To add to his problems, his wife had run off to "find" herself, leaving him with a chronically ill daughter.

Charles, of course, had never mentioned a word of his personal problems to the senator. McCready had ferreted them out through the contacts he still maintained with his publishing empire.

It became evident to McCready that the two men were made for each other: Axford was a whiz in neurology and McCready had a neuromuscular disease that was considered incurable at medicine's present state of knowledge; Axford was looking for a research post and McCready had more money than he could spend in many lifetimes—at last count his personal fortune had totaled somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 million dollars.

Two ideas were born then. The first was the seed of the Medical Guidelines bill. Doctors had explained to him over and over that myasthenia gravis was subtle and difficult to diagnose in the early stages. He didn't care. It should have been discovered years before he went to Axford. These doctors needed a lesson or two in humility. If they wouldn't do their jobs right, he'd show them how.

The second idea became reality sooner than the legislation: The McCready Foundation for Medical Research was begun, with Charles Axford, M.D., as its director. The setup was tax-advantaged and allowed McCready to direct the course of all research done. Axford seemed delighted—he was well paid and could follow his interests without having to deal too much with patients.

McCready had his first pet doctor. He too found the situation delightful.

With an influx of grants and donations, the Foundation grew until it presently provided inpatient as well as outpatient services and occupied its own building on Park Avenue in Manhattan, a former office building raised in the thirties that looked like a smaller version of Rockefeller Center. He had started off with one pet doctor; now he owned a whole stable of them. That was the only way to keep doctors in line: Own them. Make them dependent on you for their daily bread and they soon lose their maverick ways. They learn to toe the line like anybody else.

Axford still showed a lot of maverick tendencies, but McCready laid that off to the fact that he gave his research chief plenty of room. Someday he would yank on a few strings and see how the Brit danced. But not yet. Not while he needed Axford's research know-how.

That might not be much longer, though. Not if one tenth of what he had heard about this Bulmer character were true. After years of false leads, it was almost too much to hope for. But those stories…

His mouth went dry. If those stories were even half true…

And to think that Bulmer had been in his committee room only last month. He hadn't come across as a nut case then— anything but. But was it possible he had been sitting a few yards away from a cure and not known it?

He had to find out. He had to know! He didn't have much time!

___13.___

Charles

"C'mon, Daddy," Julie said, her voice a shade away from a whine. "Tonight's a dialysis night." She stood there in her cut-off jeans and long-sleeved Opus the Penguin T-shirt, holding the glass out to him. "Let me have some more. I'm thirsty."

"How many ounces have you had already?" Charles asked.

"Six."

"Only two more."

"Four! Please!" She hung her tongue out of her mouth and made a choking sound.

"All right! All right!"

He filled her eight-ounce tumbler halfway to the top, but restrained her arm as she lifted the glass.

"Use it to wash down your last three Amphojels."

She made a face but popped them in her mouth and began chewing one the twenty-eight pills Julie had to take a day— the calcium, the activated vitamin D, the iron, the water-soluble vitamins—she hated her aluminum hydroxide tablets the most.

When she had finished gulping down the juice, he pointed toward the back end of the apartment.

Julie slumped her shoulders and pouted. "Can't it wait?"

"Toddle on, and no more lolly-gagging. It's after six already."

He followed her into the back room where she plopped herself into the recliner, rolled up her sleeve, and placed her bared forearm on the arm of the chair.

Charles had the dialyzer all warmed up and ready to go. He seated himself next to his daughter and inspected her forearm. The fistula was still in excellent shape after five years. The thickened, ropy veins about as big around as his little finger bulged up under her skin. A few years ago one of the kids at school had seen her fistula and given her the name "wormy arms." She had worn long sleeves ever since— even in the summer.

After cleaning the area with Betadine and alcohol, he made the skin punctures and cannulated the arterial and venous ends. He hooked her up to the dialyzer and watched the blood begin to flow toward the machine.

"You want the telly?"

She shook her head. "Maybe later. I want to read this first." She held up the latest Bloom County collection. The comic strip was her current favorite and Opus the Penguin her latest fave.

Charles placed the remote control for the tv next to her on the seat, then stood over the dialyzer—which came up to his chest—and watched it do its thing, drawing the red blood and the clear dialysate past each other on different sides of the membrane, then sending the freshened blood, relieved of most of its toxins, back to Julie's vein while it stored away the tainted dialysate. Charles was happy with this particular hollow-fiber dialyzer. There was seldom trouble with the transmembrane pressures, and Julie had got shocky only twice so far this year—a pretty good record.

He sank into the couch across the room from her.

How does she do it? he wondered for the thousandth time as he watched her smile and occasionally giggle as she paged through the book. How does she keep from going crazy?

How much longer did this have to go on? Something had to break soon. He couldn't see how she could put up with this for the rest of her life. It was living hell…

… three hours on the machine three times a week. He always timed it as the last event of the day because it exhausted her. All those pills… the ones that didn't nauseate her made her constipated. She had to measure every bloody ounce of fluid that passed her lips so as not to overload her vascular system. And the diet—rigidly restricted sodium, protein, and phosphorus, which meant no pizza, no milk shakes, no ice cream, no pickles, no cold cuts, or anything else that kids like. She was constantly anemic and tired, so she couldn't get into any school activities that required exertion.

That was no life for a kid.

But that wasn't the worst of it. Typical of a kid on long-term hemodialysis, she wasn't growing or developing at a normal rate. As they became teenagers, they didn't… become teenagers. They stayed small; they didn't develop much in the way of secondary sexual characteristics, and that took a terrible emotional toll after a while. Julie wasn't to that stage as yet, but she would be before too long. And she was already small for her age.

Charles studied Julie, with her big brown eyes and raven hair. So beautiful. Just like her mother. Lucky for her that was the only thing she had inherited from the bloody bitch. He felt his teeth grinding and banished his ex-wife from his mind. Every time he thought of her, or someone even mentioned her name, he felt himself edged toward violence.

She didn't have to leave. It was hard living with a child in chronic renal failure, but lots of parents lived with lots worse. And Jesus, look at Sylvia—she'd gone out and adopted a bloody autistic boy! If only his ex had been like Sylvia—what a life they could have had!