, radiation is almost always the treatment of choice; the conservative one that, for all horror stories told about it, actually carries relatively few side effects. She’d likely experience some diarrhea, he noted, “because there’ll be some scatter into the GI tract,” and perhaps fatigue. But even during the ten-day period she’d be receiving her daily dosage of three hundred rads, she’d be able to carry on almost as normal.
And if such treatment proved unsuccessful in eradicating the cancer? she’d asked.
Stillman had frowned, as if this was a bit of unpleasantness there was no need at this juncture to even consider. Well, he’d replied, there are a whole range of chemotherapeutic options to be considered—plus some exciting experimental options working their way through the pipeline.
“So,” he asked her now, as they slowly descended in the elevator, “how are your children?”
“Well, thank you. Of course, they don’t know about this.”
“No, I would guess not.”
“I’ve talked it over with John. We agree there’s no point telling them now.”
“No.”
She glanced at him, his eyes on the ceiling. She’d always been perceptive about people—far more so, really, than her husband—but it hardly required insight to see that this guy couldn’t have cared less about her kids.
“Do you have children, Doctor?”
“Umm. Actually, I do, yes.”
“Boys? Girls?”
“Two boys.”
“Ages?”
He actually hesitated. “Fourteen and twelve, I think. They live with their mother.”
He thinks? After their first meeting, she’d been prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that his manner was a matter of shyness or discomfort due to her position; heaven knows, she’d made that mistake often enough in recent years. But, no, it was the real thing. Gregory Stillman might be as gifted a cancer specialist as advertised, but he was hardly someone she’d ever choose as a friend.
They emerged from the elevator into a large, well-lit reception area. Today it was deserted.
“Where’s the receptionist?” she asked.
“Almost everyone in this facility has been given the next ten days off. They’ve been told we’re doing repairs on the equipment.”
“I hope no one is being denied treatment on my account.”
“I don’t think so. I would suppose they’ve been diverted to other facilities.”
Abruptly, a door at the far end of the room swung open and a short, dark man in a lab coat walked toward them, smiling broadly, hand extended. “Forgive me, please,” he said, in an accent she took to be Greek, “I was not expecting you quite so soon.”
“Mrs. Rivers,” said Stillman, “this is Dr. Andriadis, our director of radiation therapy.”
He took her hand, still smiling. “I am a great admirer of both yourself and your husband.”
“Thank you.”
“Dr. Stillman has explained the procedure here? Everything is clear?”
“Yes, he has.” It wasn’t complicated, after all. The idea was to kill cancer cells by zapping them with a radiation beam. The specifics—that the radioactivity source was cobalt-60, producing a beam composed of energized photons—didn’t really interest her. She only knew that it destroyed everything in its path, healthy tissue as well as diseased.
“Now, the first thing we shall have to do,” he was saying, “is to draw some red-purple lines on your skin. I’m afraid these will be indelible for about two weeks. But they are necessary, so that each day we aim the beam in precisely the same place.”
She was reassured by his own obvious assurance. “I understand. I’ll just live with it.”
“I tell patients it is not so bad, as long as they stay away from the beach.” He smiled again. “But maybe with this heat, that’s not so easy.”
He led them from the reception area into a spacious room bearing four imposing machines, each set apart from the others by a concrete partition. Waiting here to assist in the procedure were two nurses, one male and one female. “This is where we will do our work,” said Andriadis. “But first I will ask you to put on a gown. The changing room is right over here.”
Only once she was in the room, the door shut behind her, was she aware of the full extent of her terror. She was about to put her life in these people’s hands! To allow her body to be attacked by a device out of a 1950s Japanese scifi film! She couldn’t pretend to be brave any longer. Why, oh why, hadn’t she insisted that John come with her?
But, no, of course not. That was impossible.
“I’m ready,” she said a moment later, emerging from the room.
Dr. Andriadis seemed to sense what she was going through. “No need to worry,” he said, “you will do just fine. We are here to help.”
As she followed him toward the cobalt-60 device, she looked at Dr. Stillman standing off to the side in seeming detatchment. Once again, more strongly than ever, she found herself wishing he were a different kind of man.
When Sabrina answered her door that evening, Logan was standing there with an armful of sunflowers. “Just so you won’t forget who’s the sunshine in your life,” he announced. “To Marjorie Rhome I sent roses.”
She laughed. “So did I.” From behind her back she withdrew two giant packs of Chunkys. “So you will remember who is the sweetness in yours.”
He tossed the flowers onto her living-room floor and took her in his arms. “As usual, I got the better deal.”
She kicked the door closed behind her as they kissed.
“I tell you, Sabrina,” he said, pulling back, “I’ve been flying all day. I can hardly stop myself from telling people!”
“I know.”
He laughed. “Or, rather, throwing it in their faces.”
“When are you seeing Reston?” she was reminded.
“Nine, at his place.” He glanced at his watch. “Bet you’d like to be a little Italian fly on that wall.”
“That way I could see him through a fly’s little prism eyes. Maybe he would look better.”
Something suddenly hit him. “Oh, I got something to show you.” From his breast pocket he withdrew a folded letter. “Talk about fate.”
“What is it?”
“It was i
n my box this afternoon.”
He handed to her. After a moment, she recognized the envelope, identical to the one bearing the first communication from the elderly German chemist two months earlier. This letter was longer than the first, almost a full page of labored old-fashioned script.
My dear Doctor Logan:
Greetings and best wishes. I am pleased to hear from you in your letter of 31 May. The work you do on your protocol sounds interesting indeed. Please let me know of your results, or of publications where I might find such things.
You ask me about the work we did long ago. It was under a Japanese named Mikio Nakano.
Sabrina looked up at Logan. “Nakano?”
He beamed. “Pretty neat, huh?”
Nakano came to our country as a young man and worked for the great Dr. Paul Ehrlich. It was Ehrlich who put him to work on this problem of cancer of the human breast.
I came to know Nakano in 1927, when he arrived to work in the Christian Thomas Company in Frankfurt. He was the chief chemist and of course I was only a young assistant. But we got on well.
I can still see him before me now, very clever and full of energy. Our main work at Thomas was with petrochemicals, but Herr Nakano was most interested still in the cancer experiments with sulfonate derivatives. He was certain he could find a cure!
Herr Thomas at first believed also. But the compounds were highly toxic. Some rabbits became blind and some died. So after a time, Nakano left Thomas.
But I know he did not stop working on this problem. He was a determined man. After all, Paul Ehrlich spent twenty years on the problem of toxicity in his treatment for syphilis. Six hundred six compounds Ehrlich synthesized! And in the end even he found only one solution!
Please, sir, write me more of your work. I am interested in all details. Now I have so much time in my hands, and am so easily bored.
With very sincere regards,
Rudolf Kistner
Sabrina carefully replaced the letter in the envelope. “You see,” she said softly, “it does not all begin with us. This man, he had the same ideas.”
“I wish he could have seen what we saw today.”
She looked at him quizzically. “How do we know that he did not?”
Entering Reston’s front door an hour later, the first time he’d visited the place in months, Logan’s feelings were extremely mixed. Obviously, as a member of the team, John Reston had a right to the extraordinary news; in fact, he should have been told of it hours earlier. On the other hand, it had been Reston who distanced himself from the project. The thought of Reston now sharing in the glory, if, in fact, there was to be any, was almost too much to swallow.
Even tonight, Reston’s first impulse was to trash the protocol.
“So, Danny boy, what’s so important that it couldn’t wait till tomorrow?” he asked, while they were still in the entry way. “As if I didn’t know.…”
“Can we sit down, John? This is pretty important.”
“That bad, huh?” said Reston, leading the way within. “Christ, I’m starting to think of you as Mr. Bad News.”
He took a seat in the cluttered living room. “What is it, another goddamn toxicity?”
“Actually no. It’s about Marjorie Rhome.”
“What about her?”
Logan held up the X rays. “We had pictures taken today. She’s clean.”
Reston sat up. “What are you talking about?”
“Take a look.”
Reston didn’t move. “Clean? As in nothing there?”
“Not that we can see.”
A smile began to bloom on Reston’s face. “Really? You’re not bullshittin’ me?” He got to his feet. “Lemme see those.”
He studied them only momentarily. “Amy!” he shouted. “Amy, get in here!”
“What?” she called from another part of the apartment.
“Baby, hurry!”
A moment later she came rushing in, wearing a terrycloth robe, a towel around her hair. “What!” Then, spotting Logan, “Oh, Dan, I didn’t know you were—”
But already Reston had her in his arms, dancing her around the room. “We’ve had a hit, Amy! The drug actually works!”
“What?”
“We did it, Amy! Compound J’s for real!”
She stopped and turned to Logan, what she was hearing apparently striking her as flatly impossible; clearly, she’d heard nothing but negative talk about the drug for months. “Is that really true? After all the problems you’ve had?”
He shrugged and smiled. “It looks good so far. Of course, it’s pretty early to—”
“Get dressed,” said Reston, “you and I are gonna go out and celebrate. And I mean big time!” He turned to Logan. “You coming along, too, Dan?”
He smiled. “No thanks, I’ve never been any good as a third wheel. Anyway, I’ve got to be somewhere.”
Reston walked over and extended his hand. “Look, buddy, I want to thank you. I guess all the rough times were worth it, right?”
“Hey, we all did our part.”
“Right.” Reston laughed. “And don’t you forget it.”
The next morning, Logan was both pleased and surprised to discover that Seth Shein had not already gotten his hands on the information.
“Well,” said Logan, grinning, “this looks like a first. I get to tell you something important you don’t already know.”
Shein was actually irritated. “And what might that be? Don’t tell me you’ve found yet another way of poisoning patients.”
By now Logan had come to regard Marjorie Rhome’s X rays as a kind of totem. Their effect on others was magical. “Take a look at these,” he said now, sliding them across the desk.
Shein did so—but his face remained disappointingly impassive. “This is your second creatinine patient?” he asked finally.
Logan nodded. “Actually, that was my concern when she came in yesterday morning.”
“And what was her creatinine level? Or were you so swept away by this triumph that you forgot to check?”
“One point nine. Not good, but still eligible to stay on the program.”
“Good.” He paused thoughtfully. “This is an excellent development, Logan, you obviously know that.”
“Yessir.” What was going on here? Logan wondered. Why the hell was he so sober about it?
“My concern,” continued Shein, as if reading his mind, “is that something like this could get you carried away. We don’t know if this result is going to stick, do we?”
“No, we don’t.”
“Nor have you come close to licking your toxicity problem.”
“No.”
“What I’m saying is that one response is nice, but it does not a successful protocol make.”
“Of course not, I know that.” Something was going on here. Could it be that Shein resented this success?
Shein suddenly grinned and threw out his hands. “That said, I am bowled over! Congratulations, Logan, I’ll tell you the truth, I was startin’ to think you were gonna make me look bad.”
Logan laughed. “I kind of got the idea that’s what you were thinking. Never. Not a chance.”
“This is gonna kill that bastard Stillman. Kill him.” He actually cackled. “Have you thought about how to break the news?”
He shrugged. “No, not really.”
“Let me handle that.” He rubbed his hands together. “Start it out as a rumor—you know, some interesting results on the Compound J trial, that sorta thing. Then leak it out in dribs and drabs over two or three days. Make ’em suffer.”
“Shouldn’t we maybe wait a little while? Keep a close eye on Mrs. Rhome—and see if we find activity in any other patients?”
Shein nodded sagely, the cat who’d swallowed an entire nestful of canaries.—“I have a pretty good idea you’re going to be seeing other results.”
“Really!” Logan sat up in his seat. “Why?”
“You haven’t paid much attention to your bunnies lately, ha
ve you, Logan? Too busy playing the big man over at the Outpatient Clinic.”
“The rabbits? Not since yesterday morning when I gave ’em their second dose.”
“Better take a look, then, don’t you think?”
A moment later, Shein was leading him down the hall toward the bank of elevators.
Stepping into the animal holding facility, Logan spotted the change even from across the room. At least half the animals looked healthier, their fur less ragged, their movements brisker and more assured. But it was only when he was beside the cages that he recognized the extent of the transformation: on almost every animal, the tumors were markedly smaller.
“My God!” exclaimed Logan. “Look at that.”
“Look almost good enough to eat, don’t they? If you go for that kind of thing.”
“But it’s so soon. It’s only been four days.…”
Shein nodded. “Wanna know what I think? I think you and your little girlfriend’s playing around with this molecule achieved something quite interesting: you didn’t alter the effects of Compound J but you accelerated the process.”
“In other words—”
“My hunch is that you’re going to see more responses with Compound J. It’s just taking longer than you thought.”
“Why? What makes you so sure?”
“This stuff you made, what do you call it?”
“Compound J-lite.”
He smiled. “Oh, you’re such a clever bastard, aren’t you, Logan? What seems to be happening is that this new stuff of yours isn’t cleared by the body as rapidly as Compound J—which means, since there’s more of it working at any given moment, that its effects are enhanced.”
“So you think we can expect a major response rate?”
Shein gave him that familiar look of contempt. “How the hell do I know? We’re dealing with human beings, not rodents.” He paused. “But it’s a pretty damn good bet you’re gonna get a response in more than just one.”
For a long moment, Logan stared at the rabbits. “That’s good enough,” he said finally. “I’m up for that.”
It was little more than a week before they had their second response. Reston was the one who first noted it. Back on board with a vengeance, he’d been making a point of seeing virtually every protocol patient in for her regular exam, hoping against hope to come up with a “hit” of his own.