The Nail and the Oracle (14 page)

A door opened. She came out, hollow-eyed, but pink and glowing in a long white terry-cloth robe. “Dr. Rathburn—”

“He’s asleep.”

“Thank God. Does it—”

“There’s no pain.”

“What is it? What happened to him?”

“Well, I wouldn’t like to say for sure … we’re waiting for Dr.

Weber. He’ll know.”

“But—but is he—”

“He’ll sleep the clock around.”

“Can I …” The timidity, the caution, Keogh realized was so unlike her. “Can I see him?”

“He’s fast asleep!”

“I don’t care. I’ll be quiet. I won’t—touch him or anything.”

“Go ahead,” said Rathburn. She opened the bedroom door and
eagerly, silently slipped inside.

“You’d think she was trying to make sure he was there.”

Keogh, who knew her so very well, said, “She is.”

But a biography of Guy Gibbon is
really
hard to come by. For he was no exceptional executive, who for all his guarded anonymity wielded so much power that he must be traceable by those who knew where to look and what to look for, and cared enough to process detail like a mass spectroscope. Neither was Guy Gibbon born heir to countless millions, the direct successor to a procession of giants.

He came from wherever it is most of us come from, the middle or the upper-middle, or the upper-lower middle or the lower-upper middle, or some other indefinable speck in the mid-range of the interflowing striations of society (the more they are studied, the less they mean). He belonged to the Wyke entity for only eight and a half weeks, after all. Oh, the bare details might not be too hard to come by (birth date, school record), and certain main facts (father’s occupation, mother’s maiden name), as well, perhaps as a highlight or two (divorce, perhaps, or a death in the family); but a biography, a real biography, which does more than describe, which
explains
the man—and few do—now,
this
is an undertaking.

Science, it is fair to assume, can do what all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not do, and totally restore a smashed egg. Given equipment enough, and time enough … but isn’t this a way of saying, “given money enough?” For money can be not only means, but motive. So if enough money went into the project, perhaps the last unknown, the last vestige of anonymity could be removed from a man’s life story, even a young man from (as the snobs say) nowhere, no matter how briefly—though intimately—known.

The most important thing, obviously, that ever happened to Guy Gibbon in his life was his first encounter with the Wyke entity, and like many a person before and since, he had not the faintest idea he had done so. It was when he was in his late teens, and he and Sammy Stein went trespassing.

Sammy was a school sidekick, and this particular day he had a secret; he had been very insistent on the day’s outing, but refused to
say why. He was a burly-shouldered, good-natured, reasonably chinless boy whose close friendship with Guy was based almost exclusively on the attraction of opposite poles. And since, of the many kinds of fun they had had, the most fun was going trespassing, he wanted it that way on this particular occasion.

“Going trespassing,” as an amusement, had more or less invented itself when they were in their early teens. They lived in a large city surrounded (unlike many today) by old suburbs, not new ones. These included large—some, more than large—estates and mansions, and it was their greatest delight to slip through a fence or over a wall and, profoundly impressed by their own bravery, slip through field and forest, lawn and drive, like Indian scouts in settler country. Twice they had been caught, once to have dogs set on them—three boxers and two mastiffs, which certainly would have torn them to very small pieces if the boys had not been more lucky than swift—and once by a dear little old lady who swamped them sickeningly with jelly sandwiches and lonely affection. But over the saga of their adventures, their two captures served to spice the adventure; two failures out of a hundred successes (for many of these places were visited frequently) was a proud record.

So they took a trolley to the end of the line, and walked a mile, and went straight ahead where the road turned at a discreet N
O
A
DMITTANCE
sign of expensive manufacture and a high degree of weathering. They proceeded through a small wild wood, and came at last to an apparently unscalable granite wall.

Sammy had discovered this wall the week before, roaming alone; he had waited for Guy to accompany him before challenging it, and Guy was touched. He was also profoundly excited by the wall itself. Anything this size should have been found, conjectured about, campaigned against, battled and conquered long since. But as well as being a high wall, a long wall, and mysterious, it was a distant wall, a discreet wall. No road touched it but its own driveway, which was primitive, meandering, and led to ironbound, solid oak gates without a chink or crack to peek through.

They could not climb it nor breach it—but they crossed it. An ancient maple on this side held hands with a chestnut over the crown
of the wall, and they went over like a couple of squirrels.

They had, in their ghost-like way, haunted many an elaborate property, but never had they seen such maintenance, such manicure, such polish of a piece of land and, as Sammy said, awed out of his usual brashness, as they stood in a solid marble pergola overlooking green plush acres of rolling lawn, copses of carven boxwood, park-lake woods and streams with little Japanese bridges and, in their bends, humorful little rock-gardens: “—and there’s goddamn
miles
of it.”

They had wandered a bit, that first time, and had learned that there were after all some people there. They saw a tractor far away, pulling a slanted gang of mowers across one of the green-plush fields. (The owners doubtless called it a lawn; it was a field.) The machines, rare in that time, cut a swath all of thirty feet wide, “and that,” Sammy said, convulsing them, “ain’t hay.” And then they had seen the house—

Well, a glimpse. Breaking out of the woods. Guy had felt himself snatched back. “House up there,” said Sammy. “Someone’ll see us.” There was a confused impression of a white hill that was itself the house, or part of it; towers, turrets, castellations, crenellations; a fairy-tale palace set in this legendary landscape. They had not been able to see it again; it was so placed that it could be approached nowhere secretly nor even spied upon. They were struck literally speechless by the sight and for most of an hour had nothing to say, and that expressible only by wags of the head. Ultimately they referred to it as “the shack,” and it was in this vein that they later called their final discovery “the ol’ swimmin’ hole.”

It was across a creek and over a wooded hill. Two more hills rose to meet the wood, and cupped between the three was a pond, perhaps a lake. It was roughly L-shaped, and all around it were shadowed inlets, grottoes, inconspicuous stone steps leading here to a rustic pavilion set about with flowers, there to a concealed forest glade harboring a tiny formal garden.

But the lake, the ol’ swimmin’ hole …

They went swimming, splashing as little as possible and sticking to the shore. They explored two inlets to the right (a miniature waterfall
and a tiny beach of obviously imported golden sand) and three to the left (a square-cut one, lined with tile the color of patina, with a black glass diving tower overhanging water that must have been dredged to twenty feet; a little beach of snow-white sand; and one they dared not enter, for fear of harming the fleet of perfect sailing ships, none more than a foot long, which lay at anchor; but they trod water until they were bone-cold, gawking at the miniature model waterfront with little pushcarts in the street, and lamp-posts, and old-fashioned houses) and then, weary, hungry, and awestruck, they had gone home.

And Sammy cracked the secret he had been keeping—the thing which made this day an occasion: he was to go wild-hairing off the next day in an effort to join Chennault in China.

Guy Gibbon, overwhelmed, made the only gesture he could think of: he devotedly swore he would not go trespassing again until Sammy got back.

“Death from choriocarcinoma,” Dr. Weber began, “is the result of—”

“But he won’t die,” she said. “I won’t let him.”

“My dear,” Dr. Weber was a small man with round shoulders and a hawk’s face. “I don’t mean to be unkind, but I can use all the euphemisms and kindle all the false hope, or I can do as you have asked me to do—explain the condition and make a prognosis. I can’t do both.”

Dr. Rathburn said gently, “Why don’t you go and lie down? I’ll come when we’ve finished here and tell you all about it.”

“I don’t want to lie down,” she said fiercely. “And I wasn’t asking you to spare me anything. Dr. Weber, I simply said I would not let him die. There’s nothing in that statement which keeps you from telling me the truth.”

Keogh smiled. Weber caught him at it and startled; Keogh saw his surprise. “I know her better than you do,” he said, with a touch of pride. “You don’t have to pull any punches.”

“Thanks, Keogh,” she said. She leaned forward. “Go ahead, Dr. Weber.”

Weber looked at her. Snatched from his work two thousand miles
away, brought to a place he had never known existed, of a magnificence which attacked his confidence in his own eyes, meeting a woman of power—every sort of power—quite beyond his experience … Weber had thought himself beyond astonishment. Shock, grief, fear, deprivation like hers he had seen before, of course; what doctor has not? but when Keogh had told her baldly that this disease killed in six weeks,
always
, she had flinched, closed her eyes for an interminable moment, and had then said softly, “Tell us everything you can about this—this disease. Doctor.” And she had added, for the first time, “He isn’t going to die. I won’t let him”; and the way she held her head, the way her full voice handled the words, he almost believed her. Heaven knows, he wished he could. And so he found he could be astonished yet again.

He made an effort to detach himself, and became not a man, not this particular patient’s doctor, but a sort of source-book. He began again:

“Death from choriocarcinoma is a little unlike other deaths from malignancies. Ordinarily a cancer begins locally, and sends its chains and masses of wild cells growing through the organ on which it began. Death can result from the failure of that organ; liver, kidney, brain, what have you. Or the cancer suddenly breaks up and spreads through the body, starting colonies, throughout the system. This is called metastasis. Death results then from the loss of efficiency of many organs instead of just one. Of course, both these things can happen—the almost complete impairment of the originally cancerous organ, and metastatic effects at the same time.

“Chorio, on the other hand, doesn’t originally involve a vital organ. Vital to the species, perhaps, but not to the individual.” He permitted himself a dry smile. “This is probably a startling concept, to most people in this day and age, but it’s nonetheless true. However, sex cells, at their most basic and primitive, have peculiarities not shared by other body cells.

“Have you ever heard of the condition known as ectopic pregnancy?” He directed this question at Keogh, who nodded. “A fertilized ovum fails to descend to the uterus; instead it attaches itself to the side of the very fine tube between the ovaries and the womb.
And at first everything proceeds well with it—and this is the point I want you to grasp—because in spite of the fact that only the uterus is truly specialized for this work, the tube wall not only supports the growing ovum but feeds it. It actually forms what we call a counterplacenta; it enfolds the early fetus and nurtures it. The fetus, of course, has a high survival value, and is able to get along quite well on the plasma which the counterplacenta supplies it with. And it grows—it grows fantastically. Since the tube is very fine—you’d have difficulty getting the smallest sewing needle up through it—it can no longer contain the growing fetus, and ruptures. Unless it is removed at that time, the tissues outside will quite as readily take on the work of a real placenta and uterus, and in six or seven months, if the mother survives that long, will create havoc in the abdomen.

“All right then: back to chorio. Since the cells involved are sex cells, and cancerous to boot, they divide and redivide wildly, without pattern or special form. They develop in an infinite variety of shapes and sizes and forms. The law of averages dictates that a certain number of these—and the number of distorted cells is astronomical—resemble fertilized ova. Some of them resemble them so closely that I personally would not enjoy the task of distinguishing between them and the real thing. However, the body as a whole is not that particular; anything which even roughly resembles a fertilized egg-cell is capable of commanding that counterplacenta.

“Now consider the source of these cells—physiologically speaking, gland tissue—a mass of capillary tubes and blood vessels. Each and every one of these does its best to accept and nurture these fetal limitations, down to the tiniest of them. The thin walls of the capillaries, however, break down easily under such an effort, and the imitations—selectively, the best of them, too, because the tissues yield most readily to them—they pass into the capillaries and then into the bloodstream.

“There is one place, and only one place, where they can be combed out; and it’s a place rich in oxygen, lymph, blood and plasma: the lungs. The lungs enthusiastically take on the job of forming placentae for these cells, and nurturing them. But for every segment of lung given over to gestating an imitation fetus, there is one less segment
occupied with the job of oxygenating blood. Ultimately the lungs fail, and death results from oxygen starvation.”

Rathburn spoke up. “For years chorio was regarded as a lung disease, and the cancerous gonads as a sort of side effect.”

“But lung cancer—” Keogh began to object.

“It isn’t lung cancer, don’t you see? Given enough time, it might be, through metastasis. But there is never enough time. Chorio doesn’t have to wait for that, to kill. That’s why it’s so swift.” He tried not to look at the girl, and failed; he said it anyway: “And certain.”