Page 64 of Starrily
He shrugged. “I’d already been close to death. Or dead, even. There’s no point in not enjoying it. Only now …” He looked at his hands, resting in his lap. “It seems death wants me back.”
“Don’t say that.” She stood and bit her nail. “That’s not happening. Death isn’t a person or a force, and it doesn’t direct anything. Whatever’s happening to you, we’ll fix it.”
“How?”
“I’ll figure it out.” She paced around for a bit. “Tomorrow. I need to sleep this through to get some ideas.” She turned and walked toward the observatory.
Simon stayed on the blanket for a few minutes more, staring into the empty night.Don’t be all glum.Callie was the smartest person he knew, and the most stubborn. If she said she’d find a way to fix his condition, he believed her.
We’ll fix it, he kept repeating to himself. No reason to despair. It was just a little glitch in his body.We’ll fix it. This was no tragedy.
In fact, the only tragedy of this night was that the bed in the living quarters would go unshared.
By the time they returned home, Callie had a plan of action. Simon glanced at it while she was typing it on her laptop and saw a bunch of bullet point lists and underlined sentences—not too different from the project on her work computer. She was taking this seriously.
And he couldn’t be more grateful because, currently, she was his only hope. Unless someone decided to take mercy on him and make his condition disappear; but Simon believed he’d tempted fate too many times in the past few years to get off this easily.
In San Francisco, they went straight to QueLabs. Callie led him to a part of the building he’d never been to before and introduced him to a physiologist colleague of hers, Nigel.
“You’ve got to give me more than ‘his arm hurts,’” Nigel said, readjusting his glasses as he looked from Callie to Simon. “What kind of pain? How severe on the one to ten scale? Is this the first time you’ve had this type of pain?”
“Just do the check-ups, please,” Callie said.
“Do the check-ups,” Nigel muttered. “This is a complicated matter, you know? Nobody tells you to just look at some stars.”
But eventually, Callie pleaded Nigel into submitting Simon to every possible exam imaginable. Blood tests, urine tests, blood pressure, sugar levels, lung capacity … ultimately concluding with a run on a treadmill, while being hooked up to several monitors.
“All right, that’s enough.” Nigel gestured for Simon to stop.
Simon leaned on the treadmill handles. “I fail to see what having enough stamina to run for fifteen minutes has to do with my arm,” he said to Callie, quietly, so Nigel wouldn’t hear.
“We don’t know anything about your condition, therefore we must try everything,” she said. “Whatever is amiss in your body, we’ll find it.”
“Admit it.” He winked at her. “You just wanted to see me sweat.”
She gently slapped his shoulder and turned to Nigel. “Anything?”
Nigel looked at his list of results. “All normal. He’s got so much healthy cholesterol that it might actually look like he’s got too much of it if you took the measures separately …” he looked at Simon. “Just so you know, in case you get measurements taken elsewhere. And apparently, you have the stamina and lung capacity of a marathon runner.”
“Thank you, Nigel.” Simon smiled at the physiologist.
“The pain in your arm could’ve been something random. Happens to all of us.”
“All right.” Callie worried her nails. “The lab is closed for today, but tomorrow, we’ll take a CAT scan and a PET scan.”
“You’ve got that here, too?”
“We have everything you need,” she said. “And we’ll use that everything until we find something.”
***
Three days later, Callie was still where she’d started. Not a single scan or examination revealed anything unusual about Simon. He took it all with his typical positivity; one more successful exam meant one less cause for concern, right?
She wished she could feel the same.
She’d spent all her hours off work reading research that could give her answers and writing stuff down, and her working hoursthinkingabout what else she could do. She’d been so preoccupied with Simon that until her fourth day back at work, she hadn’t even started processing the data from the observatory. At that point, she was so tired of not getting anywhere regarding Simon’s condition that she simply had to focus on something else, even if only for a few hours.
Her galaxies awaited. She downloaded the packets of data and opened them with her software. Sort the graphs of blackbody radiation …
