"Here is the case history." He drummed on it with his short-clipped nails. "In it, you will find that Caffey came to us three months ago with her body cavity in the grasp of a small octopus of a soft form carcinoma. The pain reached from pelvis to chest."
"Incredible!" I exclaimed.
Sansome spread his hand on the record sheets. "Facts are never incredible," he reminded me gently. "What follows, however, will tax your credulity, and I beg of you to allow me to impose an outrageous concept whose only virtue appears to be its demonstrated validity."
"Proceed."
"In forty years of slicing away tumerous growths, I had become morbid at the dreadful incidence of recurrence and the obscene mortality rate. In spite of all our techniques, these cancers have increased with the persistence of Nature herself.
"In a fit of prolonged depression brought on by a foolishly strenuous research of histories, my mind stumbled into a stupid preoccupation with a few isolated cases of exogenic pregnancy. One which fascinated me was the young 17-year-old boy from whose lung a surgeon removed a live three-month foetus. Somehow the obvious explanation refused to satisfy me. It was, of course, concluded that the foetus was an undeveloped twin to the boy himself.
"This could be so; but on what facts was this assumption based? None. Only the absence of any other theory justified the concept. The surgeon had expected to find a hard carcinoma.
"And it came to me suddenly that he had found his cancer!
"My interpolation was this: Mankind is suffering an evolutionary change in his reproductive procedure. The high incidence of various tumors evidences Nature's experiments in developing a asexual reproduction."