In any case, she must try to do better next time she spoke to Olivia. For the moment, though, she wanted to rest and stare at the sea, albeit a little guiltily, and daydream for a while. First, she had to force down the remains of the Chinese herbs she was taking twice a day. She had prepared the bitter brew instead of breakfast, but Olivia’s call had interrupted her halfway through consuming it. In the World of Four Objects into which her diagnosis had marched her, like a bored prison guard pointing out the amenities of a cell – statistic, poison, scalpel, radiation – there was no room for Chinese herbs, or a low-sugar and low-carb diet that starved the tumour without starving the patient, or medicinal mushrooms, or enhanced mental health. There was ‘no evidence’ that any complementary approach worked because the presumption that it did not work prevented funding for the expensive, controlled, large sample, double-blind, replicable experiments that would constitute ‘evidence’. Nobody could be more grateful than Lucy that chemotherapy and surgery and radiation were available if her tumour became active enough to warrant their deployment, but she remained sceptical that there were no other actions to take, no other factors in play. How could her general fitness, the strength of her immune system, her will to live and her levels of stress make no difference? She wanted to create an environment that was as inimical to her cancer as possible and as favourable to the strength she would need in order to live with it. She hoped to add many years to the ‘long right-hand tail’ of the prognostic graph and felt that it was unscientific to assume that only blind luck and three types of aggression could carry her there.

While proper scientists defended true methodology by pouring boiling oil and dropping rocks on the besieging hordes of pseudoscientists, with their diets and their herbs, their acupuncture needles and their Ayurvedic spices, their meditation practices and yoga positions, it turned out that some parts of the citadel they were defending were rotten by their own ‘double blind’ standards. A ‘replication crisis’ was rippling through one discipline after another. Carl Sagan’s remark that extraordinary claims required extraordinary proofs, so often quoted by Bill Moorhead, didn’t mean that orthodox claims needed no proof at all, and yet many of those claims, which had taken on the complacency of unexamined assumptions, had recently been held up to the ordinary test of being replicable, and failed. The crisis itself had now been given the imprimatur of serious science by appearing in Nature and all other leading scientific journals. There was no need to storm the melting citadel; in fact, it aroused Lucy’s pity. She didn’t want to replace dogmatism with an equally obstinate iconoclasm, she just wanted those parts of the impressive stone walls that had been borrowed from the prop department to be sent back to the warehouse where they belonged with the other fake boulders and soft battlements; with the debris of broken theories, of phrenological busts and treatises on phlogiston, and giant pre-Copernican maps of the cosmos painted with lapis lazuli and gold.