Blameless in Abaddon Read Online Free PDF Page B

abnormal lymph nodes in the vicinity of his prostate.
    â€œAbnormal?” he wailed. “You mean malignant?”
    â€œWe won’t know till we biopsy them,” said Blumenberg. “If I had to make a guess, though . . . yes, Martin, malignant.”
    â€œCan we beat it, Doc? Is this cancer gonna kill me?”
    â€œThese days, with God out of commission, it’s hard to know anything for sure.”
    â€œI don’t believe He’s out of commission.”
    â€œYou favor the Mayfly Theory?”
    â€œDon’t you?”
    Blumenberg shrugged. “When it comes to God, I have very few opinions. It’s all I can do to keep up with urology. But to answer your first question: yes, I think we can beat it.”
    On May 25 Martin returned to the hospital, and twenty-two hours later Blumenberg cut into his abdomen. The specialist biopsied the three suspicious nodes, and each proved rife with cancer cells. Blumenberg excised these nasty little time bombs, then biopsied their neighbors, subsequently taking his knife to the ones infiltrated by carcinoma: the majority, predictably. With Martin already out cold on the table, Blumenberg decided to start therapy immediately, sowing the diseased gland with several dozen radioactive I-125 microcapsules, each no bigger than a grain of sand.
    Surfacing into consciousness, Martin grew instantly aware of the violence wrought by Blumenberg’s scalpel. From pole to pole, his belly throbbed and spasmed. He felt as if some demonic child had opened up his abdomen with a beach shovel, reached inside, and attempted to fashion a toy castle from his viscera.
    A nurse stood by his bedside, wielding a syringe filled with Demerol. She jabbed the needle into his thigh, flashed a professional smile, and pushed the plunger.
    Corinne squeezed his hand.
    â€œThe nodes,” he rasped.
    â€œIt’s what we thought,” said Corinne.
    â€œPositive?”
    â€œBlumenberg cut ’em out, every last one.” She lifted his fingers to her lips and kissed them. “Listen, honey, he also stuck forty-six radiation microcapsules in your prostate. It’s a cure, Martin. In two days the side effects will hit, nausea, weakness, that sort of thing, but meanwhile the seeds will be hard at work, shrinking the tumor, and then the prostatitis will vanish too.” Martin was no fool. He knew that a man whose lymph nodes have been invaded by cancer cannot count on living for much more than a year.
    â€œIt’s time we took a . . . vacation,” he told his wife, the Demerol fuzzing his enunciation. “It’s time we went to . . . went to . . . went. . .”
    â€œWent to. . .?”
    â€œOrlando.”

Chapter 2
    N OTHING DELIGHTS ME SO MUCH as spoiling a surprise. Stapleton masterminded the Hound of the Baskervilles. Rosebud was Charlie Kane’s sled. Jim Young pawned his watch to buy Della a set of combs even as Della was selling her hair to buy Jim a watch chain. God willed Himself into a death trance because He thought He’d do His creatures more good that way.
    As the Jesuit cosmologist Father Thomas Ockham put it in his best-selling
Parables for a Post-theistic Age
, “It was essentially a strategy for forcing our species to grow up. By preventing us from taking Him for granted, He is making us fall back on our own resources.”
    So now you know. Mystery solved. Case closed. Unfortunately for His grand scheme, however, our Creator failed to reckon on Celestial City USA. As usual, He underestimated the human potential for self-deception.
    Â 
    Among the drawbacks of developing a terminal illness while still relatively young is the large number of people you must notify. Most of your loved ones are still alive. On the day before Martin and Corinne’s scheduled departure for Orlando, he telephoned everyone who mattered to him.
    He began with his liberal Democrat sister, Jenny Candle, knowing