Yes, it’s another Rhymer speculative! Persons who don’t like them are encouraged to go someplace else.
Here’s the sitch. Let’s say that a patient in a state-run hospital is discovered to have the ability to cure cancer. He doesn’t claim to be Jesus Christ reborn, or any other sort of faith-healer; he just has the inexplicable ability to not simply arrest the growth of tumors anywhere in a patient’s body, but also to reverse the effects of metastasis. He must do the usual laying on of hands to do this; no other physical contact is required, and it doesn’t matter where he touches the person. In other words, hand to hand is fine. The more advanced the person’s cancer is, the longer it takes him to heal them, and he can’t do jack shit about injuries, malaria, or any other sort of ailment. Our miraculous healer demonstrates his power by bringing a patient with terminal lung cancer back from the brink, and when various skeptical scientific authorities–the Centers from Disease Control, the World Health Organization, James Randi, you name it–bring him patients, he is able to repeat his feat in double-blind testing.
Our healer has limits. He himself has to be in fine fettle, for one thing–well-fed, well-rested, exercised, and so forth. How often he can perform his wonder depends on his own physical state and on how advanced the patient’s cancer is. If the cancer is in the very earliest stages, he can do a maximum of one person every other day, as he needs at least twenty-four hours to recharge. If it’s somebody in what would otherwise be end-stage, metastasized bone cancer, he’ll need a solid month of rest and relaxation before he can help anybody else, no matter how minor the next patient’s cancer is. Our healer’s 40 years old, and he’s been able to do this since he turned 18; he’s done so quietly and about two dozen times since then. None of his prior patients have had any recurrence of their cancer since receiving his healing touch, and none of them seems in any way psychologically unbalanced.
Oh, and the tiny little problem?
The healer’s a serial killer, and he’s on death row. There’s no question that he’s guilty, as he liked to videorecord himself in the act of torture, rape, murder, and cannibalism so that he could watch the tapes during down times. The police caught him with one live victim waiting her turn in his dungeon of horrors, and he was dining on her predecessor’s pancreas at the time. They found dozens of shallow graves on his property, each filled with a prior victim. But our miraculous healer seems entirely sane, or at least as sane as any such monster can be; that is, he doesn’t hear voices or see ghosts or think that Yahweh commanded him to do his deeds. “I did it because I get off on it,” he says.
The healer/monster kept his secret under wraps until all his appeals were exhausted. Now he wants a deal. He wants his sentence commuted and a lifetime of pampering at state expense, and in exchange he’ll use his power to cure cancer victims. How often he’ll be willing to do so depends on how much luxury he gets.
What shall we do with him?
