‘Colloidal, fiddlesticks!
‘But you’ve got to admit that biological economy is a matter of colloidal chemistry.
‘I’ve got to admit nothing. I’m not contending that colloids are not the fabric of living tissue- They are. But I’ve maintained for forty years that it was dangerous to expose living tissue to assorted radiation without being sure of the effect. From an evolutionary standpoint the human animal is habituated to and adapted to only the natural radiation of the sun, and he can’t stand that any too well, even under a thick blanket of ionization. Without that blanket- Did you ever see a solar-X type cancer?
‘Of course not.
‘No, you’re too young. I have. Assisted at the autopsy of one, when I was an intern. Chap was on the Second Venus Expedition. Four hundred and thirty-eight cancers we counted in him, then gave up.
‘Solar-X is whipped.
‘Sure it is. But it ought to be a warning. You bright young squirts can cook up things in your labs that we medicos can’t begin to cope with. We’re behind – bound to be. We usually don’t know what’s happened until the damage is done. This time you’ve torn it.’ He sat down heavily and suddenly looked as tired and whipped as did his younger friend
Stevens felt the sort of tongue-tied embarrassment a man may feel when a dearly beloved friend falls in love with an utterly worthless person. He wondered what he could say that would not seem rude
He changed the subject. ‘Doc, I came over because I had a couple of things on my mind-
‘Such as?
‘Well, a vacation for one. I know I’m run-down. I’ve been overworked, and a vacation seems in order. The other is your pal, Waldo.
‘Huh?
‘Yeah. Waldo Farthingwaite-Jones, bless his stiff-necked, bad-tempered heart.
‘Why Waldo? You haven’t suddenly acquired an interest in myasthenia gravis, have you?
‘Well, no. I don’t care what’s wrong with him physically. He can have hives, dandruff, or the galloping never-get-overs, for all I care. I hope he has. What I want is to pick his brains.
‘So?
‘I can’t do it alone. Waldo doesn’t help people; he uses them. You’re his only normal contact with people.
‘That is not entirely true-
‘Who else?
‘You misunderstand me. He has no normal contacts. I am simply the only person who dares to be rude to him.
‘But I thought- Never mind. D’you know, this is an inconvenient setup? Waldo is the man we’ve got to have. Why should it come about that a genius of his calibre should be so unapproachable, so immune to ordinary social demands? Oh, I know his disease has a lot to do with it, but why should this man have this disease? It’s an improbable coincidence.
‘It’s not a matter of his infirmity,’ Grimes told him. ‘Or, rather, not in the way you put it. His weakness is his genius, in a way-
‘Huh?
‘Well-’ Grimes turned his sight inward, let his mind roam back over his long association, lifelong, for Waldo, with this particular patient. He remembered his subliminal misgivings when he delivered the child. The infant had been sound enough, superficially, except for a slight blueness. But then lots of babies were somewhat cyanotic in the delivery room. Nevertheless, he had felt a slight reluctance to give it the tunk on the bottom, the slap which would shock it into taking its first lungful of air
But he had squelched his own feelings, performed the necessary ‘laying on of hands’, and the freshly born human had declared its independence with a satisfactory squall. There was nothing else he could have done; he was a young GP then, who took his Hippocratic oath seriously. He still took it seriously, he supposed, even though he sometimes referred to it as the ‘hypocritical’ oath. Still, he had been right in his feelings; there had been something rotten about that child, something that was not entirely myasthenia gravis.He had felt sorry for the child at first, as well as having an irrational feeling of responsibility for its condition. Pathological muscular weakness is an almost totally crippling condition, since the patient has no unaffected limbs to retrain into substitutes. There the victim must lie, all organs, limbs, and functions present, yet so pitifully, completely weak as to be unable to perform any normal action. He must spend his life in a condition of exhausted collapse, such as you or I might reach at the finish line of a gruelling cross-country run. No help for him, and no relief