"Don't you ever put me on one of those things again," she said. He looked at her with a merry expression. "You were great," he said. "A few more of those and you'll have the press in your pocket."
"I'm a doctor. I have to keep my pockets clean."
"It's the doctor part we've got to worry about." He pulled a small sheaf of papers from under a coffee cup. "BMQA." He pronounced it Bumqua.
She took the pages from him and looked them over. Her eyes revealed the pain the words caused.
"It's only a temporary suspension," he said.
Fletcher reached inside her jacket for her pack of Defiants. "Effectively permanent if they sit on their duffs and do noth-ing else. I could have been convicted of malpractice and man-slaughter, and they'd take years to suspend me. Get a little publicity, though, and pow."
Terry moved quickly with the table lighter to strike up a flame for her. She took a long drag on the cigarette without even a thanks for the light. Her gaze fixed upon some distant vista outside his window, even though the view stopped four feet across at the masonry of another drab Long Beach building. Johnson filled the silent void. "Nurse Dyer was flat out fired as well as having her credentials pulled."
"She told me she's moving back to San Francisco." The ciga-rette glowed orange at her fingertips. "I guess I'm available for lecture tours."
"Don't let it get you down. If we can win the trial, we can file-"
"I can't bother thinking that far ahead. I've got to arrange something for Renata." She blew a cloud of smoke off to the side. "May I use your phone?"
"Sure."
She called the hospital and paged their best pediatrician, who, though he was not a favorite of Dr. Lawrence's, carried considerable clout. He agreed to take over Renata's case, even giving Fletcher a brief rundown on her current condition.
"Look, Lon," she said. "All I have left is my personal pager. I'm sure Lawrence's shut my hospital one down. If her stem cells kick in or if her condition declines, let me know right away."
"In the same breath I'm telling the Chandlers," said a reso-nant voice on the other end.
"A breath sooner," she said.
"Sure, Ev. Sure. I'm sorry about Bum-"
"Forget it," she said. "Just take care of Renata. So long." She gently replaced the receiver in its tray. "DuQuette's a good doctor," she muttered. "She'll be all right."
"How about you?" Johnson stared at her as she flipped idly through the BMQA decision.
"It's less than thirty years of my life. I figure I've got thirty more." She stubbed the half-smoked cigarette until it disinte-grated into a crumbled pile of burst paper and dark shreds of tobacco. "Let's finish off this trial so I can decide on my career change."
XVII
The next few days consisted of a numbing series of inter-views with newspaper and magazine reporters, television talk-show hosts, and radio call-in shows. Fletcher discussed transoption with a growing fervor nurtured by her sudden fall from medical respectability.
"I'm free," she told one interviewer in her living room, "to discuss transoption without fear of losing my medical creden-tials. They're gone. I can step on all the toes I want." The reporter-a science correspondent for a midwestern newspaper-behaved differently from most of the people who had interviewed Fletcher. The majority were either openly hostile, surreptitiously hostile, or confused about just what she was trying to prove. The rest performed their jobs with a straightforward, emotionless technique that caused her to wonder whether they held any personal beliefs whatsoever.
This one, though-Lester Joseph Neilson from the Iowa New Dealer-was a small, tough-looking man in his forties. He ap-peared to have been built more for welterweight wrestling than for pounding a word processor. He watched her with iron-grey eyes under greying close-cropped hair, chewing on the end of his pencil between scrawls on a dog-eared notepad.
"You dealt with death continuously," he asked her with a voice like gravel in a gearbox. "Why should one more abor-tion have bothered you?"
He probed too deeply, she thought, reached too closely to truths she could not yet reveal. "I realized that abortion had to come to an end," she said. "That somebody had to be the first to find another way. No one else had taken the risk to use the new surgical advances available, so I did. It could have been anyone."
"Anyone with a conscience," Neilson muttered, making notes. "Do you feel morally superior to the doctors who didn't?"
"The first person to jump into a fire would be petty to chide others for not going ahead of her."
"And if they don't follow?"
"Only the hindsight allowed by history will determine whether they behaved with cowardly sloth or wise restraint."
Neilson flipped through his notes. "Good stuff, Dr. Fletcher."
"There's no need for the `Doctor' part anymore."
He smiled. "Let's keep it there just in case." He mused si-lently for a moment, then asked, "What if the medical estab-lishment finds it wise to restrain themselves permanently? What if research into transoption is banned outright?"
She smiled as she took a sip of coffee from her pale blue cup. "This isn't the only country in the world. And only natural laws last forever. Somewhere, sometime, someone else will pick up the scalpel and decide to save a life rather than end one."
"How do you feel," he asked gingerly, "about all the babies you aborted up till Renata?" The cup paused halfway to her lips. Her mind raced furi-ously; then, calmly, she said, "Catholics once believed that the souls of unbaptised babies dwelt in limbo, awaiting Judgment Day. That's how they exist... in my mind. In limbo, waiting for the atonement of sins. The sins of others." Neilson tapped the pencil against his teeth. "Pretty mystical stuff. Let's talk about your personal Judgment Day. Your oppo-nents have a medical expert going on the stand tomorrow. What do you feel about such testimony?"
Setting the coffee cup down, she said, "Without making any comments on the course of the trial, I can only say that I will be very interested in this person's opinions. I'll value his or her insight. A doctor's viewpoint has yet to be heard."
"
Evelyn stared in shock at the man called to testify.
Dr. Ian Brunner, sworn in, sat in the witness box. Evelyn marveled at the way he had changed. He was still a tall man, with long-fingered, strong hands. The rebel in him, though, was gone. With a receding line of dark brown hair and glasses through which cool eyes gazed, he seemed every bit the im-age of the dedicated man of science. He wore a somber grey suit with a small gold lapel pin in the shape of a caduceus. When he spoke, his voice filled the courtroom with a Los An-geles-softened version of crisp New England diction. An af-fectation, she realized, that he must have cultivated over the years. He gazed at her without emotion. It was another man who sat in the witness stand. Not the Ian she had hurt with her choice so many years ago. Had she done this to him? His face revealed nothing. Has he waited this long for his revenge?
Ron Czernek stepped forward, flashing a feral grin at Johnson. Just try badgering this one, he thought. "Please state your name."
"Ian Wilson Brunner, the Third." His hands, fingers inter-twined, rested comfortably in front of him. Terry stood to say, "The defense stipulates that Dr. Brunner is qualified as an expert in medical ethics."
Czernek smiled, then asked Dr. Brunner, "Are you familiar with the work of Ms. Evelyn Fletcher, formerly a doctor at Bayside University Medical Center?"
"I am familiar with Dr. Fletcher's work through what I have read in the newspapers, from speaking to colleagues, and from reviewing her proposals as an outside consultant, yes."