The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira Read Free Page B

and his art were
subjected to was instigated by the sinister Dr. Actyn, chief of medicine at
Piñero Hospital. All the attacks and the ambushes came from there, and led to
there, to the old hospital in the Lower Flores District of Buenos Aires.
    Okay, so what was it about this time? And what was it
going to be about? He knew it by heart: a terminal patient, the failure of
conventional treatments, the family’s anguish . . . The thematic spectrum was so
limited . . . Always the same! All the old miseries, even more depressing when
taken out of their framework of absolute truth, of all or nothing . . . Because
a doctor, as opposed to a patient, could always try again, even when it wasn’t
fictional, as it surely was here. The possibility that it was a lie contaminated
the very truth it was based on: the plausible itself.
    A small curtain divided the ambulance longitudinally. They
pulled it back: there was the patient, strapped to the stretcher. So they’d
brought him here! Those wretches stopped at nothing! “All’s fair in war,” Actyn
must have thought.
    The two doctors leaned over him with such intense,
professional attention that they forgot about Dr. Aira; they checked his IV, his
pupils, the blood pressure monitor, the electrical activity in his brain, the
magnetic ventilator. The ambulance was one of those new intensive care units.
The patient was a man of about forty-five who had evidently undergone radiation
therapy because the left side of his skull was bald, and the ear on that side
showed mutations. It almost seemed authentic . . . But he shouldn’t think. He
turned and looked out the window. They were still driving straight down the same
street where they’d found him, still at very high speed and with the siren
blasting, racing through intersections like an arrow, one after another after
another . . . Where were they going? The houses, swept away like exhalations in
their wake, were all small and humble, a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of
the city. They seemed to be accelerating constantly.
    He started paying attention again because they were
talking to him. They drew a clinical profile of the utmost gravity. The two
doctors’ self-assurance was astounding; they used technical vocabulary as if
they had been brought up surrounded by electronic circuits. All the machines
were turned on, and they illustrated the points they were making by pointing to
a blinking curve, a decimal number, an insulin intake chart. They had everything
divided into zones on an undulating tridimensional grid that trembled on one of
the screens like a multicolored cube of gelatin; they focused in on the numbers,
which they entered into a wireless pocket keyboard.
    “Are you familiar with this technology?” Ferreyra asked
him upon noticing his astonishment. “It operates with induced evolving boards,
made of dual proteins. Would you like to try?” he asked, handing him the
keyboard.
    “No! I’m afraid of doing something foolish.”
    “You see, all these marvels of science cannot prevent . .
. ”
    Yeah, yeah, you can’t get me to bite that. Where’s the
camera? It had undoubtedly been easy to hide among all those machines, and Actyn
was probably watching him at that very moment, surrounded by his henchmen,
recording everything. Now he understood why the ambulance kept driving in a
straight line without turning down any side streets: turning interfered for a
few instants with the transmission of the image, and Actyn didn’t want to miss a
single second; this worried Dr. Aira, for it indicated that all they needed from
him was a momentary slip . . .
    What were they telling him? Had they reached the core of
the issue?
    “ . . . your gifts, Dr. Aira, though from our strictly
rational point of view . . . ”
    And the other, at the same time:
    “ . . . everything possible is being done, technology
helps use up all possibilities of action . . . ”
    What this meant was that the deployment of incredible
machines hastened the