by Ben Bova
“But I thought you cared about me!”
I looked past her to the door to my office. She had left it open and people were walking by in the corridor outside.
“I like you a lot, Nancy,” I improvised, keeping my voice low, “but I don’t think we should—well, I’m just not ready for any kind of a commitment. It’s best if we break it off, right here and now.”
“But I love you!” she blurted.
My jaw must have dropped six inches.
“Do you think I’d go to bed with you just because I wanted a promotion? Do you think I’m some kind of company whore?”
I jumped up and went for the door. I wanted to close it.
Nancy turned in her chair. “You can’t run out on me! I won’t let you!”
I shut the door and leaned against it. “I’m not running out on you, Nancy. I just want to keep our conversation private.”
“Private?” she fairly shrieked. “I’ll tell everybody! I’ll tell them all what a coldhearted bastard you are!”
I pulled up the only other chair in the office beside her and, leaning close, keeping my voice low and controlled, I said, “You’ll do nothing of the kind. You have your own career and your own dignity to think of. This isn’t some soap opera, and don’t think you can turn it into one.”
The tears were streaming down her face but her eyes were blazing with anger. “What are you going to do, get me fired? You try that and I’ll have you in court on harassment charges so fast your head will spin.”
“Nobody’s going to fire you,” I said, trying to keep calm and sympathetic. “But you really ought to behave like an adult.”
“What do you think we were doing in bed? Wasn’t that adult enough for you?”
“Nancy, please. I’m sorry that I didn’t realize how deeply you felt for me. I had no idea, honestly.”
“And you don’t give a damn about me, do you?”
“I think you’re a wonderful person, but—”
“You’re a piece of shit, Arthur Marshak. You know that? A cold-blooded goddamned piece of shit. A turd, that’s what you are.”
I didn’t feel cold-blooded. I could have happily strangled her at that particular moment.
I got up and went back behind my desk and took a box of facial tissues from a drawer and handed it to her. Nancy dabbed at her eyes, took a deep breath, and rose to her feet.
“I should have known better,” she said, her voice shaky. “I’ve been dumped before, but I never thought you’d be so damned shitty to me.”
“I’m really sorry . . .”
“Go to hell, Arthur.” She turned and stamped out of my office.
I sagged back in my desk chair, thinking, Well, at least that’s over. I hope.
CASSIE IANETTA
I know its been months since I’ve put anything into this diary. I’ve been very remiss. I’ve even been dragging out my work here in Mexico; the human trials could be going much faster, if I put more effort into them.
But none of that seems terribly important right now. I’ve fallen in love!
It isn’t the first time for either of us, of course, but it’s like I was a kid again. I’m trying to forget everything else, forget all the times I’ve been hurt, forget how treacherous men can be, even forget my work—just about—so I can spend every waking minute with Bill.
Bill Ventriss. He’s a filmmaker, from Los Angeles. “A serious filmmaker,” he told me the first day we met. “Not one of those commercial hacks.”
Which is why he’s here in the provincial city of Querétaro, a few hours’ drive out of Mexico City. He’s living here while he gathers material for his film on the Mexican Revolution.
“None of this Pancho Villa stuff,” he says. “I’m going to do a film about the real people, the people of this land.”
Querétaro is where I’m doing the human trials on my tumor suppressant, working with the city hospital and a small staff of doctors, nurses, and administrative assistants in a set of offices that Omnitech has rented for me. The offices are just across the street from the hospital, really very decent although not fancy at all. I’m not spending Omnitech’s money foolishly.
We’re doing a double-blind series, of course, inoculating cancer patients and other patients who don’t have a single tumor. Some of the cancer patients get my enzyme, some get a placebo. Then we keep track of them to see how—or if—their tumors develop and what the side effects of the treatment might be. Most of our volunteers are mestizo women, stolid and silent until they see the needles. They never complain, though; they want the miserable few pesos I’m paying. But their black, black eyes always go wide the first time they see me coming at them with a hypodermic syringe.
The first moment I saw Bill it was like an electric shock. I was taking a break from inoculating volunteers, taking the afternoon off, strolling through the street market in the center of Querétaro. The Mexicans do beautiful work: cabinetry, sculptures in wood, fancy mirrors—if I had a house I could have furnished it completely for practically nothing. And opals! Querétaro is a center for those incredible Mexican fire opals: opales de fuego, they call them. I’ve been buying them by the palmful, as many as I can afford.
I first saw Bill from across the central lane of the market. He was wearing real tight jeans and cowboy boots, with a black leather vest hanging unbuttoned. He was holding one of those ritual masks in both hands and talking about it very seriously with the shop’s proprietor. He happened to look up and our eyes locked. Like I said, I felt an electric shock.
He must have felt something, too. He put the mask down, very gently, and left the shopkeeper standing there and came across the crowded lane to me. The shopkeeper scowled after him with disappointment, but then he must have noticed me standing with my mouth hanging open like somebody who’s been hit by a lightning bolt and he smiled at me.
By that time Bill had stopped no more than a yard or so in front of me. He didn’t say anything, just stared at me with the most incredible sky-blue eyes I’ve ever seen. And a two-day growth of beard on his rugged jaw. He was just a little taller than I, wiry, very intense. I never really knew how old he was. I supposed he was somewhere around my own age, but his face had that craggy, weathered look to it. Tanned really dark, like he had spent most of his life outdoors.
“Christ, what a face.” Those were the first words he spoke to me. “It was made to be photographed.”
No one ever thought of me as a photographer’s model before. I had always thought my face was real plain, kind of mousy.
“Look at those cheekbones,” he went on, slowly circling around me. “And the planes of your cheeks and jawline. And your profile!”
I didn’t know what to say. He looked serious, sounded serious.
“Can I buy you a beer?” he asked. “I want to know all about you, where you’re from, what you’re doing here, why you dropped out of the blue to this exact spot at this exact time.”
So we went to the nearest cantina and spent the afternoon talking. I forgot about my work, forgot about all the other times men had betrayed me, even forgot that cancer ran through my family like the Grim Reaper swinging his scythe. All I could see was Bill smiling at me, telling me about the films he wanted to make, the stories he wanted to tell.
To say I was swept off my feet would be an understatement. I was mad for him! Bill brought me out of myself. I realized that for years I had been just going through the motions of living, terrified of the cancer that always came back, afraid to get myself involved with a guy who’d run away once he found out about me, like the others had. I had built a shell around myself so I wouldn’t get hurt again. Over the past few years I’d spent most of my social time with Max; at least he would never turn his back on me.
Bill was different. He was caring, he was sensitive, a gentle and patient lover who could turn me on with just a touch or a kiss. Two days after we met I checked out of the hotel where I’d been staying and moved in with him. He had a tiny little row house in one of those wi
nding streets off the market area. And an old MG convertible, the square kind, forest green.
We drove everywhere, top down, engine roaring so loud we couldn’t hear each other even if we yelled. Over the mountains into Mexico City to spend whole days at a time in the anthropology museum staring at the massive stone monuments of ancient civilizations.
“Layer on top of layer,” Bill told me. “The Aztecs were newcomers, you know. Just the latest tribe to claw its way to the top around these parts. There’s been other civilizations, much older, before them. What stories they could tell, if these stones could speak.”
We became pyramid hunters. We drove out into the countryside to see the pyramids and temples built by those ancient peoples. I was letting the work slide, but it didn’t matter. It was going along more slowly, that’s all. I was getting good solid results. Okay, I didn’t write my reports as fast as I should have. I sent excuses back to Darrell and Arthur. They didn’t complain.
Once we went all the way out to Lake Chapala, above Guadalajara, and found a lovely hotel nestled in the flowering hills. But there were lots and lots of retired American military officers living in the area, stretching their pensions in Mexico, and they were almost always in the dining room at mealtimes, ordering hamburgers and bourbon in loud, abrasive voices.
“They’ve been here twenty, thirty years, some of them,” Bill said, frowning across the dining room at them. “Never learned a word of Spanish. Never even tried real Mexican food.”
I smiled at him over the candle on our table. He was wonderful.
One weekend we drove out to Parícutin, the volcano that rose out of a corn-field in the 1940s. It’s a big cinder cone now, more than seven thousand feet high; still active, of course. We rented horses and rode up to the ruins of the town that the volcano’s lava had destroyed. Nothing left standing except the two ends of a big church. The lava ran right through the middle of it. There were lots of other visitors climbing around the ruins, most of them Mexican, although I heard plenty of midwestern voices yakking back and forth.
Bill took one look at the teenagers who had climbed to the top of the ruined church’s old bell tower and decided he had to go up there, too. It looked dangerous to me, but I thought that Bill could do whatever he set his mind to. Fly up there, if he wanted to.
I went up with him, scrabbling across the glassy black stone that had once been a red-hot river of lava, climbing up the crumbling wall of the church. We made it to the top, where a pack of Mexican kids gave us a round of applause. I guess we looked pretty elderly to them. The view was incredible: the gray cinder cone of the volcano, the colorful town down the road, the lush green of the valley, the purple mountains making a sawtoothed horizon all around us. And the sky. That bright, bright blue Mexican sky with its hot sun pouring down on you. No wonder the ancients worshipped the sun. It was almost overpowering.
On the way back down I slipped on the smooth black lava and twisted my ankle. Bill and one of the Mexican boys had to carry me back to the horses. I felt like an idiot, but the pain from my ankle scared me. I thought maybe I had broken a bone.
Bill drove me back to the hospital at Querétaro, where they X-rayed my ankle and found nothing broken. Just a bad sprain. For the next few weeks I hobbled around on a crutch while Bill did all the housework. He never grumbled once. He almost always did the cooking; he was a much better cook than I was. He drove me to the office every morning and took me back home again in the evening. He would lift me up out of the MG and carry me in his arms into the house, up the stairs, and straight to the bed. I hoped my ankle would never heal.
I was still on the crutch when it came time for my monthly Pap smear. It was just a precaution; the last series of chemotherapy had cleaned me up good. At least that’s what I told myself. I skipped the test. I didn’t need it. I’ll go next month, when I’m on my two feet again, I thought.
Besides, if they found something I didn’t know how it would affect Bill and our relationship.
JESSE
I’ll say this much for Elwood Faber: he knew what he was doing. He put the Reverend Roy Averill Simmonds on the map. Before the rally in Central Park Simmonds had been just another evangelist on late-night TV wheedling his audience for money and playing to mediocre crowds in minor cities.
The Central Park rally was a smash success. Must have been half a million people showed up, the crowd just blackened the grass and swarmed up trees and lampposts. Like another Woodstock. Using the hospital as a focal point, Faber got everybody to show up and pitch for contributions, from the mayor on down to a bunch of ragtag kids sobbing into the microphones that they had ruined their lives with drugs and crime.
“We was doin’ the devil’s work,” they cried, and their cracked voices boomed out over the loudspeakers.
By the time Reverend Simmonds himself trotted out to the bank of mikes, that whole giant crowd was absolutely silent, as if they were expecting him to pull off some kind of miracle right there before their eyes. I noticed that he swung wide of the metal poles holding the lights. Made me laugh, and the people sitting in the makeshift bleachers all around me hissed—actually hissed—to shut me up.
I squeezed Julia’s hand. We were packed into those bleachers like sardines, shoulder to shoulder, the guests of honor seated right behind the wooden temporary stage with the podium in its center, bathed by the spotlights.
Julia was watching Simmonds as intently as any of the would-be saints sitting with us.
“Bless you, one and all,” Simmonds began, his bass voice low and rumbling like distant thunder.
“And blessings on you!” shouted a voice from the crowd. A shill, I figured. The crowd was deep in darkness now, the sun had gone down sometime while the second or third rock group had been playing.
“We are here tonight to do the Lord’s work,” Simmonds intoned, and he slowly, smoothly went into his speech. He spoke about the hospital and asked me to come down and stand beside him. Faber had told me he’d do that, so I wasn’t surprised.
“Here is the man who saved my life,” he said to the crowd. A major exaggeration, but what the hell? The mob cheered and applauded as Simmonds laid his hand on my shoulder. He was standing on a little platform behind the podium, so he was almost as tall as I was, as far as the crowd could see.
I stood there with a sappy smile on my face while Simmonds spoke about how the hospital was “doing the Lord’s work, toiling in the vineyard among the poor and dispossessed, a beacon of blessed light in the midst of the darkness of violence, crime, and poverty.”
He worked himself up, little by little, and I could feel the crowd getting excited. Couldn’t see them, with all those spotlights blazing in my eyes, but I could feel them, like a big panting animal out there in the darkness, breathing and stirring, its pulse beating faster and faster as Simmonds stirred them up. He stirred himself up, too. I could see perspiration trickling down his face. Pretty soon he was worming off his jacket and throwing it to the floor of the stage; he loosened his tie, got red in the face.
He went from the good work that the hospital was doing to the evil that surrounded us all. “Every one of us is in the midst of mortal danger. Every minute of the day Satan and his legions are trying to pull us down to everlasting hellfire.”
On and on. I had to stand there at his side while he ladled out fear to the crowd the way a man pours dog food into his pet’s dish. Not fear of God; he was scaring them with fear of the devil. To hear him tell it, the devil was after each and every one of us, every minute of the day. Not even our dreams were safe. His words blurred into a long, rhythmic string of cadences that became hypnotic. His voice boomed and I could feel the crowd swaying and sighing to his words.
Me, I never believed in any of that stuff. Our parents weren’t religious; the only time they made us go to temple was during the high holy days. I hadn’t seen the inside of a synagogue since Ma had her first stroke. Arthur was the same, although—come to think of it—he felt about his research the way some men
feel about God. No, not really. What Arby worshipped was success. He didn’t want heaven, he just wanted the Nobel Prize.
“The legions of evil are everywhere,” Simmonds ranted on, “even in the laboratories of science where men attempt to tamper with the will of God.”
That woke me up.
“Only a short hour’s drive from this very spot, secular scientists are striving to interfere with God’s plan of life. They seek to make men immortal, in defiance of God’s will. I say to you, they will fail! They will fail just as the heathens of Babylon failed when they tried to build a tower that reached unto heaven. They will fail because these things are not meant for man to know. They will fail because God will strike them down.”
The crowd roared like an angry beast.
“In their blasphemous quest for immortality, these godless men of science are killing babies! They take human fetuses, living human beings, and destroy them so they can harvest their stem cells. And then they clone the cells!”
“Monsters!” roared a voice out of the darkness. Whether he meant the scientists or what they were cloning wasn’t clear to me.
“Monsters indeed,” Simmonds agreed. “Who knows what kind of soulless devil’s spawn they’re creating in their laboratories?”
I was so stunned I didn’t know what to do. I guess I should have interrupted, said something, but instead I just stood there like a dummy.
Reverend Simmonds moved on to other matters, but his reference to Arthur’s lab rang in my mind like a fire bell. Why the hell did he do that? Did he mean what he said, or was he just using whatever came to his mind to stir up the crowd? Was Julia right; was this little man dangerous?
Sweat was pouring from his face, soaking his shirt.
“Now it is time for you to make your choice,” he bellowed into the mikes. “Are you for good or for evil? Are you ready to make a sacrifice to help further the work of the Lord?”
