Robin Cook: Acceptable Risk

“No,” Carl said.

Kim looked at the man as if she hadn’t heard him correctly.

“It’s downstairs in the storeroom,” Carl said. “We don’t get a lot of requests to see it, and we don’t have nearly enough space to display everything we have. Would you like to see it?”

“Very much,” Kim said with relief.

They took the elevator down to the basement and followed a labyrinthine route that Kim would not have liked to retrace on her own. Carl unlocked a heavy steel door. Reaching in, he turned on the lights, such as they were: several bare light bulbs.

The room was full of dusty old-style glass display cases.

“Sorry about the mess down here,” Carl said. “It’s very dirty. No one comes in here very often.”

Kim followed Carl as he weaved his way among the cabinets. Passing each one, Kim spied assortments of bones, books, instruments, and jars of preserved organs. Carl stopped. Kim came up behind him. He stepped aside and gestured within the cabinet in front of him.

Kim recoiled with a mixture of horror and disgust. She was totally unprepared for what she was seeing. Crammed into a large glass jar filled with brown-stained preservative was a four-to-five-month-old fetus that looked like a monster.

Oblivious to Kim’s reaction, Carl opened the cabinet. He reached in and dragged the heavy canister forward, jiggling the contents so that it danced grotesquely, causing bits of tissue to rain down like a glass bubble snow-scene paperweight.

Kim clasped a hand to her mouth as she stared at the anencephalic fetus, which had no brain and a flat cranium. It had a cleft palate that made it appear as if the mouth were drawn up into the nose. Its features were further distorted by being pressed up against the glass of the container. From just behind its relatively huge froglike eyes, the head was flat and covered with a shock of coal-black hair. The massive jaw was totally out of proportion to the face. The fetus’s stubby upper limbs ended in spadelike hands with short fingers, some of which were fused together. The effect was almost like cloven hooves. From the rump extended a long fishlike tail.

“Would you like me to lift it down so we can carry it out to better light?” Carl asked.

“No!” Kim said, a little too harshly. In a calmer voice she told Carl she could see the exhibit just fine where it was.

Kim understood completely how the seventeenth-century mind would have viewed such a beastly malformation. This poor creature could easily have been taken for the devil incarnate. Indeed, copies of woodcut prints of the devil that Kim had seen from that era looked identical.

“Would you like me at least to turn it around so you can see the other side?” Carl asked.

“Thank you, no,” Kim said, unconsciously stepping back from the specimen. Now she knew why the Law School and the Divinity School had not known what to do with it. She also recalled the note John Moldavian had shown her in the Medical Library. It didn’t say, Curiosity by Rachel Bingham contrived in 1691. The word was conceived, not contrived!

And Kim remembered the entry in Elizabeth’s diary where Elizabeth expressed concern over innocent Job. Job hadn’t been a biblical reference. Elizabeth had known she was pregnant and had already named the baby Job. How tragically apropos, Kim thought.

Kim thanked Carl and stumbled back toward her car. As she walked she thought about the double tragedy of Elizabeth being pregnant while she was being unwittingly poisoned by a fungus growing in her store of rye. In that day, everyone would have been certain Elizabeth had had relations with the devil to produce such a monster, certainly a manifestation of a covenant, especially since the “fits” had originated in Elizabeth’s house and then spread to the other houses where the children had taken Elizabeth’s bread. Elizabeth’s assertiveness, her ill-timed struggle with the Putnam family, and her change in social status wouldn’t have helped her situation.

Arriving at her car, Kim climbed inside and started the motor. For her it was now totally clear why Elizabeth had been accused of being a witch and how she’d been convicted.

Kim drove as if she were in a trance. She began to understand why Elizabeth would not confess to save her life as Ronald had undoubtedly urged. Elizabeth knew she was no witch, but her confidence in her innocence would have been undermined, especially with everyone against her: friends, magistrates, and even the clergy. With her husband away, Elizabeth would have had no support whatsoever. Utterly alone, she would have thought she was guilty of some horrid transgression against God. How else to explain giving birth to such a demonic creature? Maybe she even thought her fate was just.

Kim got bogged down in traffic on Storrow Drive and was reduced to inching forward. The weather had not improved. In fact it had gotten hotter. Kim felt progressively anxious about being cooped up in the car.

Finally she managed to get through the bottleneck at the Leverett Circle traffic light. Bursting free from the bounds of the city, she headed north on Interstate 93. With the literal freedom came a new revelation and the suggestion of figurative freedom. Kim began to believe that the shock of her visual confrontation with Elizabeth’s monster had caused her to stumble onto the message that she believed Elizabeth had been trying to communicate: namely that Kim should believe in herself. She shouldn’t lose confidence because of other people’s beliefs, as poor Elizabeth had. She shouldn’t allow authority figures to take over her life. Elizabeth hadn’t had a choice about that, but Kim did.

Kim’s mind was racing. She recalled all the tedious hours she’d spent with Alice McMurray discussing her low self-esteem. She remembered the theories Alice had presented to explain its source: a combination of her father’s emotional detachment, her vain attempts to please him, and her mother’s passivity in the face of her father’s womanizing. Suddenly all the talk seemed trivial. It was as if it involved someone else. Those discussions had never punched her in the gut as the final shock of Elizabeth’s ordeal had.

Everything seemed clear to Kim now. Whether her low self-esteem came from her particular family dynamics, or from a shy temperament, or a combination of the two, it didn’t matter. The reality was that Kim had not allowed her own interests and aptitudes to chart her course through life. Her career choice was a good example. So was her current living situation.

Kim had to brake suddenly. To her surprise and chagrin the traffic was bogged down on the usually freely moving interstate. Once again she was reduced to moving ahead in fits and starts, bringing the summerlike heat swirling in through the open window. To the west she could see huge thunderhead clouds massing on the horizon.

As she inched forward Kim experienced a sudden resolve. She had to change her life. First she’d allowed her father to rule her despite the fact that they had no relationship to speak of. And now she’d been allowing Edward to do the same. Edward was living with her but in name only. In actuality, he was only taking advantage of her and giving nothing in return. The Omni lab should not be on her property, and the researchers should not be living in the Stewart family house.

As the traffic began to free up again, and Kim was able to accelerate, she promised herself that she would not allow the status quo to continue. She told herself that she was going to talk with Edward the moment she got back to the compound.

Knowing her weakness regarding emotional confrontations and her inclination to procrastinate, Kim also emphasized to herself the importance of talking to Edward as soon as possible now that there was reason to believe Ultra was teratogenic, or damaging to a developing fetus. Kim knew such information was crucial for studying an experimental drug not only to protect pregnant women but because many teratogenic drugs were also capable of causing cancer.