Diseases desperate grown
By desperate appliances are relieved,
Or not at all.
Hamlet, ACT IV SCENE 3
The boss was dying.
He was losing weight, growing paler and thinner. And feeling an exhaustion no amount of sleep could relieve.
“Skipper,” he confided to his closest friend, “Boyd Penrose is a lousy liar.”
“Come on. He’s not the White House physician for nothing.”
“Listen, I’m dying and I know it.”
“No—”
“Yes, dammit. There’s a cold black wind tearing down the corridor of my chest. I can even hear the wings of the Angel of Death flapping in my bedroom when I’m left alone.”
“I’ll call Penrose.”
“No. If I can’t wring it out of him, nobody can.”
“We’ll double-team him. He can’t outface both of us.”
Forty-five minutes later a bedraggled Penrose, looking not at all like the admiral of the Navy that he was, stood straight-backed and tight-lipped in the regal bedroom.
“You rang, sir?” The physician injected his tone with as much sarcasm as he dared display to his powerful patient.
“Sit down, you lousy quack,” the sick man snapped.
The admiral obeyed.
“Come clean, Boyd,” Skipper demanded. “You’re hiding something. Has he got some fatal condition you’re too chickenshit to divulge?”
Penrose was cowed. He lowered his head and sighed. “Skip, I wish to God you didn’t have to hear this.” The doctor had to summon the courage to continue. “He’s got lymphosarcoma—it’s a cancer of the blood and tissues.”
There was a shocked silence.
“All right, hold the sackcloth and ashes a minute,” said the patient at last, trying to camouflage his fear with bravado. “Let me hear the wretched details.” Turning to the physician, he asked, “What are my chances of recovery?”
“That’s just it, Boss,” Penrose answered. “This isn’t one of those numbers you get out of alive.”
Another silence.
“How long have I got?”
“About five, maybe six months at the outside.”
“Great. If I’m lucky, at least I’ll get my Christmas presents. Skip, be a pal and give me a shot of Jack Daniel’s. Pour one for yourself and Penrose too.”
“No, I can’t,” the doctor protested.
“Drink it, Boyd, goddammit. Show me I still have some authority around here.”
The Navy man acquiesced.
Skipper’s face was gray. “I don’t get it. Why are you guys taking this lying down? There must be some way of fighting this monster.”
They looked toward the doctor again. “As a matter of fact,” he confessed, “there are three different labs—Harvard, Stanford, and Rockefeller—that are all developing experimental drugs to combat this mother. But they’re still a long way from getting FDA approval.”
“Screw the formalities, Boyd,” the Boss growled. “The White House can get me anything we ask for.”
“No, no, it isn’t a question of just having the influence to get it, which I know you could swing. But once we do, there’s simply no way of knowing which of these techniques—if any—will do the job. And even if we could choose the best, we still wouldn’t know how much to administer. We might kill you then and there.”
“Okay. Strike the carpet-bombing approach. How do you decide which is the best gamble?”
Some color returned to Penrose’s face, perhaps because he finally felt there was something he could do.
“Well, I can call up a couple of heavyweights and, keeping total anonymity, find out what they think of the relative merits of the three medications.”
“Good idea. Why don’t you start right away,” Skipper suggested. “Use the Boss’s office. The phone’s secure. Only get us some answers.”
The moment the admiral departed, the patient turned to his companion and demanded, “Be a pal, Skipper, let me have a refill of that hooch and turn on my TV.”
Penrose was back in less than an hour. “I don’t believe it,” he mumbled, shaking his head.
“What exactly do you find so amazing?” Skipper demanded.
“The first choice of all the guys I called was the same character—Max Rudolph. He’s the immunologist at Harvard who’s developed those special mice.”
“Mice?” the sick man asked with exasperation. “What in hell’s name do mice have to do with my goddamn life?”
Penrose looked his patient straight in the eye and said softly, “They could save it.”