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the caretaker—who I assume was perfectly healthy to begin with. And if an ancient nardo was poisonous, electrified, or otherwise capable of attacking humans, I can’t imagine it would be selected to adorn patients’ bedsides in a hospital. So we can probably assume that the phenomenon observed by our author was very rare.”
    “Then what happened?” I shouted. “Magic? The gods?”
    “Exactly,” Alyssa said. “Magic. The gods. Except that today we attribute these phenomena to the laws of nature. And as you are well aware, they frequently turn out to be explicable by science.”
     

    She is right , I began to admit to myself. Nature precedes science, and science precedes medicine…
    Penicillin is a mold. The medical uses for leeches and maggots, once thought archaic, were revived in the twentieth century after the organisms’ legitimate therapeutic properties were brought to light. A drug once marketed worldwide for morning sickness induced devastating birth defects in thousands of babies—but was later revived as an effective cure for leprosy, and is currently standard of care for multiple myeloma.
    “You are talking about a cure for cancer,” I said. “Not just a treatment—a cure. These women were cured.”
    “Yes,” said Alyssa. “They were. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. What we are talking about.”
    She and my husband.
    I turned away for a moment, pretending to examine a small sculpture in the corner of the office. It was a figure of a woman in a sheath dress, a crown upon her head displaying two large horns. Between them was an orb.
    Then I turned once again to face the beautiful woman Jeff had been collaborating with instead of me. And I wondered if I was looking into the face of his killer.
    “Cancer drug discovery and new chemical elements are pretty far outside of your field, aren’t they?” I asked.
    “They are entirely outside of my field,” she said. “That is why I consulted your husband.”
     

    It is the day after we spoke for the first time. The lecture hall is packed for a presentation by the handsome Nobel laureate chemist Jeffrey Wilson. I am sitting front row center, as he had been during my own talk. Jeff mounts the podium and winks in my direction.
    “Good morning,” he says. “In 1984, Barry Marshall demonstrated that stomach ulcers are caused by the bacterium H. pylori . He did this by drinking a vial of it. Vile indeed.”
    A chorus of chuckles sweeps through the room, along with a few groans of disgust.
    “Today,” Jeff continues, “my lab has developed an antidote to H. pylori infection. As I had no desire to drink a beaker of bacteria, we chose to use chemistry instead.”
    An image projects on the screen above him. He focuses a laser pointer upon it.
    “As you know, many chemical elements on the periodic table can exist as several variants, or isotopes. My lab has developed a brand new class of therapeutics using isotopes of the so-called superheavy elements.
    “These are named as such because they are formed by a combination of two smaller elements—which makes them, well, super heavy. We have learned how to force the collision of natural elements to create these from scratch. The trick is in creating those with medicinal properties, and the even bigger trick is in harnessing the best isotope before it decays.
    “Superheavy isotopes are unstable. They are generated very rapidly, and they decay almost instantly into inert ingredients. But it is also this very transience that lends enormous therapeutic potential to the superheavy isotopes as a class. It is this transience that permits us to target a specific biological or pathological niche without any off-target activity.
    “An example is the drug we have developed against H. pylori . When an ulcer patient swallows our pill, the drug is converted by stomach acid into a new superheavy isotope, which specifically targets the bacteria and then disperses into its inert ingredients. The result is a