Transhuman (3 page)

Now came the big hurdle: springing Angie out of the hospital. I signed her in, he told himself, I ought to be able to sign her out. He hoped.

At last one of the administrative staff came into the room in answer to his call. She looked nettled to see someone there so early in the morning.

“Can I help you?” she asked, unsmiling. She was a Latina, considerably overweight, her skin the color of milk chocolate.

Three hours later, Luke realized that these paper shufflers would have allowed Godzilla to check out a patient, as long as he could fill in all the forms. They didn't recognize Luke; they hardly looked at him. All they wanted was for him to check each and every box on the stack of papers they handed him. Consent forms. Discharge forms. Insurance forms. Lots of insurance forms.

Doesn't matter to them who's doing what to whom, Luke told himself as he waded through the paperwork. As long as all the i's are dotted and the t's crossed, their asses are covered.

Halfway through the papers his bladder started sending distress calls. The joys of an enlarged prostate, Luke grumbled to himself as he got up and headed for the men's room. He urinated, washed his hands, then returned to the administrative office and sat down to finish the seemingly endless forms.

“Just what do you think you're doing?”

Startled, Luke looked up from the papers and saw Tamara Minteer standing over him, fists on white-coated hips, her expression halfway between suspicion and anger.

Damn! he thought. I should have known these bureaucrats would contact the attending physician.

“I'm taking my granddaughter to a different facility,” he half-lied.

“You can't do that.”

Luke saw that several of the administrators on the other side of the counter were staring at them. He pushed the papers aside and got to his feet. In a lowered voice he insisted, “I got Angie admitted to this hospital. I can get her discharged.”

“Her parents—”

He smiled grimly and pawed through the pile of papers until he found the form he wanted. “They waived their consent when we got Angie admitted. It's all here.” He held the form under her nose.

“You can't take her out of this hospital!” Minteer hissed. “I won't allow it.”

Don't get angry at her, Luke commanded himself. She's trying to do what she thinks is best for Angie.

He grasped her elbow and said, “Let's go down to the cafeteria and talk this over.”

Minteer looked uncertain for a moment, then nodded minimally.

Luke carried the papers back to the counter. “I'll be back in a little while,” he told the Hispanic woman. “Would you hold these for me, please?”

The woman took the papers, the expression on her face sullen, wary.

Luke and Dr. Minteer threaded through the busy hospital corridors until they reached the cafeteria. It was crowded with doctors, nurses, visitors, relatives of patients, office workers, all grabbing coffee, sticky buns, scrambled eggs, fruit juices. Not much noise, just the buzz of low voices and the clink of flatware on dishes.

He led her to a table as far from the serving counters as possible and sat wearily, his back to the wall.

“Where do you want to take her?” Minteer demanded, sitting across the table from him.

Luke hunched forward, kept his voice down. “To a facility where she can get the treatment she needs.”

“Your telomerase inhibitors?”

“That's right. I'm going to kill her cancer.”

“You're going to kill
her
!”

“So what do you want to do? Hand her over to Hospice and watch her die?”

Minteer hesitated.

“Do you have anything better to offer?” Luke pressed. “I can save her. I know I can!” Before the doctor could reply he added, “And even if I'm wrong, what difference does it make? You've given up on her. You and the whole goddamned establishment.”

She slowly shook her head. “Professor, you can't just wheel a patient out of this hospital because you want to experiment on her.”

“I want to save her!” he growled. “She's my granddaughter, for God's sake!”

“You can't get her discharged without the attending physician's approval.”

“Which is you.”

“Which is me.”

“Then you'll have to sign off on it.”

Minteer stared at him for a long, silent moment. Then she asked, “Where is this facility you want to take her to?”

“Oregon.”

“Oregon? That's completely across the country!”

He nodded. “There are several places along the way we can stop off, check her condition, renew her meds.”

“Several…” She blinked with confusion. “You're not flying? You're going to
drive
all the way out to Oregon?”

“That's right.”

“But why drive? Why not fly?”

Now Luke hesitated. Hell, he thought, might as well tell her.

“Because,” he said, “once my daughter and her husband find out I've taken her, they're going to go apeshit. They'll call the cops, the FBI, God knows who else.”

“They don't know you're doing this?” Minteer's voice rose a register and a half.

“No, they don't,” he admitted.

“Then I'm not signing anything!”

“You've got to!”

Dr. Minteer shook her head stubbornly.

“If you don't help me,” Luke growled, “you'll be killing my granddaughter.”

 

Tamara Minteer

S
HE WAS BORN
on a small farm near Blue Hill, Maine, not far from Bar Harbor. The family, of French Canadian ancestry, had been there since the American Revolution. Her father was an electrician who sometimes worked in the boatyards of nearby Southwest Harbor. He was a doggedly stubborn man, a hard worker who tolerated no laziness in his children, stern and gruff. Yet he slipped quarters under their pillows while they slept and told them that the Tooth Fairy had done it.

Her mother raised their nine children, tended the family's little vegetable garden, milked their cows, and occasionally took in laundry. Always smiling, she taught her children the songs of her own childhood.

Tamara was a bright and independent child, the next-to-last daughter in the family. She grew up strong and tall and healthy, and won a partial scholarship to the state university. She worked part-time during the school semesters, full-time during summers, and went on to medical school. Since childhood the only profession she had ever wanted was to be a physician.

It was in medical school that she fell hopelessly in love with a charming young scoundrel who had too much family money and too little sense of responsibility. He took her heart and, soon after, her virginity. Despite her mother's warnings and her father's misgivings, she married the young man. Tamara saw the good hidden beneath his lazy, self-centered ways, and knew that she could transform him into a wonderful, heroic healer.

She couldn't. Love turned to bitterness. They quarreled. They fought. She couldn't divorce him; that was unthinkable in her family. One day he sailed off alone into the calm and bright Atlantic and never returned. No word of him. Searches by the Coast Guard found nothing, not even his boat.

Tamara threw herself into her studies, feeling guilty to be free of him, wondering if he was alive or dead.

She went into oncology, determined to help cancer patients to combat their dread disease. Over the years, she learned that most of her patients died. The best that she could do was give them a few extra years. Death was her implacable enemy, and death almost always won.

She didn't become bitter. But neither did she become resigned to watching her patients wither and fail. She held on to her faith and kept herself on the cutting edge of new therapies, new concepts, new hope.

Angela Villanueva was an especially trying case. Eight years old. Glioblastoma multiforme. A death sentence for the little girl, despite every technique of modern medicine.

Then the child's grandfather insisted that he could cure her, with a treatment never tried on human beings. It was impossible, Tamara knew. The hospital's board refused even to consider it. The FDA and other government agencies would not countenance it.

But Professor Lucas Abramson pointed his finger at Tamara and told her that unless she helped him, little Angela would die. In his stubborn black-or-white ways, he reminded her faintly of her father.

“There's no maybes about right and wrong,” her father had often told her. “There's right and there's wrong. One or the other.”

One or the other. Abramson insisted that if she didn't help him to treat Angela, she would be killing the child.

No maybes.

 

Decisions

L
UKE STARED AT
Tamara Minteer, her high-cheekboned face set in a rock-hard expression of obstinate refusal, her green eyes locked on his own.

“If you don't sign the release forms,” he said, very softly, “you'll be killing Angie. Not the hospital. Not the system.
You
.”

Minteer's eyes wavered.

“I'm the only chance the kid has,” Luke went on. “You know that. Even if I'm completely wrong, I'm the only chance she has.”

Clasping her hands together on the tabletop, leaning closer to Luke, she said, “Professor, you can't take a sick child across the country without a physician to attend to her. That'd be murdering her right then and there.”

Before he realized what he was saying, Luke shot back, “Then you come with us.”

“Me?”

“You're her attending physician. You come along with us.”

“I can't!”

“You mean you won't.”

She looked torn. “I can't just take a week or more off from my job. It's just not possible.”

Luke reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out his cell phone. “All you have to do is call your department chief and tell him you have an emergency on your hands and you'll be gone for a while—a few weeks, at the most. He'll find somebody to fill in for you.”

“She.”

“What?”

“My department head is a woman: Dr. O'Shaughnessy.”

Luke said, “I don't know her.”

“She's not a bad sort.”

He nudged the phone to her side of the table. “Call her.”

Minteer froze, although Luke could see a flood of emotions in her deeply green eyes. Do it, he urged silently. Do it.

She pushed the phone back toward him. Before Luke could say anything, she pulled her own smartphone from the pocket of her white coat.

He held his breath as she thumbed the phone's keyboard. She could be calling security, he realized.

“Dr. O'Shaughnessy? This is Tamara Minteer.” Her eyes met Luke's, then flicked away. “Look … I've, uh, I've got a personal emergency and I'll have to leave town for a few weeks.” Luke heard a voice gabbling from the phone's speaker. “Yes,” Minteer said. “Two or three weeks. It just came up all of a sudden. I hate to take off on such short notice … No, it can't be helped. It's … personal. Very urgent. Life or death, literally.”

From the tone of the voice squeaking from the smartphone, Luke could tell that Dr. O'Shaughnessy was very upset. But at last Minteer gave a tentative smile and said, “Oh, thank you for understanding, Bridget. Yes, I'll stay in touch with you. Of course. Thanks again.”

She snapped the phone shut and glared at Luke. “I hope you realize that I've just put my career in the toilet.”

“No you haven't,” Luke said. “When Angela's cured, you'll be on top of the world.”

Minteer shook her head. “The child isn't a lab mouse, Professor.”

“But it's the same genes!” Luke insisted. “Don't you see? Our genes for controlling telomerase production are the same as the mouse's. We share those particular genes in common.”

“But that doesn't mean…” She left the thought unfinished and said instead, “You're right. You're the only hope that Angela has.”

He reached across the table and took both her hands in his own. “Thank you, Tammy. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

“Tamara,” she said. “My name is Tamara. Not Doc and not Tammy. Don't ever call me Tammy.”

He nodded, grinning. “Okay, Tamara. I'm Luke.”

*   *   *

E
VEN WITH ALL
the paperwork filled out it wasn't easy to get Angela out of the hospital. The child was deeply asleep when Luke and Tamara got to her room. An IV was in one frail arm.

“We'll need a gurney,” Tamara said.

“And an orderly to manhandle it,” said Luke, knowing he was not physically up to the task.

“I just hope O'Shaughnessy doesn't pop in on us,” she muttered as she went to the door and headed out into the corridor.

Luke looked down at his granddaughter.

I'm going to save you, Angie. I'm going to save you. Or die trying.

Two orderlies pushed a gurney into the room and, under Dr. Minteer's direction, transferred Angela's sleeping body to the wheeled bed. She tucked a pair of blankets around the child as one of the orderlies pushed the gurney and the other guided the IV stand alongside. Angela stirred and mumbled but didn't wake up.

Luke raced ahead and went to the parking lot for the Ford Expedition, his heart thundering. It was bitingly cold out there; his lungs began to rasp painfully. For an agonizing few moments he couldn't find the SUV, couldn't remember where he'd parked it. Then he fished in his trouser pocket and pushed the remote key. Halfway up the line a red van blinked and beeped.

Angie, Tamara, and the two orderlies were waiting just inside the hospital's entrance when he tooled the van up the driveway. It was a lot bigger than the sedan he'd left at his apartment building, but it steered easily enough.

They bundled Angie into the makeshift cot Luke had built into the back of the van. Then Minteer climbed into the right-hand seat, and Luke slid in behind the wheel.