Murders in the Nursery

By Donald Austin, M.D.

This medical murder mystery centers around a famous but psychologically crazed neurological surgeon. Children just combing from or being prepared for surgery begin to die mysteriously in the surgical nursery of University Hospital. Two residents in training team up to investigate and fall in love in the process. What they find is a murder and a surprising twist no one suspected.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fideli Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 28, 2010
• ISBN: 9781604143065

Donald Austin, M.D.

Donald C. Austin, M.D. has spent forty years practicing medicine, specializing in neurosurgery. The recipient of numerous awards, including Humanitarian of the Year for the American Lung Association, the author was also elected Vice Chair of the Michigan Board of Medicine and subsequently the Endowed Professional Chair for Neurosurgical Research. A charitable philanthropist as well, he has contributed generously to the Karmanos Cancer Institute, the March of Dimes and the Detriot Institute of Arts. Dr. Austin has written for numerous medical publications and has written books dealing with medicine, religion, philosophy, and politics, including several books of fiction. Now semi-retired, the author continues to write creatively from his home in Michigan.

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Murders In The Nursery

By Donald C. Austin, M.D.

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Fideli Publishing Inc.

© Copyright 2011, Donald C. Austin, M.D.

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ISBN: 978-1-60414-306-5

BOOKS PUBLISHED BY DR. AUSTIN

The Tower of Babel: The Birth of a New Religion

Trials and Tribulations

Ghandi Revisited

Jeb: The Modern Job: Parts 1 & 2

The Ten Commandments

Prejudice and Pride

The Deadly Gene

PRELUDE

LORD OF THE DANCE

I danced in the morning when the world was begun;

And I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun.

And I came down from Heaven and I danced on the earth;

At Bethlehem I had my birth.

Dance, then, wherever you may be;

I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.

And I'll lead you all wherever you may be,

And I'll lead you all in the dance, said he.

I danced for the scribe and the Pharisee;

But they would not dance and they would not follow me.

I danced for the fishermen, for James and John;

They came to me and the dance went on.

Dance, then, wherever you may be;

I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.

And I'll lead you all wherever you may be,

And I'll lead you all in the dance, said he.

I danced on the Sabbath when I cured the lame,

The holy people said it was a shame;

They whipped and they stripped and they hung me high;

And they left me there on a cross to die.

Dance, then, wherever you may be;

I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.

And I'll lead you all wherever you may be,

And I'll lead you all in the dance, said he.

I danced on a Friday and the sky turned black;

It's hard to dance with the Devil on your back;

They buried my body and they thought I'd gone,

But I am the dance and I still go on.

Dance, then, wherever you may be;

I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.

And I'll lead you all wherever you may be,

And I'll lead you all in the dance, said he.

They cut me down and I leapt up high,

I am the life that'll never, never die;

I'll live in you if you live in me;

I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.

Dance, then, wherever you may be;

I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.

And I'll lead you all wherever you may be,

And I'll lead you all in the dance, said he.

Words by: Sydney Carter, 1963

Music: 19th Century Shaker Tune

CHAPTER 1

Isaac Newton Castle was sitting on the ground in his backyard under an apple tree. For some bizarre reason as yet unknown, the electrical power for the whole Northeastern corridor of the U.S. had suddenly gone out. Millions of people in New York, Connecticut, Ohio, Michigan, and Lower Canada were blackened, except for those scattered fortunate few who had been wise enough to have a generator. The home was unbearably hot and humid, and he knew he would be a wilted flower in a pot soon. The best place was in the yard leaning against a tree. The temperature had dropped and there was a gentle breeze, enough to scatter the hairs of his scalp.

He gazed up into the heavens. It was one of those cloudless nights and a myriad blanket of stars covered the whole panorama of his vision. His mind began to float. He seemed to have no control over what the network of countless cells, axons, and synapses of his body were doing. They had closed down the world of external stimuli. The soft breeze against his face, the roughness of the bark of the tree, the coolness of the grass against his bare feet had been extinguished from his conscious mind and relegated to the deep recesses of his brain where they could be brought forth if he commanded it.

His mind ruminated back to the Bible his mother had made him read over and over as a child. There were so many versions. The stars before his eyes took him back to the book of Genesis in the King James version, Chapter 1:1-5:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Then his memories flipped to the Living Bible, Genesis 1:1-5:

When God began creating the heavens and the earth, the earth was a shapeless, chaotic mass, with the Spirit of God brooding over the dark vapors.

Then God said, Let there be light. And light appeared.

And God was pleased with it, and divided the light from the darkness. He called the light daytime, and the darkness nighttime. Together they formed the first day.

Not to be prejudicial, he even recalled his readings from the Koran:

It is God who has created seven Heavens, and earths as many. His commandment descends through them, so that you may learn that God has power over all things, and that God encompasses all things with His knowledge. Koran, p. 397-398

We built the Heaven with Our might, giving it a vast expanse, and stretched the Earth beneath it. Gracious is He who spread it out. And all things We have made in pairs, so that you may take thought. Koran, p. 369

Let the once-dead Earth be a sign for them. We gave it life, and from it produced grain for their sustenance. We planted it with the palm and the vine, and watered it with gushing springs, so that men might feed on its fruit. It was not their hands that made all this. Should they not give thanks?

Glory be to Him who made all things in pairs: The plants of the Earth, mankind themselves, and the living things which they know not.

The night is another sign for men. From the night We lift the day – and they are plunged in darkness.

The sun hastens to its resting-place: Its course is laid for it by the Mighty One, the All-Knowing.

We have ordained phases for the moon, which daily wanes, and in the end appears like a bent old twig.

The sun is not allowed to overtake the moon, nor does the night outpace the day. Each in its own orbit swims. Koran, p. 310*

(*The Koran translated with notes by N.J. Dawood, Penguin Books, 1936, last copyright 1999)

His mind did not stop at that. In college he had been tainted by astronomy, evolution, physics, philosophy, and even quantum mechanics. His mind almost seemed to have a photographic memory, which during normal states of consciousness, unfortunately failed to come to him.

He had been fascinated by a book called Darwin's Black Box, written by Michael J. Behe. With his eyes closed, he could mentally visualize Behe's discussion of the Big Bang Theory of creation.

As parents and teachers always say, cheaters never prosper. A short time later the astronomer, Edwin Hubble, observed that wherever in the sky he pointed his telescope, the stars appeared to be moving away from the earth. (He couldn't actually see the stars moving. Rather, he inferred their motion from a phenomenon called a Doppler shift, in which stars that move away from an observer emit light of a slightly longer wave length – the faster they move the greater the change in the wave length.) Furthermore, the speed with which the stars were receding was proportional to their distance from the earth. This was the first observational evidence that Einstein's unfudged equations were correct in their prediction concerning the expansion of the universe, and it did not take a rocket scientist (although plenty were around) to mentally reverse the expanding universe and conclude at some time in the past, all the matter of the universe was concentrated into a very small space. This was the beginning of the Big Bang hypothesis.

To many the notion of the Big Bang was loaded with overtones of a supernatural event – the Creation, the beginning of the universe. The prominent physicist, A.S. Eddington, probably spoke for many in voicing his utter disgust with such an idea:

"Philosophically, the notion of an abrupt beginning to the present order of Nature is repugnant to me, as I think it must be to most; and even those who would welcome a proof of the intervention of a Creator will probably consider that a single winding-up at some remote epoch is not really the kind of relation between God and his world that brings satisfaction to the mind.

Nonetheless, despite its religious implications, the Big Bang was a scientific theory that flowed naturally from the observational data, not from holy writings or transcendental visions. Most physicists adopted the Big Bang theory and set their research programs accordingly. A few, like Einstein before them, didn't like the extra scientific implications of the theory and labored to develop alternatives.

In the middle part of the century, the astronomer Fred Hoyle championed another theory of the universe, called the Steady-State theory. Hoyle proposed that the universe was infinite and eternal, but he also admitted that the universe was expanding. Since a universe that had been expanding for an infinite period of time would become infinitely thinned out, even if it started with an infinite amount of matter, Hoyle had to explain why our present universe is relatively dense. The eminent scientist proposed that matter was continually coming into existence in outer space at the rate of about one hydrogen atom per cubic mile of space per year. Now, it must be emphasized that Hoyle was proposing creating of hydrogen from nothing and with no cause. The matter simple popped into existence at the required rate. Since he had no observational evidence to support this notion, why did Hoyle propose it? It turns out that Hoyle, like Eddington, thought that the Big Bang strongly implied the supernatural and found the prospect extremely distasteful.

Hoyle's Steady-State theory always had a difficult time explaining much of the observational evidence from astronomy. In the 1960's the astronomers Penzias and Wilson finally put the theory out of its misery with their observation of background radiation. They saw that microwaves are bombarding the earth from every direction with an astonishing uniformity of intensity. Such background radiation was predicted to be an indirect result of the Big Bang. The observation of the background radiation was, and still is, taken to be the crowning glory of the Big Bang theory.

It is impossible to deny that the Big Bang has been an enormously fruitful physical model of the universe, and, even though large questions remain (as they inevitably do in basic science), that the model was justified by the observational data. Scientists such as Einstein, Eddington, and Hoyle fudged and twisted in their efforts to resist a scientific theory that flowed naturally from the data because they thought they would be forced to accept unpleasant philosophical or theological conclusions. They weren't; they had other options.

The success of the Big Bang model had nothing to do with its religious implications. It seemed to agree with the Judaeo-Christian dogma of a beginning to the universe; it seemed to disagree with other religions that believed the universe to be eternal. But the theory justified itself by reference to the observational data – the expansion of the universe – and not by invoking sacred texts or the mystical experiences of holy men. The model came straight from the observational evidence; it was not fit to a Procrustean bed of religious dogma.

But it should also be noticed that the Big Bang, although friendly to a religious point of view, does not forcibly compel that belief. No person is required by dint of logic to reach any particularly supernatural conclusion solely on the basis of scientific observations and theories. This is seen initially in Einstein's and Hoyle's attempts to come up with alternative models that would fit the observational data and avoid the unpleasant thought of a start to the universe. When the Steady-State theory was finally discredited, other theories sprang up that would obviate the philosophical bind of an absolute beginning. The most popular option was the idea of a cycling universe, in which the expansion that started with the Big Bang would eventually slow down and, under the force of gravity, all matter would collapse again in a Big Crunch. From there, the story goes perhaps another Big Bang would occur, and endless repetitions of this cycle would recapture a nature that was infinite in time. It is interesting (though scientifically irrelevant) that the notion of a cycling universe would be compatible with many religions, including those of the ancient Egyptians, Aztecs, and Indians.

The idea of a cycling universe seems to be out of favor in physics these days. Insufficient matter to cause a future gravitational collapse has been observed – and even if such matter existed, calculations show that successive cycles would become longer and longer, eventually ending with a non-contracting universe. But even if this option is discredited, other ideas are available to take the sting out of the Big Bang. A more recent proposal would have it that the actual universe is enormously larger than what we observe, and that the portion of the universe that we see is merely a bubble in an infinite universe. And physicist Stephen Hawking has proposed that although the universe is finite, it would not have a beginning if something in his mathematical equations that he calls imaginary time actually existed. Another idea is that infinitely many universes exist, and that the universe in which we find ourselves just happens to have the narrow conditions required for life. This idea was popularized under the name of the anthropic principle. In essence, the anthropic principle states that very many (or infinitely many) universes exist with varying physical laws, and that only the ones with conditions suitable for life will in fact produce life, perhaps including conscious observers. So perhaps a zillion barren universes exist somewhere; we live in the zillion and first universe because it was the physical properties that are compatible with life.

The anthropic principle strikes most people as plain silly, probably because they aren't quite sure where we would put all those other universes. Other ideas, however, are available for the person who still does not want to invoke the supernatural. In quantum physics it is believed that microscopic entities called virtual particles came popping into existence by borrowing energy from the surroundings (confusingly called the vacuum, even though the word is not used by physicists to mean nothing).

Some physicists have taken this idea just a bit further and proposed that the entire universe simply popped into existence, not from any surroundings, but from absolutely nothing – a quantum fluctuation from non-being to being – and without a cause, This shows how some scientists have learned to think big compared to the days when Fred Hoyle was modestly proposing the occasional uncaused creation of hydrogen atoms.

No experiment has been done to support the notion of bubble universes, imaginary time, or the zillion anthropic universes. Indeed, it seems that no experiment could detect them in principle. Since they or their effects cannot be observed, then they are metaphysical postulates, no more accessible to experimental investigation than an admittedly supernatural being. They do science no good. Their only use is as an escape hatch from the supernatural.

The point of the above discussion is that even though the Big Bang hypothesis may appear at first blush to support a particularly religious idea, no scientific theory can compel belief in a positive religious tenet by shear force of logic. Thus, to explain the universe a person can postulate unobservables, like the theory that there are infinitely many universes and the theory that ours is just a bubble in a larger universe. Or one can hold out the hope that theories that look implausible today, such as the Steady-State theory, or the theory of the oscillating universe, might look more plausible tomorrow when calculations are redone or new measurements are taken. Or one can simply abandon the principle of causation, as seen in theories that propose that the universe came into being uncaused. Most other people may regard the ideas as pretty giddy; nevertheless, they don't violate the observational evidence.*

(*Darwin’s Black Box, Mihael J. Behe, Simon and Schuster, copyright 1998, ISBN: 0-684-82754-9; p. 244-248)

But in his musings as a college student, he had difficulty conceiving of a universe compressed into matter which exploded. If so, it must have been surrounded by a void so that the exploded matter could expand and if so, wouldn't this void be part of the universe. Einstein had shown that the universe was expanding, but now current astronomers were claiming the universe was slowing in its expansion and perhaps even reversing.

Ah! What mysteries the mind of man do entertain!

Isaac was a dreamer. He had finished undergraduate school and had entered graduate school in multiple disciplines. He was