The authorities, in fact, did appeal to the doctors. Various internes advised keeping calm, realizing that the action of cancer in the organism is slow. On the other hand, others opined that the cellular degeneration was produced instantaneously, so that it was imperative to prevent the tumor from diving and penetrating a body. As for the specialists, they surprised everyone. They wanted to apprehend the tumor alive, not to destroy it. “This would at last enable us to discover its secret.”
The doctors reviewed the means at their disposal for attacking the growth. The Red Egg sharpened his antennae and smiled to hear them speak of washings of blood, of mustard gas, of mistletoe, celandine, hydrastis, creosote.... Actually, he feared only radio therapy and the surgeon’s knife, and neither of these two could hurt him at a distance. “Therefore, I’ll wait in peace....”
“I’ll wait. . . .” From his lightning rod, the cancer had returned to his philosophizing, now master of himself and without nausea. The fear imprinted in the eyes of the populace produced an excited euphoria in him. The city was already familiar to him, he knew its shadows and its most hidden corners. He observed that the human traffic seemed to increase around the churches, around the hospitals and the Air Base. The pious against him? The army against him? Pooh!
The cancer decided to wait until nightfall to throw himself into the attack, by sliding down any chimney hole. In the meantime, he would choose his victim. Who? Ah, this was his limitation: he could attack but one single creature.
He thought first of the old paralytic, the one in semi-death, who informed on his presence. He had degenerated intestinal flora and the task would be easy. Then he thought of the photographer who had taken the most revealing plate; there was a syphilitic inheritance in him, and the task would be even simpler. Then he thought of the priests, who spend their lives speaking of death, of the mayor, of the gravedigger! A pretty combination!
None of these victims was to his liking. The Red Egg pondered, while the sky clouded, permitting him to go undetected.
In midafternoon, the Red Egg felt hungry. He looked about him and saw nothing that would do. The factories had not reopened, and in consequence were not expelling smoke. The gas tank was out of the way, as were the gasoline stations: Finally he discovered that the weather vane on which he’d settled was covered with rust and mold, and by rubbing against it he absorbed it, immediately swelling out like a great beer drinker.
Sundown increased the general nervousness. Normally healthy people who had spent these hours saying the rosary began to notice alarming symptoms and even had fits of coughing and vomiting. “I have pains here!” “I feel this or that!” They feared that they had been attacked by the tumor. Their eyes interrogated each other and they avoided mirrors.
At seven sharp the hopeless ones, the people already afflicted by cancer, showed their faces. They went to the authorities, saying, “Tell us if we can help!”
The example of these sick was decisive. Decisive thanks, once again, to the gravedigger. The gravedigger thought of his dead wife and he flew out into the street ready to face up to the cancer. He was counting on the firemen’s ladders and on helicopters, but even more on his own instinct. He defied the Red Egg and his outcry caught on. Men who had lost their wives and women who had lost their husbands began opening their doors and coming out into the street. At the start, it was a timid gathering. But there were so many cancer-mutilated families! A throng grew in the main square. Heads looked up from various vantage points. Someone spat upward. A boy screamed out, “Try to come down! We’re waiting for you!” The cancer victims who had been operated on successfully were outstanding: with their crippled bodies, their withered lungs, their plastic Tectums. Those whose larynxes had been affected emitted grunts through a hole opened in their chests. They could not shout, “Try to come down! We’re waiting for you!” They could only think it. They could grunt it. And they did. And there were those who breathed asthmatically through rubber tubes.
The tumor did not appear. Concealed among the clouds, he was a spectator to that unfolding of events. Men suffered! Their aspect was similar to the mice in the laboratory and also to the young tumors attacked by the Cyclotron.
Then, a modest figure came forward, asserting that she had seen the cancer cry. It was a school teacher, from a school in the suburbs. In the school there was a small telescope, and with this apparatus she had seen the cancer weeping. “It’s true,” confirmed a bell ringer. “I too have seen him cry.” The gravedigger became angry, but the doctors admitted it was possible. “All living organisms can weep.”
The teacher was a disheveled young woman who believed in invisible things. She proposed they gather together all the children of the city so that the cancer should feel compassion. “After all, we’re here to defend the children, aren’t we?”
The teacher tossed her hair a little more until she won out with her idea. Several hundred children were brought together in the cathedral square, in correct formation, looking upwards. “Why are we doing this?” The children still thought that the Red Egg was a “little ball” or “a top.” Until the schoolteacher told them they were mistaken, and that it was death.
The children, upon hearing this word, burst out crying: they were living organisms. They huddled inside their coats. Some tried to run away. The lyrical project of the teacher, which consisted of loosening childish comets and multicolored balloons inscribed with “PITY” in the direction of the cancer, came tumbling down. No one shared her sensibility, and there was a general disbanding of children.
* * * *
Shadows began sniffing here and there, touching buildings and faces with the evening mystery. The cancer prepared for action. He was nervous because of the cats, camping on the roofs and the walls. He was nervous because he had been born in a mouse. Besides, he discovered a soldier hidden under an eave, with his rifle poised to shoot. There were the firemen, with the ladders ready, the rumble of the helicopters could be heard nearby, and from the Air Base beams of light scanning the sky. No, he could not underestimate the inhabitants’ will to defend themselves.
The Red Egg felt besieged. There was a certain disproportion between his size and the scandalous forces organized to combat him. But his size was precisely his guarantee of immunity. At this, he pulled himself together. He again absorbed a dose of rust and mold, he nourished himself by inhaling emanations from the gas tank, and he mobilized his self-esteem with a glance at the cemetery, which was his guarantee of effectiveness.
At nine sharp, at the instant in which the Red Egg definitely selected his victim, a scream echoed in the cathedral square, piercing the belly of the tumor. “All right, then—kill me!” a man about forty years old, a chimney sweep by trade, had flung out. He was alone in the world and he understood that his work put him in constant mourning. “Why such hesitation?” repeated the man, looking upward. “Kill me!” He loosened the front of his shirt. Powerful hands covered his mouth and made him shut up. It was necessary that suicides should not disrupt the sequence of events.
The cancer was not to be deflected. He went bounding up the chimney which, as a matter of fact, crowned the hospital building. Once there, he stood at the opening and bid farewell to the moon, to the cats and to the rooftops, “Au revoir,” he said. And he leaned into the chimney with his belly of quills.
He started down the blackened tube which on several occasions had been cleaned by the chimney sweep. Once down, he dragged himself through an aseptic corridor, with white doors on either side. He knew the plan of the building from memory. But his presence there was provocative. At the moment, no one passed by; but he would have to choose between the shadowed halls or the risk of being discovered and dying.
On either side there were cancer patients. He greeted their tumors; the sick experienced an unusual twitch. In a large ward he discovered a man immunized against the tumor. He was a cultivator of bees. Each time they stung him, the bees injected formic acid, which apparently acted its a neutralizes
Fin
ally he arrived without incident at the recently inaugurated Surgery Number Three. The victim was inside! It was the surgeon. The most distinguished man in the city, and the most vigorous. Everyone called him “the Doctor.” His scalpel was the most competent in the land. His fingers were long, agile, elegant. Expert fingers. So much so that according to the data in the hospital file, they were directly responsible for the death of almost a thousand tumors in one year, two years, three. ... He was the most anxious and determined enemy of cancer. Neither the internes nor the radio therapists could compare with him. The internes felt impotent and the radio therapists often injured healthy tissues or induced sterility.
The Doctor was there, while at home his wife and children waited, oppressed. With hands gloved, raised, he prepared to intervene. His assistants, encased in green robes, trembled and would have preferred to watch the door rather than the table where the patient lay. The patient, stretched out on the table, anesthetized, had a cancer, an umbilical cancer. The Red Egg immediately recognized the malignancy, but he could do nothing to prevent its uprooting. He had not been given the power to strike like lightning or with the speed of a heart attack.
The Doctor ordered, “Scissors!” In that moment the Red Egg, sliding surreptitiously, reached the Doctor’s right shoe and rubbed himself in its wax, which also nourished him. He remained there for a few minutes, while the Doctor tore up the sublingual tumor by the roots, completely, assassinating it, frustrating its intent to found a small deadly colony in the patient’s throat.
The Doctor made a gesture of victory and turned. In that instant, the Red Egg climbed up the conic hole of his trouser. He penetrated the body in the region of the liver and murmured, “There! Let’s see you operate on yourself, now!”
The Doctor noticed only a slight tremor. As for the cancer, he adhered rigorously to the tissues and settled himself to rest a full twenty-four hours. It had been a hard day. Now there was nothing to do but wait, since neither the Roentgen rays, nor the cyclotron could reach him there. Now there was nothing else to do but grow, to grow little by little until the Doctor, the superman, the only one in the city who had not interrupted his daily work, became pale, felt himself failing, until he would hear, from the mouth of a colleague the irrevocable verdict.
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* * * *
Of course, a true-bred science-fiction writer would have done it differently; the cancer cell’s consciousness would have been based on the latest RNA-DNA “cell-imprinting” theories, and there wouldn’t have been any flying over rooftops: perhaps an adventurous infiltration of the circulatory system instead.
The point is that the near-incredible breakthroughs in medicine and biochemistry this past decade have once again opened the whole area to unlimited speculation. Who is to say, with any certainty, that individual cells (“normal” or otherwise) do not possess “consciousness,” if they have—as they seem to—a structure for “memory”? How do we determine the “good” or “bad” nature of “drugs”, when the same products are adduced as cures for mental disorders and as causes of psychotic breakdowns? What tests can determine accurately whether the disease or the cure (or both or neither) are psychogenic, when solid evidence is produced for apparent “faith healings”? Whose testimony is more valid in the case of a drug like Krebiozen: the positive claims of those who have used it, without scientific tests or control? Or the laboratory-pure negative report of the Food and Drug Administration—negative in two senses, since it says in effect only what was not found in the product?
The FDA has become supercautious: DMSO—dimethyl sulfoxide —is still not released for any but experimental use. Many ordinary citizens have become wildly experimental (“Here, try my pills!”). The laws governing narcotics are hopelessly confused, and apparently as hopeless to enforce.
Once upon a time, common sense could distinguish between cures and quackery; but then, we used to think charlatans and miracle-makers were identical in the twentieth century.
* * * *
THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING
M. E. White
It was Saturday. When I got up I found my cousins (I was raised by an uncle, an aunt, and two older cousins) packing away a lot of men’s clothing that hung in the closet in Uncle Joe’s bedroom. I said, “Good morning.”
They both smiled and said, “Go call the Goodwill Industries, darling.”
I said that I would be very happy to phone the Goodwill. First, however, I made a routine check of the house—for Uncle Joe. I didn’t find him, and so, naturally, I assumed that he was no longer with us and that we were giving his clothes away, that’s the way it was with Aunt Maude. We gave all her clothes to the Salvation Army. I called the Goodwill.
Then I just sat there in the hall for a while and thought about calling a practitioner to pray for me. I have been thinking wrong all week and am still menstruating as a result. Interestingly enough, I think wrong on the average of once a month, but I hate to call the practitioner this often; so, instead, I just thought that I would work on it myself. I have had an extremely religious upbringing, but this religion is no fly-by-Sunday affair, and one has to work constantly at becoming better and better. That is what finally happened to Uncle Joe, you see, he just became so good that he finally divested himself of all mortal error. Right there at the end, though, I thought he’d lost his faith —moaning like he did. That is probably one reason that I am menstruating today because I thought wrong of Uncle Joe.
I went back into the bedroom and relayed the phone message. “They’ll come this afternoon,” I said. My cousins were still busy emptying drawers of socks and ties. A large number of boxes were piled in the hallway, and I began to drag these out to the service porch.
What bothered me about Uncle Joe’s disappearance was the necessity of speaking to Miss Collins about it. Miss Collins is one of the headshrinkers at our school, which is quite progressive, and, since I don’t take Health and Hygiene, because of a religious conflict, I spend an hour every day talking to her. Last week she got quite upset when she found that Aunt Maude was no longer with us either. She said, “How is your aunt? I haven’t seen her for quite some time,” and I had to admit that I didn’t know because I hadn’t seen her for almost a year myself.
After all the clothes had been bundled and lugged out to the service porch, I drove my cousins down to the hairdresser’s. They always have their hair done on Saturdays. Then I came back to wait for the Goodwill truck to come. The truck and three men came about the middle of the afternoon.
“Lots of clothes,” the driver observed.
“Yeah,” I said, dragging out boxes.
“You folks moving out or something?”
I said, “No,” and smiled, trying in a friendly manner to discourage conversation.
All three of the Goodwill men were dressed, or tattooed, similarly: battleships, anchors, hearts, large mothers, pinup girls designated, from the left: Ida, May, and Rosalie. The driver of the truck also had a large number of butterflies tattooed around his navel, and his Levi’s were pulled low enough to make me wonder where the butterflies stopped, but I’ve learned to keep my curiosity to myself.
“That it, girlie?”
I nodded, and they drove away.
Then I went down to the Farmer’s Market to get the bread. We get three loaves every two weeks and freeze them. At the Market I ran into a couple of girls from school. They said, “Hi, diphtheria,” referring to a disease that I don’t believe in and a shot that I did not take with the rest of my classmates. Instead, I had spent the time with Miss Collins, who said that, even though the shots conflicted with my religious beliefs, I should take them in respect to those who believe differently and might, therefore, catch diphtheria from me. If I don’t get the disease, I can’t see how anyone is going to catch it from me. I did not upset Miss Collins with this simple explanation, however, and told her that I would think seriously over the matter of contagious diseases.
After I got the bread, I picked up my cous
ins at Ivan’s. At dinner that night there was another empty place and an extra potato. We all sat at one end of the dining-room table.
Clarice said, “Have another potato,” at regular intervals.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t very hungry.
Finally, Alice ate the potato, which was a relief. I mean it was nice to get rid of the potato. “Did the Goodwill take everything?” she asked.
I said, yes, that they had come about two.
“That’s nice. I hope it didn’t keep you from doing anything you wanted to do this afternoon.”
I said that it didn’t. It didn’t.
After dinner I went right to bed. At first, I couldn’t get to sleep, and, then, when I did, I had a dream. People started crawling over me like ants. The room squirmed with them, big, dark, on the walls, the ceiling, the dresser, and me. Then, suddenly, they began to disappear, the ones at the back first and then the ones nearer to me. Pretty soon I was all alone. I went outside—nobody. I drove down Wilshire to Figueroa without meeting another driver although there were a few empty cars parked at random in the street and at stop signs. Olympic was strangely lifeless, too. Finally, I stopped at a gas station to use the pay phone; no one I knew answered, so I phoned some people I didn’t know in the A’s. They didn’t answer either.
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