It

shrill giggle — that of a man describing a prank rather than an experiment. ‘Of those one hundred patients, ninety– three said they felt a definite improvement, and eighty – one showed an improvement. So what do you think? What conclusion do you draw from such an experiment, Eddie?’
‘I don’t know,’ Eddie said faintly.
Mr Keene tapped his head solemnly. ‘Most sickness starts in here, that’s what I think. I’ve been in this business a long, long time, and I knew about placebos a mighty stretch of years before those doctors at DePaul University did their study. Usually it’s old folks who end up getting the placebos. The old fellow or the old girl will go to the doctor, convinced that they’ve got heart disease or cancer or diabetes or some damn thing. But in a good many cases it’s nothing like that at all. They don’t feel good because they’re old, that’s all. But what’s a doctor to do? Tell them they’re like watches with wornout mainsprings? Huh! Not likely. Doctors like their fees too much.’ And now Mr Keene’s face wore an expression somewhere between a smile and a sneer.
Eddie just sat there waiting for it to be over, to be over, to be over. You didn’t have any medicine: those words clanged in his mind.
The doctors don’t tell them that, and I don’t tell them that, either. Wh y bother? Sometimes an old party will come in with a prescription blank that will say it right out: Placebo, or 25 grains Blue Skies, which was how old Doc Pearson used to put it.’
Mr Keene cackled briefly and then sucked on his coffee soda.
‘Well, what’s wrong with it?’ he asked Eddie, and when Eddie only sat there, Mr Keene answered his own question. ‘Why, nothing! Nothing at all!
‘At least . . . usually.
‘Placebos are a blessing for old people. And then there are other cases — folks with cancer, folks with degenerative heart disease, folks with terrible things that we don’t understand yet, some of them children just like you, Eddie! In cases like that, if a placebo makes the patient feel better, where is the harm? Do you see the harm, Eddie?’
‘No sir,’ Eddie said, and looked down at the splatter of chocolate ice cream, soda-water, whipped cream, and broken glass on the floor. In the middle of all this was the maraschino cherry, as accusing as a blood-clot at a crime scene. Looking at this mess made his chest feel tight again.
‘Then we’re like Ike and Mike! We think alike! Five years ago, when Vernon Maitland had cancer of the esophagus — a painful, painful sort of cancer — and the doctors had run out of anything effective they could give him for his pain, I came by his hospital room with a bottle of sugar-pills. He was a special friend, you see. And I said, «Vern, these are special experimental pain-pills. The doctor doesn’t know I’m giving them to you, so for God’s sake be careful an d don’t tattle on me. They might not work, but I think they will. Take no more than one a day, and only if the pain is especially bad.» He thanked me with tears in his eyes. Tears, Eddie! And they worked for him! Yes! They were only sugar-pills, but they killed most of his pain . . . because pain is here.’
Solemnly, Mr Keene tapped his head again.
Eddie said: ‘My medicine does so work.’
‘I know it does,’ Mr Keene replied, and smiled a maddening complacent grownup’s smile. ‘It works on your chest because it works on your head. HydrOx, Eddie, is water with a dash of camphor thrown in to give it a medicine taste.’
‘No,’ Eddie said. His breath had begun to whistle again.
Mr Keene drank some of his soda, spooned some of the melting ice cream, and fastidiously wiped his chin with his handkerchief while Eddie used his aspirator again.
‘I want to go now,’ Eddie said.
‘Let me finish, please.’
‘No! I want to go, you’ve got your money and I want to go!’
‘Let me finish,’ Mr Keene said, so forbiddingly that Eddie sat back in his chair. Grownups could be so hateful in their power sometimes. So hateful.
‘Part of the problem here is that your doctor, Russ Handor, is weak. And pan of the problem is that your mother is determined you are ill. You, Eddie, have been caught in the middle.’
‘I’m not crazy,’ Eddie whispered, the words coming out in a bare husk.
Mr Keene’s chair creaked like a monstrous cricket. ‘What?’
‘I said I’m not crazy!’ Eddie shouted. Then, immediately, a miserable blush rose into his face.
Mr Keene smiled. Think what you like, that smile said. Think what you like, and I’ll think what I like.
‘All I’m telling you, Eddie, is that you’re not physically ill. Your lungs don’t have asthma; your mind