Gregory Stillman was waiting when the First Lady’s car—a late-model Chevy Caprice—pulled up to the ACF’s Radiation Therapy Center.

“Right on time,” he said, helping her from the car.

“With all you’re doing for me,” she replied, “it’s the very least I can do.”

“Wait around the corner,” he instructed the driver, and ushered her into the nondescript brick building.

As in all such facilities, the floors aboveground were superfluous. For safety’s sake, the radiation equipment is housed deep underground. They proceeded directly to the elevator that would carry them five stories down.

Mrs. Rivers was operating under no illusions. At their first, extended meeting, Dr. Stillman had explained that, in cases like hers, radiation is almost always the treatment of choice; the conservative one that, for all horror stories told about it, actually carries relatively few side effects. She’d likely experience some diarrhea, he noted, “because there’ll be some scatter into the GI tract,” and perhaps fatigue. But even during the ten-day period she’d be receiving her daily dosage of three hundred rads, she’d be able to carry on almost as normal.

And if such treatment proved unsuccessful in eradicating the cancer? she’d asked.

Stillman had frowned, as if this was a bit of unpleasantness there was no need at this juncture to even consider. Well, he’d replied, there are a whole range of chemotherapeutic options to be considered—plus some exciting experimental options working their way through the pipeline.

“So,” he asked her now, as they slowly descended in the elevator, “how are your children?”

“Well, thank you. Of course, they don’t know about this.”

“No, I would guess not.”

“I’ve talked it over with John. We agree there’s no point telling them now.”

“No.”

She glanced at him, his eyes on the ceiling. She’d always been perceptive about people—far more so, really, than her husband—but it hardly required insight to see that this guy couldn’t have cared less about her kids.

“Do you have children, Doctor?”

“Umm. Actually, I do, yes.”

“Boys? Girls?”

“Two boys.”

“Ages?”

He actually hesitated. “Fourteen and twelve, I think. They live with their mother.”

He thinks? After their first meeting, she’d been prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that his manner was a matter of shyness or discomfort due to her position; heaven knows, she’d made that mistake often enough in recent years. But, no, it was the real thing. Gregory Stillman might be as gifted a cancer specialist as advertised, but he was hardly someone she’d ever choose as a friend.

They emerged from the elevator into a large, well-lit reception area. Today it was deserted.

“Where’s the receptionist?” she asked.

“Almost everyone in this facility has been given the next ten days off. They’ve been told we’re doing repairs on the equipment.”

“I hope no one is being denied treatment on my account.”

“I don’t think so. I would suppose they’ve been diverted to other facilities.”

Abruptly, a door at the far end of the room swung open and a short, dark man in a lab coat walked toward them, smiling broadly, hand extended. “Forgive me, please,” he said, in an accent she took to be Greek, “I was not expecting you quite so soon.”

“Mrs. Rivers,” said Stillman, “this is Dr. Andriadis, our director of radiation therapy.”

He took her hand, still smiling. “I am a great admirer of both yourself and your husband.”

“Thank you.”

“Dr. Stillman has explained the procedure here? Everything is clear?”

“Yes, he has.” It wasn’t complicated, after all. The idea was to kill cancer cells by zapping them with a radiation beam. The specifics—that the radioactivity source was cobalt-60, producing a beam composed of energized photons—didn’t really interest her. She only knew that it destroyed everything in its path, healthy tissue as well as diseased.

“Now, the first thing we shall have to do,” he was saying, “is to draw some red-purple lines on your skin. I’m afraid these will be indelible for about two weeks. But they are necessary, so that each day we aim the beam in precisely the same place.”

She was reassured by his own obvious assurance. “I understand. I’ll just live with it.”

“I tell patients it is not so bad, as long as they stay away from the beach.” He smiled again. “But maybe with this heat, that’s not so easy.”

He led them from the reception area into a spacious room bearing four imposing machines, each set apart from the others by a concrete partition. Waiting here to assist in the procedure were two nurses, one male and one female. “This is where we will do our work,” said Andriadis. “But first I will ask you to put on a gown. The changing room is right over here.”

Only once she was in the room, the door shut behind her, was she aware of the full extent of her terror. She was about to put her life in these people’s hands! To allow her body to be attacked by a device out of a 1950s Japanese scifi film! She couldn’t pretend to be brave any longer. Why, oh why, hadn’t she insisted that John come with her?

But, no, of course not. That was impossible.

“I’m ready,” she said a moment later, emerging from the room.

Dr. Andriadis seemed to sense what she was going through. “No need to worry,” he said, “you will do just fine. We are here to help.”

As she followed him toward the cobalt-60 device, she looked at Dr. Stillman standing off to the side in seeming detatchment. Once again, more strongly than ever, she found herself wishing he were a different kind of man.