Dr. Marsteller Chapter 22
22
When Dr.
Marsteller arrived home, he went to the couch and lied down. What would happen if the therapy failed? It wouldn’t fail, he justified. We know that it will work for humans. It is an excellent idea and sometimes to get an
excellent idea to the hospital you have to tweak your data a little. But you didn’t just tweak your data; you didn’t
have any data at all. That doesn’t
change the fact that it should work in theory.
But science is supposed to be about discoveries that occur through
research, not coming up with an idea and claiming data that never occurred to
get funding. But people do it all the
time, he thought. Even my advisor in
college told me not to, ‘go fishing.’ He
wanted results for his ideas. He didn’t
want to publish something that said their idea ‘didn’t work.’ Nobody did.
That’s why it is best to study things that are publishable whatever the
research yields. But then you are going
fishing. He suddenly became very
hungry. He realized he was sweating
through his shirt as he pulled himself off the couch. In the kitchen, his wife was reading the
paper and eating a bagel.
-Sly, how was the conference?
-Mrs. Viscane paid us to perform surgery
on her.
-What!?
-I wasn’t at a conference. Mrs. Viscane paid us to perform surgery on
her with my new therapy.
-Christ, Sly, and you did it?
-Listen honey, this is between us. I signed a confidentiality agreement. I’m not supposed to tell anyone.
-Sly, I know she’s insane, but for God’s
sake, do you realize the moral and ethical implications of what you did?
Dr. Marsteller slammed the orange juice
he had grabbed from the fridge down on the counter. Then he impulsively began screaming.
-Think if it’s successful! Think what it would mean!
He now loomed over her at the table and
pounded on it while her bagel hopped on its plate after the force of
impact. His eyes were wild and on fire,
he moved back and forth like a tiger in a cage.
-Do you realize what we’ve
accomplished! Every single person or
being that ever lived on this planet has died after a period of time. Time will now be negligible! Do you know what that means! All we’ll have left to conquer is space!
-Honey, calm down! For god’s sake, you’re sweating. Take a shower and go to bed. We’ll talk about it when you get up. Her confusion squashed his tirade.
She picked up her bagel and went into the
living room. Dr. Marsteller stared at
the ceiling and sulked into the bedroom.
His shoulders drooped and the sweat stopped pouring off his forehead and
down his nose. He tore his shirt off and lugged his tired old body into the
shower and turned on the water. As the
warm water rolled down his aching body, Dr. Marsteller pondered what had really
happened, he pondered what he would need to do in the result of every possible
outcome of the surgery. He was fond of
the phrase, ‘one should never conclude but think to the next possible thought,’
and used his full mental capacities thinking about what he would have to
do. He flipped every situation over in
his brain like a piece of tobacco in an old mechanic’s cheek. He knew he had to be on top of his game now. No matter what delusions he was capable of,
he was still attuned to reality enough to understand logic was his only weapon
no matter how wrong he was in reality.
He hoped the truth, whatever it may be, and he knew what it was likely
to be, never came out. But he knew it
always did.
This originally appeared in Dr. Marsteller