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Today There Was So Much

DOROTHY BECK

THE SUDDEN heat of early evening was a double shock to the young
man who stepped from the door of the air-conditioned County
Clinic. The stifling July heat of the Southeast wilted his white suit
almost immediately. The day was tired. No sigh of life seemed to
exist in the surrounding cotton fields. Not even a crow circling lazily
in the sky. "Heck of a place for a clinic," Dr. Frazer thought, as he
did every evening. Funny, the way thought patterns seem to engrave
themselves on your mind. Today there was so much more to think
about.

Doctor Clark Frazer was tired, but not weary and despondent as
he'd been so many evenings of late. Today was a red-letter day in
medical history. It was the day that ended medical history.

Frazer paused on the white wooden steps and lit a cigarette. Gad,
he was glad he lived today and not a half-century before. Life must
have been hell then. Cancer-that plague of the sixties. Once an
actual disease. Clark shook his head. The first item in all intro-
ductory medical books was the description of the finding of the cure
for cancer. Cancer, then leukemia, then the common cold. And now=.

Clark started down the dusty country road. He'd always found
the two-mile walk to town invigorating, but now he almost wished
he'd driven. When was it he'd last slept?

He had a sudden feeling of physical joy in his throat. His mind
was scarcely able to comprehend the miracle. All those months of
intense research-studying, devising, experimenting, testing-first on
animals, finally ...

The doctor had a certain feeling of satisfaction as he thought of
his present patient. Amos Small, age 128, injured in a fire. It was
necessary to replace over half his organs with synthetic ones, but he"
was alive. Alive! A few decades age he would have been dead of old
age, if nothing else. Now there was nothing else.

How strange that this miracle had happened in Clark's little
clinic. Expectations would have laid it in some large university hos-
pital. Then he almost smiled. Wasn't Christ born in a stable?

The drug. He recalled the happenings of the last few hours in
disjointed, vivid fragments, like confetti swirling in his conscious-
ness-the few drops of precious liquid in the flask, the joyful smile on
Dr. Green's face, the tears in Dr. McBride's eyes. "We did it," he'd

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