The Corrections

Knuter & Speigh, a firm that often worked closely with investment bankers, suggested due diligence —a dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s on the eve of something big.
    “Do you want to go and be with your brothers?” Gary said to Jonah. “It sounds like fun up there.”
    “No, thank you,” Jonah said. “I’m going to read the next Narnia book, and I thought I might go to the basement, where it’s quiet. Will you come with me?”
    The old playroom in the basement, still dehumidified and carpeted and pine-paneled, still nice , was afflicted with the necrosis of clutter that sooner or later kills a living space: stereo boxes, geometric Styrofoam packing solids, outdated ski and beach gear in random drifts. Aaron and Caleb’s old toys were in five big bins and a dozen smaller bins. Nobody but Jonah ever touched them, and in the face of such a glut even Jonah, alone or with a play-date pal, took an essentially archaeological approach. He might devote an afternoon to unpacking half of one large bin, patiently sorting action figures and related props, vehicles, and model buildings by scale and manufacturer (toys that matched nothing he flung behind the sofa), but he rarely reached the bottom of even one bin before his play date ended or dinner was served and he reburied everything he’d excavated, and so the toys whose profusion ought to have been a seven-year-old’s heaven went basically unplayed with, another lesson in ANHEDONIA for Gary to ignore as well as he could.
    While Jonah settled down to read, Gary booted up Caleb’s “old” laptop and went online. He typed the words axon and schwenksville in the Search field. One of the two resulting site matches was the Axon Corporation Home Page, butthis site, when Gary tried to reach it, turned out to be UNDER RENOVATION. The other match led him to a deeply nested page in the Web site of Westportfolio Biofunds, whose listing of Privately Held Corporations to Watch was a cyberbackwater of drab graphics and misspellings. The Axon page had last been updated a year earlier.
    Axon Corporation, 24 East Industrial Serpentine, Schwenksville, PA, a Limited Liability Corporation regis tered in the state of Delaware, holds wordwide rights to the Eberle Process of Directed Neurochemotaxis. The Eberle Process is protected by United States Patents 5,101,239, 5,101,599, 5,103,628, 5,103,629, and 5,105,996, for which the Axon Corporation is the sole and exclusive grantor of license. Axon engages in refinement, market ing and sales of the Eberle Process to hospitals and clinics worldwide, and in research and development of related technologies. Its founder and chairman is Dr. Earl H. Eberle, former Distinguished Lecturer in Applied Neurobiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

    The Eberle Process of Directed Neurochemotaxis, also known as Eberle Reverse-Tomographic Chemotherapy, hav4 revolutionized the treatment of inoperable neuro- blastomas and a variety of other morphologic defects of the brain.

    The Eberle Process utilizes computer-orchestrated RF radiation to direct powerful carcinocdies, mutagens, and certain nonspecific toxins to diseased cerebral tissues and locally activate them without harm to surrounding healthy tissue.

    At present, due to limitations in computing power, the Eberle Process requires sedating and immobilizing the patient in an Eberle Cylinder for up to thirty-six hours while minutely orchestrated fields direct therapeutically active ligands and their inert “piggyback” carriers to the sight of disase. The next generation of Eberle Cylinders is expected to reduce maximum total treatment time to less two hours.

    The Eberle Process received full FDA approval as a “safe and effective” therapy in October 1996. Widespread clincial use throughout the world in the years since then, as detailed in the numerous publications listed below, hav4 only confirmed its safety and effectiveness.
    Gary’s hopes of extracting quick megabucks from Axon were withering in the absence of online hype. Feeling a bit e-weary, fighting an e-headache, he ran a word search for earl eberle. The several hundred matches included articles with titles like NEW HOPE FOR NEUROBLASTOMA and A GIANT LEAP FORWARD AND THIS CURE REALLY MAY BE A MIRACLE . Eberle and collaborators were also represented in professional journals with “Remote Computer-Aided Stimulation of Receptor Sites 14, 16A and 21: A Practical Demonstration,” “Four Low-Toxicity Ferroacetate Complexes