The Touch
Page 25
“Happy?”
“‘Night, Doc,” they said in unison, and they were gone.
Charles seated himself before his computer terminal and found a three-by-five index card taped to the screen. It read:
All data from Bulmer notes and cassettes entered into memory as “Hour of Power,” your access only.
He stared at the dull, lifeless surface of the screen, almost afraid to turn it on, afraid that he would find no explanation for the incredible phenomena Bulmer had left in his wake for the past few months.
But he had to start sometime, somewhere, and Bulmer’s notes seemed as good a place as any. He flipped on the power and entered his access code when prompted. He went first to the data Alan had given him and had the computer list it sequentially.
It was a mess. He scrolled through, noting that times would be recorded for three consecutive days, then a gap of two days with no data, then four days with times, then three without. He could see no pattern. It looked completely random, chaotic.
He entered:
correlate with all known human biorhythms
No sound of a whirring hard drive because they were all in the Cray supercomputer on the third floor. The answer flashed on the screen with a beep:
NO CORRELATION
Charles typed:
correlate to memory.
That would initiate a search through the Cray’s entire memory bank, one of the most complete bioscience databases in the world. It was a longer wait, but finally came the beep:
NO CORRELATION
This was looking like a dead end, but for the hell of it, Charles decided to let the computer search the Internet for an answer:
correlate rhythm with all other accessible databases
PROCESSING flashed on the screen.
This search would take considerable time, so while that was going on, he cleared the screen and prepared to find out what there was to know about Dr. Alan Bulmer. He decided to start with the basics, so he cued up Bulmer’s blood profile.
The metabolic, lipids, and thyroid panel were all normal, as was the CBC. For the hell of it, he had ordered a drug screen. He checked that:
Test
Abnormal
Normal Units
ALCOHOL, ETHYL
0
mg/dl
10–50
mg/dl: NO INFLUENCE
50–100
mg/dl: SL. INFLUENCE
100–150
mg/dl: MOD. INFLUENCE
150–200
mg/dl: MOD. POISONING
200–250
mg/dl: SEVERE POISONING
350–400
mg/dl: DEEP COMA
AMPHETAMINE
NONE DETECTED
METHAMPHETAMINE
NONE DETECTED
PHENOBARB
NONE DETECTED
SCOBARB
NONE DETECTED
DORIDEN
NONE DETECTED
QUININE
NONE DETECTED
MORPHINE
NONE DETECTED
METHADONE
NONE DETECTED
PHENOTHIAZINE
NONE DETECTED
CODEINE
NONE DETECTED
COCAINE
NONE DETECTED
DILAUDID
NONE DETECTED
AMOBARB
NONE DETECTED
DARVON
NONE DETECTED
DILANTIN
NONE DETECTED
As expected, no abusable substances were floating around in his blood or urine.
So far so good. His cardiogram and chest X-ray were normal too. Next he cued up Bulmer’s MRI scan from Downstate and reviewed the series of computer-generated slices of the brain at various levels with and without contrast: no infarcts or masses evident anywhere. The CT studies done here were negative as well.
So Bulmer didn’t have a brain tumor and hadn’t had any previous strokes. No surprise. He moved on to see what his brain-waves looked like.
An edited version of Bulmer’s twenty-four-hour EEG from yesterday scrolled horizontally across the screen. The computer presented a good sample of the six parallel zigzag lines that formed the basic electrical pattern of his brain, then edited that particular pattern out of the rest of the record, leaving only irregularities and significant variations for review.
Charles noticed immediately that the basic pattern was diffusely abnormal. Nothing terribly specific, but the background activity was disorganized, showing generalized slowing.
That puzzled Charles. This was not the type of EEG he would associate with an active professional pushing forty. It was a senile old man’s.
He scrolled on. The first variation showed around 7:15 a.m., when an undulating pattern began to appear, barely noticeable at first, but growing more pronounced with every passing minute. It wasn’t confined to any one section of the brain, but affected all the leads, causing the lines to glide up and down. The undulation was most pronounced at 7:45, after which the magnitude of each wave began to slacken off, finally disappearing at 8:16.
Charles leaned back and chewed his lip. Odd. He couldn’t remember ever seeing anything like that before. He shrugged it off. Probably some transient electrical disturbance in the telemetry. He scrolled on, finding nothing until 7:37 p.m. last night, when the same pattern repeated itself, peaking shortly after 8:00 and disappearing by 8:35.
Doubly odd. Two apparent artifacts, both identical, approximately twelve and a half hours apart, each lasting an hour.
The Hour of Power.
A tingle ran up Charles’ back.
He shook himself. This was ridiculous. It was just an artifact—a unique one, he’d grant that, but a mere artifact nonetheless.
He cleared the screen, cued up Bulmer’s PET scan, and gasped. The EEG had been unsettling, but this was outright shocking. He ran through a number of slices on the PET, then flashed back to the CT scan and MRI. Those were definitely normal, with normal ventricles and sulci and no sign of impaired circulation in any area of the brain. Back to the PET scan—grossly abnormal. The FDG injected into Bulmer had not been taken up by his brain cells in the usual way. The CT scan showed that nothing was stopping the glucose from getting there, but in the PET, the yellow and orange areas of active brain were markedly reduced, while other areas of the scan were dark, showing no uptake at all. The neurons there weren’t working.
Which meant that areas of Bulmer’s brain were not functioning.
Charles’s mind whirled in confusion. He had seen PET scans with similar abnormalities before, but not in a brain so perfectly normal in anatomy and vasculature.
The computer beeped and flashed in the lower left corner of the screen:
SEARCH COMPLETED—0.95 CORRELATION FOUND
Charles quickly cleared the screen and typed:
list correlation
The computer beeped and wrote:
SOURCE: NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DATABASE. CORRELATION: TIME COORDINATES OF ALL DATA ENTERED APPROXIMATE TIME OF HIGH TIDE IN LONG ISLAND SOUND OFF GLEN COVE, NY. COMMENCING APPROXIMATELY 30 MINUTES BEFORE HIGH TIDE AND CEASING APPROXIMATELY 30 MINUTES AFTER.
Charles slumped back in his chair. Well, he had wanted to identify the rhythm of Bulmer’s so-called Hour of Power, and here it was. The oldest rhythm in the world.
The tide.
It gave him the creeps.
He stood and walked around his desk and back again to relieve the tension that had begun to grip his muscles. He remembered the two sine-wave artifacts that had risen and fallen about twelve hours apart. Didn’t the tide rise and fall twice a day, about twelve hours apart? He rechecked the tracings on the screen and jotted down the time each artifact appeared and disappeared—7:15 a.m. to 8:16 a.m. and 7:37 p.m. to 8:35 p.m. If the artifact represented Bulmer’s Hour of Power, and it was linked to the rise and fall of the tide, then high tide should occur right in the bloody middle of those two periods. He figured the midpoints, then sat down at the
terminal again.
CORRELATE WITH HIGH TIDE IN LONG ISLAND SOUND OFF GLEN COVE JULY 11: 7:45 A.M. AND 8:06 P.M. REFER TO N.W.S. DATABASE
The computer beeped almost immediately.
0.35 CORRELATION
Damn! If that had correlated, he’d have had something concrete to go on.
Wait. Bulmer hadn’t been near Long Island Sound when the tracing was made. He’d been here, on Park Avenue in Manhattan. The East River was the nearest body of water.
Charles leaped to the keyboard.
CORRELATE WITH HIGH TIDE IN THE EAST RIVER JULY 11: 7:45 A.M. AND 8:06 P.M. REFER TO N.W.S. DATABASE
An instant beep:
0.97 CORRELATION
Got it!
But exactly what did he have?
40
Alan
Alan felt his heart throw a few premature beats when he answered the knock on his door and saw Axford standing there.
This is it, he thought.
Axford had a bottle in one hand and a sheaf of papers under his other arm. He looked like he’d already sampled the bottle a couple of times before his arrival.
“Is this a party?” Alan said, stepping back to let him in. “Or a wake?”
“Get some glasses,” Charles said gruffly. “This is good stuff even if you don’t like bourbon.”
He poured an inch or so into each of the two plastic cups Alan got from the bathroom and they tossed it off together.
“Smooth. What’s the brand?”
“Maker’s Mark,” Axford said. “Have some more.” He quickly poured another shot, but Alan didn’t drink.
“Well?” Alan said, forcing himself to ask the question that had made the last two days a living nightmare. He had envisioned himself slowly deteriorating over the next few years until he became a drooling vegetable sitting in a pool of his own excrement. “Do I have Alzheimer’s disease or don’t I?”
Axford emptied his glass and walked over to the window.
“You know something, Bulmer? Sometimes I have to wonder about myself. I’d have found it so much easier to tell you you’ve got Alzheimer’s than what I really have to say. Some kind of bloody bastard, what?”
“I’ll tell you something, Axford,” Alan said, allowing his rancor to rise to the surface. “You’ve got the bedside manner of Attila the Hun! What did you find?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” He knew he was shouting, but he couldn’t help it. “All those tests—”
“—reveal something I can’t explain.”
Alan sat down on the bed and sipped at his glass. “So there is something after all.”
“Your memory changes are similar to the Alzheimer pattern, but as you know, the way things stand now, the only way to make a definitive diagnosis is at autopsy.”
Alan couldn’t help but smile. “I signed a lot of consents, but I don’t remember agreeing to that.”
Axford’s face was completely deadpan as he looked at Alan. “You did. You just don’t remember. It’s scheduled for nine a.m. tomorrow.”
“Not funny.”
“But seriously: We can make a pretty good presumptive diagnosis of Alzheimer’s clinically and radiographically without cutting into your brain and finding some neurofibrillary tangles.”
Alan realized that Axford was speaking to him as he might to a layman, probably not sure of how much Alan had retained about the disease. Alan himself didn’t know what he knew or had forgotten, so he let Axford go on.
“Clinically you might be suspected of having a case, but your scans show none of the usual stigmata—no cerebral atrophy or ventricular dilation, no widening of the sulci.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Your PET scan, on the other hand, is markedly abnormal. Areas of the cortex and hippocampus have shut down, showing no metabolism—a classic picture of the advanced Alzheimer brain.”
Alan’s insides knotted. “Well, is it or isn’t it?”
“I can’t say. If you have Alzheimer’s, you don’t have any form I’ve ever seen.”
Alan held out his cup for more bourbon. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“Do you think it’s the Touch that’s doing it to me?”
Axford shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t know much, do you?” Alan snapped.
“We know what rhythm your Hour of Power follows.”
Alan felt his spine stiffen. “I’m listening.”
“It comes and goes with high tide.”
It was like a punch in the gut. “High tide?”
Axford nodded.
Feeling shaky, Alan got up and took his turn at the window, looking down at Park Avenue below, barely hearing Axford talk about a periodic disturbance in his EEG.
High tide! God! Why hadn’t he seen it? The clues were all there—t he way the power traveled around the clock, coming an hour or so later every day. It was so obvious once it was pointed out. If he’d only known! It would have been so easy to work with it. All he’d have needed was a tide chart. If he’d had one in his pocket at the Board of Trustees hearing, he wouldn’t be in this mess.
But the tide controlling the waxing and waning of the Touch. It had such an elemental feel to it, hinting at something extraordinarily ancient at work.
He turned to Axford as a thought occurred to him.
“You realize, don’t you, that you’ve just so much as admitted that the Touch exists.”
Axford had dispensed with his cup and was now taking pulls straight from the bottle. His voice was slurred.
“I don’t admit a bloody damned thing. Not yet. But I do want to do a repeat PET scan on you tomorrow. Confirm those dead areas.”
Alan wanted to confirm those areas, too.
“Fine. I’ll be here.” He watched as Axford walked unsteadily for the door. “You’re not driving, are you?”
“Hell, no. Only a bloody idiot would keep a bloody car in this bloody city!”
He slammed the door behind him, leaving Alan alone with the prospect of trying to find sleep while thinking about dead areas in his brain.
41
Charles
“I’ll be damned!” he said aloud as he looked at the computer analysis of the repeat PET scan.
It was still grossly abnormal, but the computer said that the glucose uptake had increased over the past twenty-four hours as compared to Saturday’s scan. The improvement wasn’t visible to the naked eye, but the computer saw it, and that was good enough for Charles.
And good news for Bulmer, although it didn’t bring Charles any closer to a diagnosis.
He now spread out the new two-hour EEG on his desktop. Despite the cotton mouth and pounding headache from too much bourbon last night, he’d managed to remember to pick up a tide chart for the East River on his way to the Foundation this morning. When he had seen that high tide was due at 9:17 a.m., he had ordered a stat EEG on Bulmer at 8:30.
And here before him on paper was the same sine-wave configuration that had appeared on the longer EEG two days ago, rising approximately thirty minutes before high tide at 8:46 and ending at 9:46.
He took a certain perverse satisfaction in his newfound ability to predict the occurrence of something he had been absolutely sure did not exist.
His private line buzzed. He picked it up, wondering who would be calling him here on a Sunday morning.
He recognized the senator’s hoarse voice immediately.
“Why haven’t I seen a report yet?”
“And a very good morning to you, too, Senator. I’ll be finishing up testing today.”
“You’ve done enough tests! The Knopf case is proof enough for me.”
“Maybe so, but it explains nothing.”
“I don’t care about explanations. Can you deny that he has a healing power? Can you?”
“No.” It killed him to admit that.
“Then that does it! I want you to—”
“Senator,” Charles said sharply. He had to put McCr
eady off for a little while longer. He couldn’t let Bulmer go just yet. “This power, or what ever it is that he has, works sporadically. By tonight I’ll have the exact pattern of its occurrence confirmed. With that nailed down we can predict to the minute when it’s operating. Until we do that, we’ll just be fumbling around in the dark. One more day. That’s all. I promise.”
“Very well,” McCready said with obvious reluctance. “But I’ve waited a long time.”
“I know. Tomorrow morning for sure.”
Charles hung up and stared at Bulmer’s EEG without seeing it. The report McCready was looking for had already been dictated, and tomorrow Marnie would type it into the main computer’s word processor. But Charles hadn’t mentioned that, because he knew the senator was not really after a report.
He was after a cure.
McCready wanted Alan Bulmer to touch him and make his myasthenia gravis go away. So he was becoming more anxious, more impatient, and more demanding than usual. And why shouldn’t he? If he was going to restore Bulmer’s reputation and credibility as a physician, he had a right to a touch.
But in order to give Bulmer back his credibility, he needed Charles Axford’s signature on the report stating that Dr. Alan Bulmer could indeed, at the right time of day, cure the incurable with a simple touch of his hand. Charles, however, needed one last bit of proof, one final shred of irrefutable evidence before he would sign.