He walked over to the table that held the dead man. “My job was to get them a clear signal. I thought I could do it just by boosting the power a little and shifting to a less frequently used band, but as I said and as you can see—” he patted the corpse on the table “—the power increase is more than a body can bear.”
* * *
For the next few days after Louise told Jim and me about her cancer, she and I talked almost every day. She didn’t want to get together in person, but she seemed to enjoy chatting on the phone. She called a couple of the days, and I called the others. We talked about old times, her work, her family—everything but the cancer. So I wasn’t surprised to hear her voice when I picked up the phone one afternoon, but I was surprised at what she said.
“Something’s wrong. I’m hurting in different ways than usual, ways I don’t think I should be hurting.”
“Did you call your doctor?” I asked.
“Not yet, because I just saw him this morning, and I was fine—I mean, as fine as I get these days.” She paused and I could hear her sucking in air, fighting the pain. “Nothing unusual was wrong, nothing to explain all this pain I’m feeling in my abdomen.”
“Did you do anything unusual?”
“Not really,” she said. “After the doctor appointment I stopped and picked up some flowers, then I met Jim for lunch—he finally called, you see, so I figured what the heck—and then I came home.”
I thought about my last meeting with Jim, about the talk the three of us had had that day at lunch, about his research, about his mother, and my heart sank.
“Call your doctor,” I said. “I’m coming over.”
“Okay,” she said. “I don’t think you need to, but right now I wouldn’t mind the company either. This feels weird.”
I drove as fast as I could from our gym to her house. Along the way I dug out Jim’s card and finally got him on his cell phone.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“She called you,” Jim said.
“Yes. What did you do?”
“I made a choice,” he said, “that’s all. I couldn’t just sit by and let her die. Maybe you could do that, but I couldn’t.”
“That wasn’t your choice to make, Jim. She had a few more weeks, maybe a few more months, and now you may have taken those from her.”
“Or I may have saved her.”
“For your sake, I hope you’re right,” I said. “But even if you are it wasn’t your choice to make. I’m on the way there now; I’ll deal with you after I see her.” I hung up.
Louise didn’t answer my knock on her front door, but it was unlocked so I let myself in.
I found her lying on the floor in her bedroom. Her eyes were bloodshot, blood was coming from her ears and her mouth, and she was barely conscious. I knelt beside her, wanting to hold her but fearing contact might infect me and so unwilling to risk my life, too.
She looked at me. “Matt?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I think this is it.”
My face and eyes were hot. “Yeah, it probably is.”
“I thought I’d get more time, but it’s okay,” she said, “it really is okay.”
“Sure,” I said, knowing it wasn’t, knowing she didn’t have to die now, at this time, in this way.
Her head fell to one side, and it was over. I didn’t bother to check for a pulse. The flow of blood picked up unnaturally, the nano-machines continuing to work, and I backed out of the room.
Jim came through the front door just as I finished explaining the situation to the 911 operator. Ignoring the operator’s instructions to stay on the line, I dropped the phone and tackled Jim, taking him down hard. I hit him in the stomach and the face, then sat on his chest and pinned his arms. He spit blood and didn’t resist.
“It didn’t work, Jim. You killed her.”
He looked genuinely sad, but I didn’t care how he felt.