Engineman - Eric Brown [86]
"So Dan and the others-?" Mirren began.
"Dan's fine, Ralph - as is everyone else you've had contact with over the past couple of days. Another 'benefit', if you like, of Heine's III is that it responds to treatment, as I've said." She paused, then continued, "It's still a fatal disease, but with the drugs we have available nowadays it can be controlled."
He felt sick. "How long have I got?"
Nahendra nodded, as if acknowledging his need to be told the truth. "In similar cases of Heine's III, life expectancy is calculated at between four and five years."
Mirren felt their eyes on him. He experienced an ambiguous reaction to the news. He had fully expected Nahendra to tell him that he would be dead in a month, and now he felt as though he had been granted a reprieve, a stay of execution.
Then, as her words sank in, that part of Mirren which considered himself immortal was rocked by the fact that in four years, certainly five, he would be dead. The enormity of the concept was too much to comprehend. Death was what happened to other people, never oneself, however inevitable he knew the fact to be. Intellectually he could grasp the abstract concept that one day he would die - one day in the not too distant future - but on a visceral level it was impossible for him to understand that within five years his viewpoint on existence would be shut down.
He reflected with sudden bitterness that he did not even have the benefit of belief to fall back on.
He felt dazed. He could think only of the obvious questions. "What about pain?" he asked. "How disabled will I be?"
"I can put you on a course of tablets immediately which will control the symptoms and ease the pain. There might be side-effects, but these will be negligible. You'll be active right up to the last couple of weeks. But you never know, by that time, in a few years from now, there might be a comprehensive cure for all forms of Heine's."
Easy words. "There might be..." He could only stare blindly at the far wall, too numbed to respond.
"I'll give you these for the time being," Nahendra said. She passed him a bulb of tiny white capsules and a print-out of instructions. "They're analgesics, temperature suppressants. If you can come back say... this time next week, then we can begin the real treatment."
He wanted to ask what the 'real' treatment consisted of, how painful or prolonged it might be, but the coward in him shied from such questions.
Nahendra reached across the table and squeezed his hand. "People with Heine's III are leading full and active lives, Ralph. There's no reason why you shouldn't do the same."
Dan walked Mirren from the surgery and into the upchute. As he left the building in a daze, and crossed the roof to the air-taxi rank, he felt Dan's hand on his shoulder. "Ralph, I can stay with you for a while if you like. If you want to talk..."
Mirren tried to smile. "I'll be fine... I'll call if I need anything."
They boarded the air-taxi. Mirren sat in the back seat and stared through the window as the flier rose and banked away from the hospital. Five minutes later, before Mirren realised where they were, the taxi landed on the rooftop of his apartment. He climbed out, waved abstractedly at Dan and took the downchute to his rooms. He unlocked the front door and switched on the hall light, and then stopped.
Bobby was in the hall, leaving his room. Within two seconds of the light going on, he halted and turned to the door. He cocked his head to one side, his face expressionless. His ultra-sensitive skin had detected the heat of the light.
"Ralph?" he said, slurring the word like a recording played at too slow a speed.
The sight of his brother, his slight body made childlike by the dimensions of the hall, filled him with the urge to reach out and hold Bobby to him, to confess, tell him everything.
Bobby wore his old radiation silvers - not those of the Javelin Line