by Ben Bova
Pat said nothing, but the look on her face told him that she understood. Maybe.
“It’s not just ego,” he explained. “It’s my life. I started this work, Jesse and I did. It’s part of me, like a part of my mind, my brain. If they don’t let me continue, if someone overseas steals it away from me—it’d be a form of intellectual mutilation. Maiming.” He threw his hands up in the air. “They might as well kill me.”
“Could the government stop this kind of work entirely?” Pat asked.
Arthur nodded glumly. “They’ve screwed up other lines of research with their regulations and red tape. They could stop anyone in the United States from engaging in this type of research if they want to.”
“That’s why this trial is so important, isn’t it?”
Arthur leaned back tiredly in the sofa. “That’s why this trial is so important. I want an unequivocal approval from that jury of my peers. I want the scientific establishment to proclaim that the work we’re doing is valid and valuable and should proceed full-tilt. Then nobody could stop us.”
“Really?”
“Rosen was right about that. If this trial gives me a positive recommendation the politicians won’t be able to stand in our way, no matter what Jesse or that raving evangelist or any other nut group say.”
Pat thought about that for a moment. But what if the trial comes out in some other way? she wondered. What if that jury of his peers says the work should not be continued?
Arthur tried to read the expression on her face. “How do you feel about this work? You’ve been close to it since we first began talking about it. Do you think we ought to go ahead?”
“Yes,” Pat said. “Unequivocally.”
Arthur felt almost surprised. “Really?”
“Absolutely. This is the most important thing since . . . since . . . who knows when?”
Arthur smiled and reached out for her hand. “I’m glad you think so.”
Pat felt alarm bells tingling. And something else. Gently she pulled her hand away from his.
“Look at the time! I’d better get back . . .” She practically jumped to her feet.
Arthur got up, too. “Do you have to go?”
“Tomorrow’s going to be a rough day,” Pat said, her voice slightly shaky.
“Yes. You’re right.” Reluctantly.
She had to step around him to start for the door.
“I’ll go downstairs with you,” Arthur said.
“No need for that,” said Pat. “The doorman can get me a cab.”
“I don’t mind.”
“You’ve got to read Potter’s paper.”
“Tomorrow. Over breakfast.”
“You need some rest,” she insisted. “You’ve got to start cross-examining witnesses tomorrow.”
He sighed. “Right. Tomorrow I put on my Perry Mason hat.”
Pat forced a laugh. “You’ll tear them to pieces.”
“Sure I will.”
She opened the door, hesitated, then turned and gave him a swift peck on the lips.
“Good night, Arthur.” And she fled down the carpeted corridor.
“Good night, Pat,” he called after her.
Then he shut the door, thinking, Sure I’ll tear them to pieces. I don’t even have the guts to make a pass at her and I’m going to be a vicious, take-no-prisoners interrogator tomorrow. Sure I am.
JESSE
When I got Julia’s message, and then talked to her on the phone, I was scared that something had happened to her. Another miscarriage, I thought. Or maybe she’s hemorrhaging or god knows what. All through the plane ride from Washington to New York my mind ran through the possible disasters that could happen to her. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, imagine how scary it is to know all the medical possibilities.
I was thinking about her, not the baby. When she told me it was spina bifida it caught me totally off guard. Jesus! The kid would be crippled from birth. And she didn’t want to abort it. That was the real shock. She wanted the baby. She knew it was going to be nothing but pain and sorrow all the years of its life but she was not going to abort it.
She was so hurt and so brave it made me ashamed of myself. I didn’t want to spend the next twenty, thirty years tending a helpless cripple. But I couldn’t tell Julia that; she’d think I was some kind of coldhearted monster.
And then I started thinking that maybe that first miscarriage was a warning. Spina bifida is a genetic defect. Maybe it’s my goddamned genes that’re the cause of it. Maybe if we aborted this baby and tried again we’d run into the exact same problem. Or some other birth defect.
Christ! Maybe it’s me, in my genes.
I didn’t know what to do, where to turn. I couldn’t let this poison my marriage. I loved Julia and if she wanted to have this baby—that was going to be a bitch and a half. Raising a helpless kid, knowing that it would never live a normal life, knowing that every day it existed it would need to be fed and washed and have its backside wiped and its diapers changed. God! I wanted a son, not some deformed helpless sack of shit!
And then she asked me if Arby’d be able to save the kid. That hit where it hurt. I realized that no matter what Julia said, down deep she had that little spark of hope that someday, somehow, my big brother would come riding to our fucking rescue, save us from a life of shame and heartache with a wave of his all-powerful hand. Yeah, I could see Arby doing that: showing me how much better he is than I, and taking Julia off with him as his reward.
Kindelberger’s office called that evening. Where was I, why did I leave the hearing, when was I coming back?
I told them I didn’t know. I had family problems and they’d have to get through the next couple of days without me.
Julia and I went through the motions of having dinner. She opened a couple of cans; I don’t remember what it was and I didn’t care at the time. I felt like drinking a bottle of wine or two but Julia wouldn’t touch a drink, she just patted her belly gently and gave me a strange kind of smile.
We hardly said a word to each other all through dinner. I felt bone-tired, and so did she. We went to bed early.
As I turned out the lamp on the night table I said the toughest words I’d ever spoken. “Julia, if you want to keep the baby it’s all right with me.”
I didn’t mean it, not from the heart, and she must have known that. But she turned toward me in the bed and kissed me lightly on the cheek.
“I love you, Jesse,” she said.
“I love you, too.”
“You’re a good man.”
Then why was I thinking that I had let myself in for a twenty-year sentence in purgatory?
“Thank you,” Julia said.
“For what?”
“For understanding. For caring. For . . .” She choked up and started sobbing quietly in the darkness.
I slid an arm across her bare shoulders and pulled her close to me. “It’s all right,” I whispered, trying to make her feel better than I did. “It’ll all work out all right, you’ll see.”
And then the phone rang.
It was Reverend Simmonds’s deep voice. “I was told you’re having some sort of family problem. Is there anything I can do to help?”
I started to say that I didn’t think so, but before I knew it I was telling him the whole terrible story about Julia and the baby. He listened to me blabber on while Julia watched me from her pillow, her face set in an expression halfway between surprise and relief.
He listened to my nonstop unwinding of grief, then said simply, “I’ll fly up first thing tomorrow. You shouldn’t be alone at a time like this.”
“Thanks,” I said. I put the phone down and turned back to Julia. I felt kind of dazed. “He’ll be here tomorrow morning.”
She nodded as if she had been expecting that. “Get some sleep,” Julia said. Good advice. I realized I was exhausted, physically, mentally, and emotionally washed out, drained. I thought I was too wound up to sleep, but my eyes must have closed the minute I put my h
ead down on the pillow.
I had weird dreams. I couldn’t remember all of them, but I do recall dreaming that we were kids again, Arby and me, playing in front of our apartment building on the street in Brooklyn Heights. It was a hot day, a real scorcher, and I wanted to go to Coney Island but Ma said we were too young to go by ourselves and I couldn’t understand that because I was going to be a father but I was still just a kid myself. And then I couldn’t walk! I just lay there in a heap on the sidewalk while people walked past me and around me and some even stepped over me. I was afraid they were going to squash me, they were real big and I was just a tiny little blob on the pavement and Arby was standing up at the top of the stone steps of our building’s front stoop watching me but not doing a damned thing to help me and I was crying and calling to him to help me but he just stood there and did nothing.
I woke up soaked with cold sweat. In the dark I could hear Julia sobbing quietly to herself. I couldn’t tell if she was awake or asleep.
“Julia?” I whispered, real soft, so that if she was sleeping I wouldn’t awaken her.
She didn’t move. But her crying stopped.
“Are you okay?” I whispered.
“Did I wake you?” she whispered back.
“Naw. I had a nightmare.”
“I haven’t slept at all.”
I tried to make a laugh. “Then why the hell are we whispering?”
She turned over and I touched her cheek. It was wet. I reached for the lamp but she grasped my arm and stopped me.
“Don’t turn on the light. I must look awful.”
“You couldn’t look awful if you tried,” I said.
So we sat in bed together, my arms around her, while the window gradually brightened with the new day. In the dawning light I could see that Julia’s eyes were red and filled with tears.
“I’d better shower and shave,” I said. “I don’t know how early he’ll be here.”
Reverend Simmonds arrived before nine o’clock. He must have had a private plane fly him up from Washington; he got here too soon for the commercial shuttle. He looked grave, like a shaggy concerned grandfather, when I opened our front door for him. He was wearing slacks and a navy blue blazer. No tie. I could see specks of dandruff on the jacket’s shoulders.
We sat him on the living room sofa while Julia and I took the two cushioned chairs. She brought out a tray of tea things and put it on the coffee table between us.
“You have a difficult decision to make,” he said, once the three of us had settled down.
“We’ve made our decision,” I said.
“Yes, you told me on the phone last night.” He peered at Julia, who had erased most of the signs of her grief with makeup.
“We’ve agreed on it,” I said.
Simmonds nodded. “I think you’ll find yourselves unmaking and remaking that decision a few hundred times over the next several days.”
“Really?” asked Julia, very softly.
“That’s been my experience in cases similar to yours. It’s not an easy decision to make.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. Julia glanced at me, but said nothing.
Simmonds hunched forward, forearms on knees, hands clasped together. “Now, look. I could give you a whole morning’s worth of religious talk about the sanctity of life. Make you cry and tear your hair out. But I know that neither of you believes in my kind of religion, so I won’t bother you with that.”
“We believe in the sanctity of life,” Julia said, still in that small voice.
“Of course you do. Everybody does. But there’s three lives here to consider, not just one. The two of you have to think about your own lives—which are just as sacred as the life of your unborn child.”
“Which side are you on?” I blurted.
He grinned at me. “God’s, of course. But sometimes the good Lord doesn’t make it very clear as to which way He wants us to go.”
“I can’t kill the baby,” Julia said firmly.
Simmonds nodded. “I understand how you feel. I agree with your decision. But I want you both to realize that there are going to be times when you’ll regret that decision. You’re going to wonder if you’ve done the right thing. You’re going to hate yourselves and your baby for making your lives miserable.”
“Never!”
He reached over and patted her knee. “Yes, you will. Even over the next few days you’re both going to feel like you’ve martyred yourselves and thrown your lives away. That’s natural. It’s the devil tempting you.”
I could believe him, all except that last line.
“Oh, I know you don’t believe in the devil,” he said good-naturedly, looking me in the eye. “Okay, call it self-interest or the instinct for self-preservation, whatever you want. But there will be times when you’ll look at your child and ask yourselves why you ever let him ruin your lives.”
Neither Julia nor I had anything to say to that.
“It’s a natural reaction. Don’t start hating yourselves or each other for it. Don’t start hating the baby.”
“I could never hate my baby,” Julia said.
“Only the love that you two feel for each other can see you through this crisis. Only if you can share that love, enlarge it to include your baby, will you be able to make a happy life for him and for yourselves.”
“I understand,” I said.
“If you were religious, I’d tell you that God will strengthen you, that He has enough love to share His with you and your baby. But you don’t have that kind of faith, so I’ll just tell you that God will help you anyway. That’s His way.”
I wondered why, if god was such a nice helpful guy, he had given our baby spina bifida.
But Julia just smiled. “That’s very comforting.” She didn’t mean it, I knew. And Simmonds knew it, too, but it didn’t really seem to matter.
Then she asked, “Suppose—just hypothetically, now—suppose that scientists learned how to cure spina bifida. Suppose they could make my baby normal. What do you say to that?”
“It can’t happen soon enough to help us,” I snapped.
Julia gave me a pleading look. “But suppose it could.”
Simmonds scratched at his thick mane of gray hair. “You know I’m against tinkering with God’s will. We don’t know why God has sent you this cross to bear, but whatever the reason, it’s part of His plan.”
“Curing my baby could be part of His plan, too, couldn’t it?” Julia asked.
Simmonds bowed his head. “Okay. We’re going to get down into the details of this now.” Looking up at Julia, he said, “Apparently the Lord has decided to test you. I don’t know why, neither do you. He moves in mysterious ways. But someday you will stand before Him and He will judge you on the strength of how you accepted His test.”
The same old religious hogwash, I thought. Julia kept her expression noncommittal, though, and continued to listen without interrupting.
“Now, suppose you circumvent His test. Suppose you latch on to some miraculous scientific cure for your baby. What does that mean for your relationship with God? What does it mean for your baby’s relationship with his Creator?”
I couldn’t take any more of it. “Do you honestly think that God doesn’t want us to practice medicine?”
He turned to me. “I honestly don’t pretend to know what God has in mind for us. Except for this—He sends His tests to us for His own reasons. And if we turn our backs on Him, we do it at our own peril.”
“But curing my baby might be part of God’s plan, mightn’t it?” Julia insisted.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t accept that,” Simmonds said. “I think what those scientists are doing is the devil’s work.”
I must have huffed.
“You don’t believe in Satan, I know. That’s his strongest weapon against you.”
It was incredible. One moment Simmonds was a kindly, thoughtful, helpful counselor to us. The next he was a religious zealot telling us to accept whatever plagues his god chooses t
o throw at us and warning us that Arby and his researchers are in league with the devil.
We talked back and forth for more than an hour with him, and I’ve got to admit that I felt a lot better for it. So did Julia, I’m certain. By the time we finally got him out the door and had the apartment to ourselves again, I was almost smiling.
“It was awfully good of him to come and talk to us,” Julia said, much brighter than she’d been at dawn.
I shook my head. “He’s a nice guy, all right. But a meshuga.”
“He has his beliefs,” said Julia. “I almost wish I could be as convinced about it all as he is. It must be very reassuring.”
We felt good enough to go out to a neighborhood restaurant for a late breakfast and we almost got through the whole meal without talking about the baby.
As we walked back home, Julia asked me, “Will you be going back to Washington this afternoon?”
I shrugged. “It’s almost noon. I’ll stay here, spend the weekend. I’ll go back to the hearing Monday—if it’s still going on by then.”
“Do you think it might end sooner?”
“I think Arby’s sinking faster than the Titanic,” I said. “They’ve got him by the balls.”
Julia looked shocked. “I can’t imagine Arthur losing anything to anyone.”
“Well, imagine it. It’s going to happen, believe me.”
Julia got real quiet the rest of the way from the restaurant to our building.
“Listen,” I said to Julia as we approached our front door, “Even if the decision at the hearing goes in Arby’s favor and he’s allowed to start human trials, the work will never be done in time to help our child. Do you understand that? Don’t think that my brother can save our baby, because he can’t.”
Julia smiled and patted me on the cheek. “Oh, Jesse, I love you. Don’t you know that?”
I opened the front door and she went through. I followed her into the foyer, wondering what she meant by that.
Then she added, “I do think you ought to get back to the trial this afternoon, though.”
THE TRIAL:
