The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

A MIRACLE TOO MANY Philip H. Smith and Alan E. Nourse

When it first began, Dr. Stephen Olie’s curious gift appeared in the manner of most true miracles, insidiously and without fanfare. At first Dr. Olie wasn’t certain that anything out of the ordinary had happened. Later, when it became obvious that something more than his own native skill as a physician was at work, he refused to accept the idea of a miracle and resisted for weeks the temptation to analyze his gift scientifically. In those rare cases when medical miracles do happen (as indeed they do), few doctors are foolish enough to inquire into them too closely, and fewer still expect them to occur again. But in Dr. Olie’s case, things were disturbingly different.

It happened the first time with the one patient of all his patients that Dr. Olie most dreaded to see. Mary Castle was a small, pale six-year-old whose weekly visit to his office was an ordeal for her mother and her doctor alike. Childhood leukemia is always a fearful illness; in Mary Castle’s case the progress of the disease had been swift and inexorable since diagnosis had been made a few weeks before. In the face of expert consultation, the newest drugs, transfusions and supportive care the little girl had become steadily sicker, until the doctor found himself shrinking from each weekly visit.

Now, as the child and her mother were escorted into his examining room, Dr. Olie reviewed the chart hopelessly. Last week her white blood count had begun climbing again, her hemoglobin level sagging dangerously. He knew that today he would again find the enlarging lymph nodes and distended spleen, the hemorrhagic blotches on the child’s legs, the shortness of breath—all the dreadful stigmata of a cruel and relentless killer. And he knew, bitterly, that he had nothing to offer the child but a word of encouragement and a smile as false as the smile of death itself.

As the office nurse poked her neat head through the door, Dr. Olie closed the chart. A wave of anger and frustration swept through his mind. If only there were something I could do, he thought. If only there could be some magic in my fingers—. Shaking his head, he walked into the examining room and smiled warmly at the child. “Well, Mary, how are you today?”

The little girl tried to return the smile. “All right, I guess.”

“Fine, we’ll just see how things are going.” Gently the doctor examined her skin, checked her throat, then asked her to lie down as he went through the ritual of examination. From the corner the child’s mother watched him, silently and hopelessly. For a moment he studied the listless child on the table and then gently probed with his fingers, feeling the tense spleen almost filling her abdomen. The child looked worse than the week before, her skin grey, her breathing labored.

“Doctor, you’ve got to tell me,” the mother suddenly blurted. “Nothing seems to be helping; how much longer is it going to be?”

Dr. Olie caught the mother’s eye, shook his head in warning. “Why, we’re doing fine!” he said. “Right, Mary? Before long your tummy will be feeling better and your breathing will be better and everything. Of course, we may have to go back to the hospital for another transfusion this week, but that won’t be so bad. After all, if it’s going to make you well—”

His voice trailed off and a chill went up his back as he stared at the girl. While he talked, his hand had been gently probing, and now, suddenly, something had changed. The child’s skin looked more pink and the enlarged spleen, like a deflating balloon, seemed to be shrinking under his fingertips. Even as he watched, a new luster was appearing in the little girl’s eyes and, incredibly, she giggled. “You’re tickling me!”

Dazed, the doctor felt for the swollen lymph nodes and failed to find them. He stared in amazement as the hemorrhages seemed to fade from the child’s skin. Thirty minutes later Mary Castle was a pink and glowing little girl, playing happily in the examining room as they waited for the emergency blood-count report. It was impossible, and Dr. Olie knew it, but the blood count had returned to normal. Two days later the child was exuberantly healthy, eating vast quantities of food and demanding to go back to school.

And nobody understood why, least of all Dr. Olie.

In the busy weeks that followed, Dr. Olie did not forget the strange case of Mary Castle’s miraculous recovery. He simply discredited it. Spontaneous remission of leukemia had been recorded before in medical history (though never so swiftly or dramatically); since Dr. Olie’s scientific mind did not admit of miracles, he just refused to think about the case at all. Instead, he buried himself in the busy routine of his general medical practice with office hours, home calls, deliveries and hospital rounds. He was so busy trying not to think about Mary Castle that he hardly noticed the extreme rapidity with which his everyday office cases seemed to be recovering from their illnesses— the ulcer patients who seemed to be feeling better before they walked out of his office, the pneumonia patients whose fevers broke even while he was listening to their chests, the patients whose abcesses stopped hurting the moment he touched them and were healed completely in 24 hours. There were always the possibilities of coincidence and the well-known vagaries of human illness to call to account for such speedy recoveries—but as time went on, coincidence piled upon coincidence until a case occurred that Dr. Olie simply could not ignore.

The patient was a middle-aged man complaining of progressive weakness and fever. “I’m getting scared, Doc,” he said. “I’ve lost 20 pounds in the last two months, and last night I coughed up some blood.”

“Bright red blood?” the doctor asked.

“Yes. Is that bad?”

“We’ll see. Let’s have a look at a film.”

There was no question of the diagnosis as Dr. Olie studied the wet X ray. Advanced tuberculosis is hard to miss on a chest film. But when he began to examine the patient’s chest, the characteristic sounds of the infection which had been present at first ceased abruptly. The fever and cough the nurse had noted on his chart suddenly were gone, and the man seemed to be breathing more deeply and freely.

“That’s funny,” the man said. “I’d have sworn I felt lousy when I came in here, and now I’m feeling great. In fact, I feel like going out and having a steak.”

Dr. Olie’s hand was shaking as he put down the stethoscope. “Let me see another chest film first,” he said. “And don’t worry about the cost—this one’s on the house.”

The second film, taken 20 minutes after the first, revealed nothing but normal, healthy-looking chest.

After the office closed that night, Dr. Olie sat for a long time staring at the two films side by side on his view box. There was no way it could have happened—no way at all —but there it was. This he could not ignore—and now that the dam had broken, he thought back to the succession of curious coincidences that had been tripping over each other in the past few weeks. Individually, just coincidences. Taken together, a pattern. The touch of his hand, a few words, and the patient was cured. Minor things perhaps could be dismissed as “normal remissions”—but not a case like this one. And not the case of Mary Castle.

He knew there had to be an answer, but no answer made sense. This was not scientific medicine that he was dealing with. This was miracle-working. And then he thought of the day he had leafed through Mary Castle’s chart so hopelessly, grasping for straws in desperation. If only there could, be some magic in my fingers—

Dr. Olie shivered as a hint of panic rose in his mind.

There is a time-honored tradition that the doctor may bury his mistakes without recrimination, but must never advertise his successes.

In Dr. Stephen Olie’s case, advertisement was hardly necessary. Little by little, word of the doctor’s incredible feats of healing began to spread, first through the town and then farther afield. At first the stories were received with skepticism. Everyone knew that doctors could not cure by magic—but it was hard to argue with a living, breathing neighbor who swore he had been cured by just such curious handiwork. One by one the most skeptical themselves began slinking quietly to Dr. Olie’s office and coming back cured of everything from carbuncles to cancer. Soon the office nurse was having trouble scheduling appointments; the doctor’s tiny waiting room was crowded to overflowing as the lame, the halt and the blind trouped in and the doctor’s fingertips continued their miracles. The office opened a little earlier each morning and closed a little later. The doctor began hurrying from examining room to examining room, racing faster and faster to keep up with the deluge of patients.

Home calls went by the board. There simply were not hours enough in the day to make them, and the doctor’s hospital admissions dropped sharply as fewer and fewer of his patients seemed to require hospitalization. Soon Dr. Olie began hearing remarks and complaints from his once-friendly medical colleagues as the traffic jams outside his office increased in frequency.

In the middle of an especially busy day, three grim-faced gentlemen appeared in his office and were hurried into his consultation room in spite of the standing-room-only crowd outside. “They’re from the County Medical Society,” his nurse whispered as they stalked up the hall. “Some kind of a delegation. They insisted upon seeing you at once.”

The leader of the delegation was a highly successful society surgeon named Bronson. He did not waste time with pleasantries. “Doctor, there have been a number of very strange reports about you at the Society recently.”

Dr. Olie sighed and sank wearily back in his swivel chair. “You mean patients have been complaining?”

Dr. Bronson looked momentarily embarrassed. “Not patients, exactly,” he said. “But some of your colleagues have become concerned about certain—ah—questionable practices going on here. You realize that it is the obligation of the Medical Society to uphold the ethics of the profession—”

“You mean that it’s unethical for me to cure my patients?” Dr. Olie asked quietly.

Dr. Bronson glanced uneasily at his colleagues. “No one would say that, of course,” he said quickly. “But we have to question a man who seems to cure so many so quickly.”

Dr. Olie looked relieved. “I see! It’s ethical to cure them, but unethical to cure them quickly, eh? I should drag it out a bit more?”

The surgeon flushed angrily. “Doctor, you know quite well what I’m trying to say. No one is questioning the fact of your—ah—success in practice, if it is a fact. It’s your methods that are under scrutiny.”

“I’m simply practicing medicine the best way I know how,” Dr. Olie replied.

“You mean by faith healing?”

Dr. Olie pulled X rays from his file. “Would you consider this faith healing?” he asked quietly.

“I would consider this outright fraud!” Dr. Bronson sputtered. “What’s going on in this office? What have you been doing? The Society insists on an answer.”

“Then tell them that I’ve been curing impossible cases. And that I haven’t the faintest idea how.”

Dr. Bronson shook his head angrily. “Doctor, we are representing the Medical Society officially. There have always been renegades in medicine who have preyed upon helpless neurotics. It is our duty to protect the public against charlatans—”

“But there’s nothing neurotic about cancer of the lung.” Dr. Olie said. “Nor osteomyelitis. Nor septicemia.”

“Then if you have some miraculous drug, it’s your ethical duty to study it scientifically, document its actions, run ‘double blind’ studies to evaluate it—”

“And, of course, share it with my colleagues.” Dr. Olie rose abruptly. “I’m sorry, Doctor. There is no miracle drug. I think you are wasting your time, and I’m quite certain that you’re wasting mine. Now, if you will excuse me, I have patients to see.”

“Then this is your final word?” Dr. Bronson said ominously, rising with his delegation.

“There’s nothing more I can say.”

“Very well.” The surgeon drew himself up. “You realize that the Society will not be satisfied with my report. No doubt you will be hearing further.”

Dr. Olie did hear further—but not quite in the manner he expected. The Medical Society delegation had hardly left when the phone was ringing with an emergency call for Dr. Bronson. “Yes, he was here—but he’s gone now. I don’t know where you could reach him.”

The voice on the wire was frantic. “But I have to reach him. When he saw my husband this morning, everything seemed fine, but now John can hardly breathe. It’s a cancer case, Doctor. If you can’t reach Dr. Bronson, could you possibly come yourself?”

Dr. Olie hurried, and it was well that he did. The patient’s name was John Stevenson, and he was in great pain, obviously in the terminal stages of a wasting disease. He was choking for breath, his heart rate frantic and irregular. A brief history clarified the picture: an unsuccessful operation to arrest a carcinoma of the lung, followed by supportive care as the tumor spread and fluid filled the chest cavity. Dr. Bronson’s treatment had been expert, meticulous and thoroughly scientific.

Two minutes after Dr. Olie’s hand touched John Stevenson’s wrist, the man’s breathing became more free and the grey color left his face. His heart rate slowed to normal. Administering a sedative, Dr. Olie reassured the family (privately hoping that the man would survive until Dr. Bronson could be contacted). Having done all he could, he hurried back to the office, and had all but forgotten the incident by the time his last patient was seen, sometime after midnight. Then, dismissing the office nurse for the night and locking the doors, the doctor settled back in his chair to drink in the blessed silence and solitude for a few moments and settle his own quivering nerves.

The silence was shattered by a pounding on the office door, and a white-faced and furious Dr. Bronson burst in upon him.

“What devil’s work did you do on John Stevenson?” Bronson shouted, glaring at him through bloodshot eyes.

Dr. Olie blinked. “Devil’s work? I merely answered a call after you had left here this afternoon. I thought at first that he was terminal, but he seemed to quiet down a bit after I’d seen him.”

“Quiet down!” Dr. Bronson stared at him. “Do you know what that man was doing when his family reached me? He was digging into a five-pound steak, that’s what! I saw him with my own eyes—breathing freely, good color, hungry! I tell you, he was riddled with carcinoma. He was ready to die at any moment, and now he looks better than he did the first day I saw him. It’s impossible!”

Dr. Olie nodded wearily. “I know. But it’s true. Tomorrow he’ll be even better. In 48 hours you won’t find a trace of tumor in his chest. Believe me, I don’t know how it’s true, but that’s what you’ll find.”

Shaking, Dr. Bronson sank down in a chair. “All right,” he said. “I believe you. But you did something, didn’t you? You must have done something. Will you just tell me what you did?”

Dr. Olie told him. He told him in detail, from the very beginning, and then as the surgeon’s temper and incredulity subsided the two doctors sat and talked on into the small hours of the morning. Faced with the impossible, they sought an explanation and got nowhere. When they finally parted, the sunrise was no redder than their bleary eyes.

A few days later Dr. Bronson called him up. “You won’t get anything in writing from us,” he said. “But we are all convinced that you’re on the up-and-up. We don’t like to admit that such a thing as ‘healing hands’ exist— and for good reason, as you damned well know. We don’t dare to, because it would open the door to charlatanry, quackery, and all kinds of abuse—

“But it does exist! Not often, of course . . . and it baffles explanation. All I can say for now, on behalf of my colleagues and myself, is: thank Heaven you are a regular and respectable member of the medical profession! There is no scientific way to explain what you are doing. But you’ll have no further complaints from us, I assure you.”

During the next few weeks, the crush of Dr. Olie’s office practice increased in geometric progression. The miracle of his fingertips did not wear off; on the contrary, he seemed able to cure any and every case that came under his care. His waiting room filled to overflowing, and three policemen were assigned to keep order outside. The doctor could neither sleep nor eat. Bit by bit he approached the brink of exhaustion, but still drove himself, if only to avoid thinking about the enigma that lay in the touch of his hand.

The crusher came when John Stevenson, who happened to be the publisher of the local newspaper, featured the story of his miraculous cure in a full-page Sunday editorial. The wire services picked up the story, complete with halftone cuts of before-and-after X rays, and certified pathology reports. From then on practice became impossible. Dr. Olie was deluged with telephone calls, telegrams and personal pleadings for help. When his office nurse found him one morning asleep in his swivel chair in the same position she had left him the night before, she firmly closed up the office, led him stumbling out to her car and drove him upstate to a friend’s farm for sanctuary.

After three solid days’ sleep and a week of good food and daily tranquilizers, the doctor’s tremors began to subside and he felt almost human again. He continued to rest. Time had no meaning here; he might have recuperated for two weeks or two years, but one day he felt well enough to walk down to the lake shore and take an old rowboat out to fish for awhile. Clouds played tag with the sun; when the doctor beached the boat again, he found himself whistling. Walking up the hill from the lake, he was suddenly aware of the world about him again, and once again he gave thought to grappling with the terrible power he seemed to have acquired.

Two tall men in grey topcoats were waiting for him as he reached the house. “Dr. Olie?”

“Yes.”

One of them extended FBI identification. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to come with us. We need you.”

“How did you find me?”

“Your trail was easy to follow. Now, if you will just come with us—”

“But why?” Dr. Olie protested. “You can’t just come and cart off a private citizen—”

“I’m sorry. We have orders. You see, there has been a disaster—an assassination attempt on the President. He is failing rapidly, and the White House physician has sent for you, against considerable protest.”

The trip to Washington was swift, first in a large black car and then by helicopter. Before he knew what had happened, Dr. Olie was being rushed along carpeted corridors, through a maze of rooms and into a sickroom where a small grey man lay in coma with a bullet lodged in his brain. Swiftly the doctor examined his patient. Moments later the President was sitting up in bed, shaking his head in confusion and asking to be carried to a chair. A day later the President’s recovery was so complete that careful X ray examination failed even to locate the bullet.

An attempt was made to keep the episode secret, but there was a leak to the Press from somewhere high in the Administration. Overnight Dr. Stephen Olie was famous. Congress paused in their deliberations to declare him a National Resource while the United Nations claimed him for humanity. Leading clergymen the world over debated the moral issue of whom he should save first, since it was obviously impossible for him to go to the aid of every desperately ill patient. On one occasion, in the cause of peace, he was whisked into a bulky foreign aircraft and flown nonstop to the Kremlin to cure a certain high-ranking official of his cirrhosis. The newspapers debated the morality of that, also.

A committee was set up, composed of two physicians, two Senators and Adlai Stevenson, to determine who should have priority on Dr. Olie’s services. The committee could not agree. Meanwhile, Dr. Olie was kept busy 20 hours a day treating long lines of patients on a first-come, first-serve basis. On the second day a riot broke out; the doctor was saved from the lethally grateful embrace of the mob only with the greatest difficulty. He was taken to a master bedroom in Blair House and put to bed, given vitamin injections and subjected to electrocardiograms. Double shifts of special nurses babied him. Presently he forced them to let him sit up in a chair and was left alone to stare out the window at the grey buildings of the city (except for the Secret Service men who were assigned to insure his personal protection).

For three days he sat, hardly moving, barely eating, searching to find a solution to the dilemma as frustration, rage and desperation arose in his mind.

For another three days he sat staring at his hands. Once, he had wished for a miracle—an idle, hopeless, vagrant thought—and the miracle somehow had come about. And now, hour by hour, as committees, newspapers, television programs, governments, clergymen, doctors and lawyers all clamored for his services he was hating that vagrant thought, wishing desperately to retract it. If only he had never wished it. If only the magic could be gone—

His brooding was interrupted by a representative from the White House. He was most regretful to interrupt the doctor’s rest, but a famous Senator had developed laryngitis on the eve of a critical filibuster and the President requested that Dr. Olie see him. Dr. Olie declined.

The representative blinked. “But sir, it’s an important part of the Administration’s program. The President personally asks—”

“I said no,” the doctor replied.

“But I’m afraid the President insists—”

Dr. Stephen Olie rose slowly from his chair, feeling a chill going through his body. Then something seemed to break in his mind; in a moment of blind, screaming rage he fought them off, smashing his fists against the wall, throwing chairs through windows, tearing his clothes and cursing, as the Secret Service men—doubtless afraid of damaging the holder of the Great Gift—fell back and looked at him, fearfully.

He felt filled with rage and hate. He had not asked that the gift be given to him; he had not even realized it when it at first was. Every trace of love or even compassion for humanity seemed to leave him, now—a mob, greedy and grasping for life, avid for it, having together no thoughts or hopes except for themselves—not caring if their incessant demands and ceaseless pressure to be healed drained the healer dry and left him dead of fatigue; just so long as they themselves were made whole.

Save me! was the relentless cry. Save me! And not one, not a single damned one of them, paused to say (with even a trace of concern): Physician, heal thyself . . .

And as the rage and hatred mounted up in him he felt-suddenly—a great change. This time it was unmistakable, though the why of it was as unanswerable as the why of the other, earlier change. Or the how. And with the change descended a great calm. Strangely, he now felt better. Different, certainly, but better.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I’ll see the senator now. I am much better. . . .

“Laryngitis, hmm?” he said, happily, as the senator croaked at him. “Well, let’s just see what we can do.”

Smiling, feeling the power surge in him, he felt the senatorial pulse and touched the senatorial throat. The senator took a horrible gasp, turned blue and dropped dead at his feet.

The Secret Service men stared at Dr. Olie, moved toward him, moved—except for one—away from him. The exception clasped him grimly on the shoulder. And at once fell, choking, to the floor. In a second he was still. Dr. Olie shrugged.

“It’s really very simple,” he said, answering the unvoiced question. “You’ve all heard of the power of life and death.” Those in the room shrank back still farther from him. He got up from his chair, stretched. “Now,” he said, “it’s complete, you see. Now it’s complete. . . .”

No one tried to stop him as he walked out. The word had spread rapidly. He went to his hotel room and there, humming tunelessly, he cut his common carotid artery with a razor blade.