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being the focusing agent?'

'NMR.' She smoothed down his hair. 'Magnusson's stuff on it is pretty fragmentary, but he appears to be suggesting that your effect on the cameras was caused by your realigning the atomic magnetic nuclei of the camera's field and transmitting a force which altered the electrical capacitance of the film. I think you're doing more or less the same thing to the patients.' She chewed on her pencil. 'The fact that you can intuit the movements of the geomagnetic field, and that you're able to do the right things to the patients without any knowledge of the body, it seems to me if you had enough metal to generate a sufficiently powerful field, two or three tons, then you'd be able to orchestrate the movements of the bacteria with finer discretion than any mechanical device.'

Donnell had an image of himself standing atop a mountain and hurling lightning bolts. 'Just climb upon a chunk of iron and zap myself?' 'Copper,' she said. 'Better conductivity.' 'It sounds like magic,' he said. 'What about the wind?' 'There's nothing magical about that,' she said. 'The air becomes ionized under the influence of your field, and the ions are induced to move in the direction imposed on the field. The air moves, more air moves in to replace it.' She shrugged. 'Wind. But understanding all this and being able to use it are two different things.' 'You're saying I should go back to the project?' 'Unless you know how we can buy three tons of copper with a Visa card.' She smiled, trying to make light of it.

Something was incomplete about her explanation, just as there had been about his sketch, and he did not believe either would come to completion at Shadows. 'Maybe as a last resort,' he said. 'But not yet.'

The majority of the patients were local people, working men and housewives and widows, as faded and worn as the battered sofas they sat upon (Mr Brisbeau had tossed out the junk and scavenged them from somewhere); though as the weeks passed and word spread, more prosperous-looking people arrived from faraway places like Baton Rouge and Shreveport. Most of their complaints were minor, and there was little to be learned from treating them. But from the difficult cases, in particular that of Herve Robichaux, a middle-aged carpenter afflicted with terminal lung cancer, Jocundra put together her explanation of the healing process.

When medical bills had cost him his home, with the last of his strength Robichaux had built two shacks on a weed-choked piece of land near the Gulf left him by his father, one for his wife and him, the other for his five children. The first time Donnell and Jocundra visited him, driven by Mr Brisbeau in his new pickup, the children - uniformly filthy and shoeless - ran away and hid among the weeds and whispered. Their whispers blended with the drone of flies and the shifting of wind through the surrounding scrub pine into a sound of peevish agitation. In the center of the weeds was a cleared circle of dirt, and here stood the shacks. The raw color of the unpainted boards, the listless collie mix curled by the steps, the scraps of cellophane blowing across the dirt, everything testified to an exacerbated hopelessness, and the interior of the main shack was the most desolate place of Donnell's experience. A battery-operated TV sat on an orange crate at the foot of the sick man's pallet, its pale picture of gray figures in ghostly rooms flickering soundlessly. Black veins of creosote beaded between the ceiling boards, their acrid odor amplifying rather than dominating the fecal stink of illness. Flies crusted a jelly glass half-full of a pink liquid, another fly buzzed loudly in a web spanning a corner of the window, and hexagrams of mouse turds captioned the floors. Stapled on the door was a poster showing the enormous, misty figure of Jesus gazing sadly down at the UN building.

'Herve,' said Mrs Robichaux in a voice like ashes. 'That Mr Harrison's here from Bayou Teche.' She stepped aside to let them pass, a gaunt woman enveloped in a gaily flowered housecoat.

Mr Robichaux was naked beneath the sheet, bald from chemotherapy. A plastic curtain overhung the window, and the wan light penetrating it pointed up his bleached and shrunken appearance. His mouth and nose were so fleshless they seemed stylized approximations of features, and his face communicated nothing of his personality to Donnell. He looked ageless, a proto-creature