“The other sort?”
“Ah, yes. The Bad Scientist stereotype. The one that cackles evilly over bubbling retorts and Bunsen burners and foaming test-tubes—I’d love to know where they get those from. I’ve certainly never seen such equipment in any lab I’ve ever been in—while he plots the destruction of mankind. The transplanters and the genetic engineers and test-tube-baby people—they’re supposed to be that sort. But you—you’re supposed to be your actual discoverer of a cure for the scourge of mankind! Come on, Hattie—after the way you kicked out at Ferris last night, and cocked a snook at the offered donations, and had a go at Ross-Craigie, who’s the most stereotyped character ever—cut out of cardboard, I swear it, with plywood struts to hold him up at the back—what did you expect? Red roses?”
She laughed then, feeling her face relax and soften, and grateful to him for it. “I must be tireder than I realized. Yes, of course you’re right! Papers don’t really express what people are thinking any more than those stereotypes you talk about really have any resemblance to people like me. So I shouldn’t care what these headlines scream”—she flicked a finger and thumb at the pile of newspapers in front of them on her desk with a dismissive gesture—“any more than I care about last night’s stupidity.” There was a pause and she felt her face and shoulders settle back into some of their original tenseness. “I shouldn’t, but I’m afraid I do. Call it the human bit again. I’m too anxious to be liked. Like most people, I suppose.”
“Most women, you mean! That’s the real difference between the sexes. Men very often couldn’t care less about other people’s responses to them personally. Oscar almost certainly knows he’s heartily loathed by most of the people here and revels in it—sees it as a proof of his administrative ability, probably. Or it makes him feel powerful—like flexing muscles and admiring the ugly bumps they make. And plenty of people dislike me, and much I care! But women—no, they want to be loved. They want to be seen to be nice and friendly and basically very-good-sorts-don’t-you-know: whatever extraordinary things they do—like discovering cancer treatments. And when some of them get together and manage to rid themselves of that particular hangup and set out to get what they want the way men would, and to hell with other people’s opinions, they find themselves getting a double share of opprobrium and anger from the world at large. Remember the suffragettes and think of the Women’s Lib lot now!”
“Theo, dear, whenever you start talking in this cascade fashion, I have the distinct impression you’re soothing me. You’re like a mother dishing out cocoa and biscuits and saying, ‘There, there, dear—don’t you upset yourself—Mummy’s on your side, so forget the nasty boys at school—’”
“Holed in one,” Theo said equably. “It works, though, doesn’t it? You sat there a while ago looking like a half-melted wax doll with the flesh falling off your bones, all tense and creased, all because a few tabloid papers of the dingier sort use you to make their headlines on an otherwise dull day! A few minutes listening to me pontificate and look at you. Solidifying nicely!”
“Not a very flattering turn of phrase, but I’ll take it kindly. Look, Theo, are you busy today?”
“I am, believe it or not. I have a list in”—he glanced at his watch—“about three quarters of an hour. Why?”
“Oh. I hoped you’d be fairly free, as it’s Saturday. I’ve sweet damn all to do here. Can’t get on with another trial until Oscar gives me the go-ahead on another patient—not that there’s anyone suitable in the hospital unit, anyway—and there’s only the animals to worry about. I’ve got a small series started on a half dozen of the new monkeys, but frankly, John and Catherine could run those alone. The vaccines they’re using are the ones I prepared before all this flap started—all I have to do is to collate the observations and graph them against the results of the last seven series I did before starting Ferris. I just thought, if you weren’t too busy, we could–oh well, never mind!” She got up and started to pace the room, restless and irritable.
“Bored, love?” Theo watched her, his eyebrows raised gently. “Is that why you’re so edgy?”
“Oh, I don’t know! Yes, I suppose I am! If only I could get on with some work! If Oscar could stop the series we’re doing, I swear he would—he’s maddening—”
“See it his way, Hattie, if you can. He’s under considerable pressure from Whitehall, you know that. I don’t often defend the man against you, but—”
“Oh, I know! Do you imagine I’m blaming him personally? Of course I’m not! If I could it’d all be less frustrating. As it is—I’m aching to get on with some real work. I feel so useless, prowling around stupid television shows and wasting my time with newspapers—”
The phone on her desk shrilled, and she jumped slightly. “You see what’s happening to me? Edgy as a cat! Hello, Dr. Berry’s unit …. Who?… Oh. Hold on a moment—”
She put her hand over the telephone mouthpiece and said softly, “It’s Sefton—wanting a personal call. Shall I tell them I’m not here? I don’t think I could talk to him without chewing his ears off, after this morning’s papers, on top of last night’s performance—”
“Um. Let me think for a moment.” He sat and looked at her, consideringly, and then nodded decisively. “Talk to him. The man’s entitled to an answer one way or the other. You haven’t told him yet what you intend to do about his offer, after all.”
She grimaced, but obediently uncovered the telephone mouthpiece. “Dr. Berry speaking …. Yes …. Good morning, Sir Daniel …. Hmm? No, I can’t say I am feeling particularly well this morning. Would you, in my shoes?”
Theo got up, and came to perch beside her on the desk, his head bent toward her, and obligingly she shifted the earpiece slightly so that they could both hear the thin clacking tones of Sir Daniel’s voice.
“No, I have no doubt I would not. I am truly very sympathetic, Dr. Berry—I would have protected you from—er—this journalistic onslaught this morning had I been able. Unfortunately, my night editor took it into his head to make a certain amount of—er—shall we say, editorial capital, out of last night’s program. And inevitably, as the Echo leads, so do other papers follow. Once our first edition was out, every other paper naturally picked up the direction and started their own witch hunt—if you’ll forgive the expression!”
“I’m not feeling particularly forgiving about anything this morning, Sir Daniel,” Harriet said icily, and Theo grinned broadly at her and nodded his head in violent approbation. “I don’t enjoy being made a public exhibition—”
“Oh, now, dear lady!” the distorted little voice said. “You can hardly blame the Echo for that. After all, you accepted the ‘Probe’ invitation—”
“Yes, I know that, but—”
“And really, one does need a good deal of experience to be able to handle such—urn—so very sophisticated a public platform!”
“Well, of course, I’m well aware that no one would be likely to call me sophisticated.”
“Oh, please, I meant no judgment on you personally! I was merely making a statement of fact—political fact. I can assure you that you are in good company if you feel chagrin at the—er—errors of judgment in your performance last night. I well remember what the Chancellor of the Exchequer said to me the day after he had suffered at the ‘Probe’ program’s hands! So please, do stop blaming yourself. Also don’t blame yourself for this morning’s newspaper headlines. The only person to blame for those is myself! Had I not been a little—er—wearied, shall we say, by the—discussion–with your daughter’s friend, I dare say—however! That is all by the by. What I would like to ask you, Dr. Berry, is whether or not you have yet reached a decision about joining us at Whyborne? Once you do join us, I think I can assure—indeed, I can promise you that there will be no more public complaining about you of the sort you have unfortunately suffered today.”
“That sounds like a—shall we say, a bribe, Sir Daniel?”
Theo grinned more widely than ever, if that were possib
le, and patted her shoulder in encouragement. Harriet was beginning to enjoy herself; it was extraordinary how different she felt, talking to this man on the telephone, from the way she had felt when facing him beside Oscar’s desk the week before. Then she had felt stupid, and rather helpless. Now, she felt almost powerful, and certainly in control of the conversation. Last time she had been more like a piece of wood swept by the opposing river currents that were Oscar and Sir Daniel. This time, she was a rock unmoved by the pressure. She liked the simile as it came into her head, and grinned back at Theo.
“A bribe? My dear Dr. Berry, you almost insult me! I am not in any way trying to bring pressure to bear on you! I merely made a statement of fact. No more!”
“Well, Sir Daniel, I am going to make a statement of fact,” Harriet said. “A very definite statement. I am not interested in being part of a—a business consortium, now or ever. I am not interested in being made use of, as though I and my work were no more than—than mere commodities. I am sick and tired of all the fuss, all the interminable and exceedingly boring public discussion that’s been going on. In short, Sir Daniel, I am not accepting the offer of a post at your establishment. Thank you for the invitation, but–no. Good morning, Sir Daniel!”
Very gently, she recradled the telephone, and looked up at Theo. “There!” she said, with her voice filled with satisfaction. “Now I feel a tot better!”
“Oh, no! No. Not again,” Harriet said, staring at the newspaper in Catherine’s hand. “I really don’t think I could stand it. Please, don’t expect me to read it—”
“You’ll have to,” Catherine said firmly and put the paper on the desk in front of her on top of the graph she had been working on. “It’s no good trying to pretend it isn’t happening, because it is. And not knowing what everybody’s saying’ll make it worse for you, not easier.”
“It can’t be worse,” Harriet said irritably and pushed the paper away and stood up to begin moving restlessly about the room, her hands thrust into the pockets of her white coat. Catherine leaned against the desk, her arms folded, and watched her.
“Damn it all to hell!” Harriet said after a moment. “What more can they say? I’ve made up my mind—I’m not leaving here, and that’s all about it. So the treatment won’t be available for a long time yet, if ever, and they might as well forget about it and leave me in peace—”
She stopped by the door to the oxygen chamber and stared at it for a moment, and then turned toward Catherine and threw her hands out with what she knew was a faintly melodramatic gesture. “Look at us! Instead of being able to get on with another trial we’ve got to sit here, wasting what little facility we’ve got, because Oscar won’t let me have another patient until the fuss dies down. If the papers are starting again, how much longer must I—”
“If you’d read the paper, you’d see that it isn’t just the same old hooha all over again,” Catherine said calmly. “Like I said, not knowing what everyone’s saying makes it worse, not better.” She reached behind her and picked up the paper and opened it and refolded it to a center spread to show the heavy black print of the headline.
“ARE YOU RICH ENOUGH TO BE ALLOWED TO LIVE?” It trumpeted across the room, and Harriet peered at it but made no move to come and take it from Catherine’s hand. So Catherine shrugged slightly, and began to read aloud.
“‘The new Research Treatment Establishment for Atheroma and Cancer at Whyborne in Buckinghamshire which accepted its first heart attack patients this week, is only to be used for people who can afford to pay the massive fees demanded by the Board of Management appointed by the consortium which set it up. This fact was revealed yesterday in an exclusive Clarion interview with Dr. Ben Shoeman, the young Canadian biologist who first suggested, on the J. J. Gerrard “Probe” program two weeks ago, that the establishment was to be a profit-making organization. “I now have conclusive proof that these people are planning to make money out of the heartbreak of desperate illness,” he told—’”
“Ben?” Harriet said. “Ben told them—let me see—” And she took the paper from Catherine’s hands and read it rapidly. “The five members of the consortium including Sir Daniel Sefton, the newspaper magnate, and Mr. Lewis Pirrie, the shipping millionaire, hold A shares in the private company that is registered as the owner of Whyborne. Dr. Shoeman said, ‘Fees for treatment are not as far as I can discover set out in any official schedule, but I have firm evidence that at least one of the heart patients, a wealthy Cheshire farmer, is paying £200 a week as a basic charge, and his family expects to pay far more for additional expenses as his treatment gets under way. Clearly, only the rich are to be able to make use of these great medical breakthroughs.’”
“There’s more on the leader page,” Catherine said. “And it’s even—well, look for yourself.”
Harriet looked. “UNTO THEM THAT HATH” it was headed, and went on, “and that means not only material possessions but the gift of life itself, if you can use the word gift for what will be so very costly. Until today, disease and death have been the great levelers, striking the rich man at his table and the beggar at his gate with equal ferocity. But no longer is that true. There have been what might be termed straws in the wind; for some time now, the lifesaving technique of treatment on a kidney machine has been hard to get for some poor patients, easier to get for those who could pay, but now we have a situation in which only the rich can be treated. The diseases of heart attack and cancer will no longer deal their painful death to a very small section of our society–the rich section. That this is immoral in the extreme is self-evident. What must be discussed now is what we, the bulk of society who cannot afford to buy health and life so dearly, are going to do about it. Are we going to sit quietly by and watch our mothers, our wives and our children die of cancer, our husbands and fathers succumb to the agony of coronary thrombosis? And make no mistake about it; this sort of heart disease is not confined to the rich, as some people think. The incidence among working-class people, such as bus drivers, is very high. We at the Clarion are committed to a campaign to bring these treatments within the reach of every patient who needs it, whatever his creed, his color and his income. Several unions and particularly those representing young people, such as university students, are holding a joint mass meeting tomorrow afternoon in London’s Trafalgar Square to decide what they are going to do about it. The question we ask now is what are you going to do about it?”
There was a short silence, and then Catherine said, “You see what I mean? You’ve got to know what people are saying. And they aren’t saying that your treatment isn’t available, are they? Anything but.”
“Ben must know I’ve refused to go to Whyborne! What the hell does he think he’s—I told Patty the day after that TV business that I’d made up my mind to stay here at Brookbank and that I’d told Sir Daniel so. So why didn’t Ben say so?”
“Kills half his story if he does, doesn’t it?” Catherine said.
“What?”
“If he let on he knew that you weren’t going to work for this Whyborne lot, there wouldn’t be so much to hold a meeting about, would there? Not so much to sound off in the papers about? A treatment for heart disease matters, of course, but cancer—that gets everybody where they live, always has. So he doesn’t bother to mention you one way or the other, and lets the Clarion people think you’re going there—and why shouldn’t they think it, seeing that Sefton man said loud and clear that you were, and hasn’t murmured a word about your saying no to him?—and leaves them to write what they want It makes a bigger noise that way. Sells more papers.”
“But Ben doesn’t care about selling papers, Catherine! Anything but. He’s a great crusading Communist, and—”
“Exactly. And what do Communists want all the time? Revolutions, that’s what. And believe me, this Ben is using you and your work for his own ends just as much as he says these other people are doing. I hate the whole bloody lot of them, Communists and Capitalists. For my part, they can all go and—”
She produced a thick sound in her throat, part snort and part growl, and shrugged. “Ah, what’s the good of anything? All we want to do is get on with a job, and all this—it’s enough to make you spit.”
They sat in silence for a while, and then Harriet said, “I think I’ve got to do something about all this. Haven’t I, Catherine? I can’t let it all just go on and on, can I?”
“I’m not the person to ask! How can I say? All I want is to see you get on with the work. It’s—as far as I’m concerned, it’s the most important thing in the world. My mother died of cancer of the uterus, and I looked after her the last three months. She just rotted away, and she wasn’t fifty. And you’ve got—well, I’m only a technical assistant, but I’m not as stupid as some might think. And I’m as sure as I’m standing here that you’ve got the cure in your hands, that you’re the only scientist working in the field who has, and it’s wicked, wicked that all these rotten politicians and money grubbers can stop you from getting on with it, that—that great stupid idiot Bell can—” she stopped sharply, red-faced and breathless, and shook her head, and Harriet stared at her, amazed. “Catherine! I’ve never known you so—”
A Time to Heal Page 15