‘You should.' Grimes walked over to where Stevens had reseated himself. ‘Cross your knees.' Stevens complied; Grimes struck him smartly below the kneecap with the edge of his palm. The reflex jerk was barely perceptible. ‘Lousy,' he remarked, then peeled back his friend's right eyelid
‘You're in poor shape,' he added after a moment. Stevens drew away impatiently. ‘i'm all right. It's you we're talking about.
‘What about me?
‘Well- Damnation, Doc, you're throwing away your reputation. They talk about you.
Grimes nodded. ‘I know. "Poor old Gus Grimes - a slight touch of cerebral termites." Don't worry about my reputation; I've always been out of step. What's your fatigue index?
‘I don't know. It's all right.
‘It is, eh? I'll wrestle you, two falls out of three.' Stevens rubbed his eyes. ‘Don't needle me, Doc. I'm rundown. I know that, but it isn't anything but overwork.
‘Humph! James, you are a fair-to-middlin' radiation physicist - ‘Engineer.
‘-engineer. But you're no medical man. You can't expect to pour every sort of radiant energy through the human system year after year and not pay for it. It wasn't designed to stand it.
‘But I wear armour in the lab. You know that.
‘Surely. And how about outside the lab?
‘But- Look, Doc - I hate to say it, but your whole thesis is ridiculous. Sure there is radiant energy in the air these days, but nothing harmful. All the colloidal chemists agree-
‘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
During Waldo's childhood he had hoped constantly that the child would die, since he was so obviously destined for tragic uselessness, while simultaneously, as a physician, doing everything within his own skill and the skills of numberless consulting specialists to keep the child alive and cure it
Naturally, Waldo could not attend school; Grimes ferreted out sympathetic tutors. He could indulge in no normal play; Grimes invented sickbed games which would not only stimulate Waldo's imagination but encourage him to use his flabby muscles to the full, weak extent of which he was capable
Grimes had been afraid that the handicapped child, since it was not subjected to the usual maturing stresses of growing up, would remain infantile. He knew now, had known for a long time, that he need not have worried. Young Waldo grasped at what little life was offered him, learned thirstily, tried with a sweating tenseness of will to force his undisciplined muscles to serve him
He was clever in thinking of dodges whereby to circumvent his muscular weakness. At seven he devised a method of controlling a spoon with two hands, which permitted him, painfully, to feed himself. His first mechanical invention was made at ten
It was a gadget which held a book for him, at any angle, controlled lighting for the book, and turned its pages. The gadget responded to fingertip pressure on a simple control panel. Naturally, Waldo could not build it himself, but he could conceive it, and explain it; the Farthingwaite-Joneses could well afford the services of a designing engineer to build the child's conception
Grimes was inclined to consider this incident, in which the child Waldo acted in a role of intellectual domination over a trained mature adult neither blood relation nor servant, as a landmark in the psychological process whereby Waldo eventually came to regard the entire human race as his servants, his hands, present or potential
‘What's eating you, Doc?
‘Eh? Sorry, I was daydreaming. See here, son - you mustn't be too harsh on Waldo. I don't like him myself. But you must take him as a whole.
‘You take him.
‘Shush. You spoke of needing his genius. He wouldn't have been a genius if he had not been crippled. You didn't know his parents. They were good stock, fine, intelligent people, but nothing spectacular. Waldo's potentialities weren't any greater than theirs, but he had to do more with them to accomplish anything. He had to do everything the hard way. He had to be clever
‘Sure. Sure, but why should he be so utterly poisonous? Most big men aren't.
‘Use your head. To get anywhere in his condition he had to develop a will, a driving one-track mind, with a total disregard for any other considerations. What would you expect him to be but stinking selfish?