Analog SFF, March 2012 (13 page)

He closed the book. “It's even possible, if you're so inclined, to draw an analogy to the present war. I'm not a communist. I have nothing against the church. But I want to destroy fascism. And the only way to do this is to align that struggle with the movements that want to do away with capitalists and clergymen. In the short term, it leads to atrocities on both sides. But we can't stop fascism unless we connect the fight to an impulse that the people can understand."

"We're straying from the point, I think,” I said. “What about William Coley?"

"Well, after reviewing the literature, he began looking for instances of spontaneous remission that were closer to home. In particular, he heard about the case of a German immigrant who had been diagnosed with terminal sarcoma. Later, the patient came down with erysipelas, the kind of infection that Chekhov mentions, but eventually recovered. Coley went looking for this patient, knocking on tenement doors until he finally tracked him down. And what he found was that the patient was alive and free of cancer, apparently because of the infection he'd survived."

I began to see where Ernesto was going. “So we're talking about a cure for cancer."

"Coley certainly seemed to think so. He began to investigate the possibility of deliberately infecting cancer patients to trigger their natural immune defenses. He even developed an antitumor vaccine, a brew of microbes, including erysipelas bacteria, that could be injected directly into the body. The results, not surprisingly, were mixed. Some patients recovered, but others died. After all, there's always a chance that erysipelas itself might kill the patient. It can be a brutal disease. There's one famous case, in particular, that might be relevant here—"

I found that I knew exactly what he was going to say. “St. John of the Cross."

Ernesto nodded, pleased, as if I had passed a test. “I've looked into the details. St. John came down with a fever, then an inflammation of the leg. It ulcerated and spread to his lower back, where it killed him. His biographers agree it was erysipelas. But let's file that fact away for now."

Signaling to the waiter for another round, Ernesto picked up a handbook of infectious diseases. “So what are the symptoms of erysipelas? It begins as a fever with tremors. A red, swollen, hardened rash appears, usually on the extremities, particularly the hands, feet, and legs. The rashes tend to be raised, with sharply defined edges. In some cases, they take the form of elevated vesicles or blisters. Not unlike, shall we say, the marks of a nail—"

The waiter arrived with our drinks, although I barely noticed this. “So you think these cases of stigmata were really erysipelas?"

"It isn't so hard to believe. Imagine that round, hardened welts appear on a supplicant's hands and feet after a visit to the shrine. Someone else at the monastery takes them for stigmata. Then, as word gets around, later cases show the marks even more clearly. Why? Because everyone knows what stigmata are supposed to look like. The mind influences the size and location of the markings. The cycle feeds on itself. All it takes is a certain degree of credulity."

"Hold on,” I said. “So you're saying that these miracles are due to visitors to the shrine being infected by erysipelas. Their symptoms are mistaken for stigmata. Because the war has reduced their access to medical care, they don't receive the usual diagnosis or treatment, but if they survive the infection on their own, it drives off their cancer. But are you really implying that they've been infected by the body of a saint who died over three centuries ago?"

"That's something I found hard to accept, too,” Ernesto said. “But look at the circumstances. A reliquary is an ideal place for bacteria to grow. Staphylococcus, for instance, has been found thriving in newly opened tombs. And you've seen that chapel. Visitors lie on the floor for hours at a time. They're near death, undernourished, vulnerable to infection, in a dark, damp place that has been recently disturbed by bombing. And any battlefield doctor can tell you that bombardment releases microbes that have been dormant in the landscape for a long time."

I remembered Ernesto's conversation with the doctor at the International Brigade. “Is that why you spoke to Dr. Heilbrun?"

"Yes. And he reminded me of a case I might otherwise have forgotten. I imagine that you've heard of it. A tomb was reopened after thousands of years. Soon after the excavation, a number of those involved died, including the man who financed the dig, which led to certain fantastic theories. Well, the tomb was that of Tutankhamen. The man was Lord Carnarvon. And he died of erysipelas."

We fell silent. I became aware that I had drunk too much. “So what are you going to do about it?"

Ernesto contemplated his glass for a moment, then took a careful swig. “Nothing."

"Nothing?” My head was throbbing, and I had trouble understanding what he meant. “What are you talking about?"

He did not respond right away. Around us, the bar had grown packed with journalists, soldiers, and girls, and when he spoke again, I had to listen carefully to hear him over the crowd:

"The Segovia offensive needs to take place,” Ernesto said slowly. “If we don't recapture Segovia, Franco will push north until he reaches Bilbao, which will cut the Loyalists in half. If that happens, the war is lost. And if I write about this shrine, it will only complicate the situation."

He looked into his glass, which was nearly empty. “That's the strange thing, you see. The friar came to me because he thought word of a miracle might discourage the attack. He was wrong, of course. The last thing the Loyalists want is to give legitimacy to the church. But when you cast things in scientific terms—"

Ernesto paused. “That's a different story. The socialists have made a fetish of science. They'll want to look into it. Even to postpone the offensive until they have more information. And I can't allow that to happen."

"But what if you're right?” I asked. “If the chapel contains a cure for cancer, are you willing to throw that away?"

"I'm willing to make the hard choice. Perhaps a handful of men and women will die without this cure. On the other hand, we have the future of a nation, even the world, to consider. You've seen the forces at play here. Sarcoma is nothing compared to the cancer of fascism. If you don't believe me, imagine how Europe will look in a few years, if that cancer isn't snuffed out now."

I weighed this in silence. Deep down, I knew that there was nothing I could do. I was neither famous nor expert enough to make the case for the shrine on my own. And there was always the possibility that Ernesto was right.

"Well, hell,” I said at last. “If that's what you've decided, I'm not going to stop you."

Ernesto only finished his drink, without meeting my eyes. It was too loud to talk any further, so we paid the bill and left. Outside, the city was very quiet. We headed back to the Hotel Florida, moving in silence through the ruined streets, and parted ways at the elevator. I don't think we even said goodbye.

Ernesto left the city soon afterward. I stayed for another few months, writing and working on my own, long enough to see the failure of the Segovia offensive, which began three weeks after his departure. Even after it became clear that the assault had fallen short, it was difficult to understand how things had gone so wrong. After suffering more than a thousand casualties, the offensive faltered, then fell back. In the end, it succeeded in delaying the capture of Bilbao by less than two weeks.

After that, I only saw Ernesto once more. A year after the war ended, I wound up in Havana, where I learned that he was staying at an estate fifteen miles from the city. On an impulse, I gave him a call. Rather to my surprise, he agreed to see me that day, if I'd be willing to drive up to the house.

When I arrived at the estate, which the locals called the Finca Vigia, it was lunchtime. I rang the bell, and Martha let me inside. She looked as beautiful as always, a tall, elegant blonde, and she seemed glad to see me. Showing me into the study, she left us alone, saying that she would bring some refreshments.

Ernesto was seated at his desk, wearing a soft red robe. Beside the typewriter lay a heap of manuscript pages. I had heard that he was working on a novel inspired by the Segovia offensive, and asked if he had a title yet. He said he was thinking of calling it
The Undiscovered Country
.

Waving me into a seat, Ernesto leaned back in his chair. “Any news of the
padre?"

"Yes,” I said, accepting a glass of scotch from Martha, who set down a tray of sandwiches and left the room. “He was shot by the Falangists a month after our visit. For all I know, it was because they saw him with us."

"Damn them,” Ernesto said mildly. “But it's hard to be sure about these things. What about the chapel?"

"As far as I can tell, the cures have ceased. Visitants kept coming, but after a while, there were no more recoveries. Nobody knows why. Although I hear that the monastery was disinfected from top to bottom after a typhus scare."

Ernesto straightened the papers on his desk. “It isn't surprising. Microbes change character quickly. Like men. So perhaps the factors that made the cure possible simply ceased to exist."

He took a sip of his drink. “In any case, it's for the best. The last thing we need is for Franco to lay claim to a shrine. You can imagine how he would treat it. It would become a Fascist Lourdes. Proof that his regime had been blessed by heaven. Better for it to disappear altogether."

We lapsed into a rather melancholy silence. After a moment, the alcohol spreading through my body prompted me to speak more philosophically than usual. Finishing my glass, I said, “You know, the Loyalist republic never would have lasted. A government that is utterly opposed to the church can't survive for long. The need for faith runs too deep.” I paused. “Perhaps in time, if things had been different, the Loyalists would have realized this."

Ernesto, in his red robe, looked out the window at the sea. On the surface of the water, the sun was beating down in a long white line.

"Yes,” Ernesto said at last, draining his glass of scotch. “Isn't it pretty to think so?"

Copyright © 2011 by Alec Nevala-Lee

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Rumors have been circulating in the physics community for the last few days about a spectacular new result coming from the OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) experiment at CERN. This morning, CERN produced a press release about the result, and this afternoon hundreds of physicists crowded into the large seminar room at CERN's site at Meyrin, Switzerland, just West of Geneva, to hear a presentation by the OPERA Collaboration's physics coordinator, Dr. Dario Autiero of the Institute for Nuclear Physics in Lyon, France. I was able to “attend” the seminar over the Internet from Westport, NY.

The OPERA group has just released a 24-page paper describing in detail a measurement detecting over 15,000 mu-neutrinos, showing with a statistical precision of about six standard deviations that, in traveling the 730 kilometers (454 miles) from the CERN site to a detector in the Grand Sasso underground laboratory buried in a mountain East of Rome, they travel at a velocity that exceeds the speed of light by 26 parts per million.

This result, if valid, shakes the world of theoretical physics to its very roots. Einstein's special theory of relativity is based on a principle called “Lorentz invariance,” an even-handedness in the treatment of inertial reference frames (coordinate systems at rest or moving with a constant speed) that would be destroyed if signals could be sent using particles traveling even slightly faster than the speed of light. Such signals would break Einstein's frame even-handedness by selecting some reference frame as the “correct” one. For this reason, the general view in the physics community is that there must be something wrong with the OPERA result. Some subtle problem must be producing the illusion of superluminal neutrinos.

Before we get into the OPERA results, however, let me review what we think we understand about neutrinos. There are two classes of fundamental spin 1/2 particles, the six strongly-interacting quarks and the six weakly-interacting leptons. Three of the leptons (electron=e, mu=m, and tau=t) have significant masses and one electron-charge of electrical charge. The other three leptons (ne, nm, and nt) have tiny masses, zero electrical charge, and are called
neutrinos
. The simplest form of the Standard Model assumes that neutrinos, like photons and gluons, have zero rest-mass. However, we have had to change that assumption, based on recent experimental evidence. Neutrinos have very small masses (perhaps a few hundredths of an electron-volt), they always travel close to the speed of light, and they rarely interact with anything.

Our sun is a giant thermonuclear reactor that burns hydrogen into helium, making lots of neutrinos in the process. Neutrinos from the Sun pass through your body and through the Earth as if neither was there. As you might imagine, this makes neutrinos very difficult to detect . . . but not quite impossible. The first successful experiment to detect neutrinos from the Sun was mounted in 1968 in the Homestake gold mine in Lead, South Dakota by Ray Davis and his group from Brookhaven National Laboratory. This experiment, conducted 850 feet below ground level in a 100,000 gallon tank filled with perchloroethylene cleaning solvent, produced a famous result. They detected only about 1/3 of the expected number of solar neutrinos. This neutrino deficiency was later confirmed by the Kamiokande II detector in Japan, which, although it operated on a different principle, was sensitive to neutrinos in about the same energy range as the Homestake detector.

We now understand the missing solar e-neutrinos. Neutrinos have a small mass, and this causes them to “oscillate", to change their flavor from e-neutrinos to m-neutrinos and back again, as they travel through space. The solar neutrinos were not detected by Homestake and Kamiokande because 2/3 of them had oscillated to the m-neutrino flavor by the time they traveled from the Sun to the Earth, and these m-neutrinos could not produce the nuclear reactions used in detection.