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 McCready 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.
He intended to acquire that proof tonight, sometime after 9:00. But first he wanted a tête-à-tête with Bulmer.
“So that’s the Hour of Power, ay?” Bulmer said, looking down at the sine waves flowing through the EEG laid out on his bed.
“If you want to call it that.”
Bulmer looked at him. “You never give in, do you?”
“Not often.”
“And you say my PET scan is better?”
“Minimally, yes.”
“Then I might as well get out of here.”
“No!” Charles said, a bit more quickly and loudly than he would have liked. “Not yet. I just want to hook you up to the EEG tonight and have you use your so-called power on a patient while we’re recording.”
Bulmer frowned, looking distracted.
“Are you all right?” Charles said.
Bulmer shrugged. “Something bad happened today. I felt it around midday. Don’t ask me what it is, I don’t know. But…” He shrugged again. “Maybe this place is getting on my nerves. I’m bored out of my mind.”
“You’ve come this far. What difference is another twenty-four hours going to make?”
Alan shook his head again. “Do you know how many times I’ve said those exact words to inpatients with hospitalitis? Thousands!” He sighed. “Okay. One more day and then I’m out of here.”
“Right.” Charles turned at the door. He didn’t want to ask this question, but he needed the answer. “By the way, how do you make this bloody power work?”
“What power?” Bulmer said with a smile.
“The one that doesn’t exist?”
“Yes. That one.”
He scratched his head. “I don’t really know. When the hour’s on, I just put my hand on the person and sort of…will it.”
“Just touching them in passing’s not enough?”
“No. Many times I’ve done a physical on someone—ENT, heart, lungs, blood pressure, and so on—and nothing’s happened. Then I’ve found something, wished it gone and”—he shrugged—“it goes.”
Charles saw the light in Bulmer’s eyes and realized for the first time that the man was a true healer, power or no power. Charles knew plenty of physicians who loved the practice of medicine—ferreting out the cause of a problem and then eliminating it. Bulmer was that sort, too, but Charles had come to see that he had another, almost mystical dimension. He wanted to heal. Not merely to stamp out the disease, but to make a person whole again, and he was bloody damned elated when he could. You could be taught to do the first; you had to be born to do the second.
And damned if he wasn’t starting to like the man.
“Do you have to know the diagnosis?”
“I don’t know. I usually know because I talk to them and examine them.” He cocked an eyebrow toward Charles. “Just like a real doctor.”
“Do you feel anything when it happens?”
“Yeah.” His eyes got a faraway look. “I’ve never shot dope or snorted cocaine, but it must be something like that.”
“That good?”
“Great.”
“And the patients? Do they all have seizures?”
“No. Mr. K probably had his because all of a sudden his brain metastases were gone and that triggered something. A lot of them seem to feel a brief pain in the target organ, but he’s the only one ever to seizure on me. Why the interest all of a sudden?”
The Complete Adversary Cycle: The Keep, the Tomb, the Touch, Reborn, Reprisal, Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack) Page 108
