Two minutes after Dr. Olie’s hand touched John Stevenson’s wrist, the man’s breathing became more free and the grey color left his face. His heart rate slowed to normal. Administering a sedative, Dr. Olie reassured the family (privately hoping that the man would survive until Dr. Bronson could be contacted). Having done all he could, he hurried back to the office, and had all but forgotten the incident by the time his last patient was seen, sometime after midnight. Then, dismissing the office nurse for the night and locking the doors, the doctor settled back in his chair to drink in the blessed silence and solitude for a few moments and settle his own quivering nerves.
The silence was shattered by a pounding on the office door, and a white-faced and furious Dr. Bronson burst in upon him.
“What devil’s work did you do on John Stevenson?” Bronson shouted, glaring at him through bloodshot eyes.
Dr. Olie blinked. “Devil’s work? I merely answered a call after you had left here this afternoon. I thought at first that he was terminal, but he seemed to quiet down a bit after I’d seen him.”
“Quiet down!” Dr. Bronson stared at him. “Do you know what that man was doing when his family reached me? He was digging into a five-pound steak, that’s what! I saw him with my own eyes—breathing freely, good color, hungry! I tell you, he was riddled with carcinoma. He was ready to die at any moment, and now he looks better than he did the first day I saw him. It’s impossible!”
Dr. Olie nodded wearily. “I know. But it’s true. Tomorrow he’ll be even better. In 48 hours you won’t find a trace of tumor in his chest. Believe me, I don’t know how it’s true, but that’s what you’ll find.”
Shaking, Dr. Bronson sank down in a chair. “All right,” he said. “I believe you. But you did something, didn’t you? You must have done something. Will you just tell me what you did?”
Dr. Olie told him. He told him in detail, from the very beginning, and then as the surgeon’s temper and incredulity subsided the two doctors sat and talked on into the small hours of the morning. Faced with the impossible, they sought an explanation and got nowhere. When they finally parted, the sunrise was no redder than their bleary eyes.
A few days later Dr. Bronson called him up. “You won’t get anything in writing from us,” he said. “But we are all convinced that you’re on the up-and-up. We don’t like to admit that such a thing as ‘healing hands’ exist— and for good reason, as you damned well know. We don’t dare to, because it would open the door to charlatanry, quackery, and all kinds of abuse—
“But it does exist! Not often, of course . . . and it baffles explanation. All I can say for now, on behalf of my colleagues and myself, is: thank Heaven you are a regular and respectable member of the medical profession! There is no scientific way to explain what you are doing. But you’ll have no further complaints from us, I assure you.”
During the next few weeks, the crush of Dr. Olie’s office practice increased in geometric progression. The miracle of his fingertips did not wear off; on the contrary, he seemed able to cure any and every case that came under his care. His waiting room filled to overflowing, and three policemen were assigned to keep order outside. The doctor could neither sleep nor eat. Bit by bit he approached the brink of exhaustion, but still drove himself, if only to avoid thinking about the enigma that lay in the touch of his hand.
The crusher came when John Stevenson, who happened to be the publisher of the local newspaper, featured the story of his miraculous cure in a full-page Sunday editorial. The wire services picked up the story, complete with halftone cuts of before-and-after X rays, and certified pathology reports. From then on practice became impossible. Dr. Olie was deluged with telephone calls, telegrams and personal pleadings for help. When his office nurse found him one morning asleep in his swivel chair in the same position she had left him the night before, she firmly closed up the office, led him stumbling out to her car and drove him upstate to a friend’s farm for sanctuary.
After three solid days’ sleep and a week of good food and daily tranquilizers, the doctor’s tremors began to subside and he felt almost human again. He continued to rest. Time had no meaning here; he might have recuperated for two weeks or two years, but one day he felt well enough to walk down to the lake shore and take an old rowboat out to fish for awhile. Clouds played tag with the sun; when the doctor beached the boat again, he found himself whistling. Walking up the hill from the lake, he was suddenly aware of the world about him again, and once again he gave thought to grappling with the terrible power he seemed to have acquired.
Two tall men in grey topcoats were waiting for him as he reached the house. “Dr. Olie?”
“Yes.”
One of them extended FBI identification. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to come with us. We need you.”
“How did you find me?”
“Your trail was easy to follow. Now, if you will just come with us—”
“But why?” Dr. Olie protested. “You can’t just come and cart off a private citizen—”
“I’m sorry. We have orders. You see, there has been a disaster—an assassination attempt on the President. He is failing rapidly, and the White House physician has sent for you, against considerable protest.”
The trip to Washington was swift, first in a large black car and then by helicopter. Before he knew what had happened, Dr. Olie was being rushed along carpeted corridors, through a maze of rooms and into a sickroom where a small grey man lay in coma with a bullet lodged in his brain. Swiftly the doctor examined his patient. Moments later the President was sitting up in bed, shaking his head in confusion and asking to be carried to a chair. A day later the President’s recovery was so complete that careful X ray examination failed even to locate the bullet.
An attempt was made to keep the episode secret, but there was a leak to the Press from somewhere high in the Administration. Overnight Dr. Stephen Olie was famous. Congress paused in their deliberations to declare him a National Resource while the United Nations claimed him for humanity. Leading clergymen the world over debated the moral issue of whom he should save first, since it was obviously impossible for him to go to the aid of every desperately ill patient. On one occasion, in the cause of peace, he was whisked into a bulky foreign aircraft and flown nonstop to the Kremlin to cure a certain high-ranking official of his cirrhosis. The newspapers debated the morality of that, also.
A committee was set up, composed of two physicians, two Senators and Adlai Stevenson, to determine who should have priority on Dr. Olie’s services. The committee could not agree. Meanwhile, Dr. Olie was kept busy 20 hours a day treating long lines of patients on a first-come, first-serve basis. On the second day a riot broke out; the doctor was saved from the lethally grateful embrace of the mob only with the greatest difficulty. He was taken to a master bedroom in Blair House and put to bed, given vitamin injections and subjected to electrocardiograms. Double shifts of special nurses babied him. Presently he forced them to let him sit up in a chair and was left alone to stare out the window at the grey buildings of the city (except for the Secret Service men who were assigned to insure his personal protection).
For three days he sat, hardly moving, barely eating, searching to find a solution to the dilemma as frustration, rage and desperation arose in his mind.