How long had the Dat-tay-vao been with him?

Surely not long, for Ba had seen the surprise on the Doctor's face when the wound had healed under his hand. If only…

Ba's mind leaped back over the years to the time when his dear Nhung Thi was wasting away from the cancer that had started in her lungs and spread throughout her body. He remembered how Dr. Bulmer had returned again and again to her side during the endless torment, the year-long days, the epochal months as she was devoured from within. There had been many doctors treating Nhung Thi in those days, but for Ba and his wife, Dr. Bulmer had come to be The Doctor.

If only he had possessed the Dat-tay-vao then!

But of course he hadn't. He had been an ordinary physician then. But now…

Ba felt a pang in his heart for the Doctor, because all the tales about the Dat-tay-vao hinted that there was a balance to be struck. Always a balance…

And a price to be paid.

I can do it! Alan thought as he drove home.

There was no longer any doubt that he had come to possess some sort of healing power. Tonight's episode proved it. Cunningham's scalp had been hanging open, bleeding like crazy, and he'd put his hand over it and changed it to a scratch.

Eleven p.m. He had made a mental note of the time it happened.

Sonja Andersen and Henrietta Westin weren't freak coincidences! He could do it! But how to control it? How to use it when he wanted to?

Ginny's voice broke through.

"Josie and Terri won't believe tonight when I tell them about it!"

"Won't believe what?" Alan said, suddenly alert to what she was saying. Had she seen? If she had, they could talk about it without him sounding crazy. He desperately needed to share this with someone who believed.

"The party! All those celebrities! And the fight between Cunningham and Switzer! Everything!"

"Oh, that." He was disappointed. Obviously she hadn't seen anything.

He thought Ba might have seen what had happened, but perhaps he hadn't quite believed his eyes. That would be the normal reaction—disbelief. Which was why Alan had to keep this to himself. If he couldn't quite believe what was happening, how could he expect anyone else to accept it?

"You know," Ginny was saying, "I can't figure that Sylvia. She seems hard as nails, yet she took in that little retarded boy and cares for him by herself. I just don't—"

"Jeffy's not retarded. He's autistic."

"Just about the same thing, right?"

"Not really. Most autistic kids test out retarded, but there's a lot of debate as to whether they all are. I don't think Jeffy is." He gave her a quick summary of the latest theories, then said, "Sylvia once snowed me a photo of a house he had built out of blocks. So I know there's intelligence in that boy: It's just locked away."

Ginny was staring at him. "That's the most you've said in days!"

"Is it? I hadn't realized. Sorry."

"That's okay. You've been only a little bit more preoccupied than usual. I'm used to it by now."

"Again, sorry."

"But back to our hostess: How did she come to adopt that little boy? I asked her but she never got around to answering me. As a matter of fact, I got the distinct impression she avoided answering me."

Alan shrugged. "I don't know, either. I figure it's something she doesn't feel is anybody else's business."

"But isn't there something that can be done for him?"

"Every known therapy has been tried."

"With all her money, I'm surprised she doesn't take him to see some bigwig pediatrician in the City—" She stopped abruptly.

Alan finished for her. "Instead of making do with a local family doc?" he said with a sour smile.

Ginny looked uncomfortable. "I didn't mean that at all."

"It's okay." Alan was not angry, nor was he hurt. He had developed a thick skin on this topic. He knew Ginny wished that he had specialized in some field, any field, of medicine. She said she wanted it for him so he wouldn't have to work such long hours, but he knew the real reason. All her friends were the wives of specialists, and she had come to think of a family doctor as the bottom of the medical pecking order.

"I didn't," she said quickly. "I simply— Alan! That's our street!"

Alan braked and pulled in toward the curb.

"Are you all right?" Ginny asked, genuine concern on her face. "Were you drinking much?"

"I'm fine," Alan said in a meticulously steady voice. "Just fine."

Ginny said nothing as he backed the car along the deserted road and turned into their street. Alan didn't understand how he could have missed the street. He had been paying attention to the road. He had even seen the street sign. He simply hadn't recognized it. And he hadn't the vaguest notion why.

___10.___

Alan

Alan spent all day Sunday aching to get to the office to see if he could make the power work again. Finally, morning came and he was chafing to get started.

It was 8:00 a.m. He was going to be scientific about this— get all the data down as it happened: dates, times, names, places, diagnoses. He had fresh batteries in his microcassette recorder. He was ready for his first patient and his first miracle of the day.

No such luck.

His first three patients consisted of an elderly couple, each with stable hypertension, and a woman with mild, diet-controlled, type II diabetes. There was no ready means of confirming a cure with these diagnoses. He wouldn't feel right telling the first two to stop their medications, nor could he tell the third to throw away her 1500-calorie diet and rush down to Carvel's for a hot fudge sundae.

He needed an acute illness or injury. It came with the fourth patient.

Six-year-old Chris Bolland was home from school because of a sore throat and a fever of 101.6 degrees. Alan looked in the child's throat and saw a white exudate coating both tonsils: tonsilitis.

"Again?" said Mrs. Bolland. "Why don't we take them out?"

Alan glanced back through the chart. "This is only his third episode in the past year. Not enough to warrant that. But let's try something."

He swung around behind Chris and placed his fingertips lightly over the swollen glands below the angles of the jaw. He concentrated—on what, exactly, he did not know; but he tried thinking of a nice, pink, healthy throat with normal-sized tonsils; tried willing that ideal throat into little Chris.

There was no outcry from Chris, no tingle in Alan's fingers and arms. Nothing.

Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the mother looking at him strangely. He cleared his throat, adjusted the earpieces of his stethoscope, and began listening to Chris' lungs, hiding the frustration that welled up in him.

Failure! Why was this power, if it really existed, so damn capricious? What made it work?

He didn't know, but he dutifully dictated a brief, whispered account of the failure into his hand-held recorder.

His next patient was an unscheduled emergency. Maria Springer—a new patient, twenty-three years old, brought in by a neighbor who had been coming to Alan for a long time— had cut her right hand earlier this morning. After half an hour of applying ice and direct pressure, the wound was still bleeding. Denise placed her in an empty examining room immediately.

Alan examined Maria's hand and found a crescent-shaped laceration, an inch from end to end, on the fleshy edge of the palm below the fifth finger. Blood was oozing slowly but steadily from under the flap of cut skin. He noticed the hand was cold. He looked at the woman and saw the pallor of her face, her tight features, her lower lip trapped between her teeth.

"Hurt much, Maria?"