Interface (22 page)

If Zeldo could do this job properly and build a new, specialized
chip for this purpose, it might vastly improve the capabilities of Dr.
Radhakrishnan's implant.

Actually, bringing in a "chiphead" from a hot company like
Pacific Netware was a brilliant idea. He wished he had thought of
it himself. He wondered who
had
thought of it.

"Did they try to set you up with a babe?" Zeldo said.
"I'm sorry? A babe?"

"Yeah. A chick. You know, a prostitute."
Dr. Radhakrishnan wished that Zeldo had not used this word. "They did with me," Zeldo said. "Bought me a first class ticket
on British Airways to get me over here from San Francisco. Soon
as I get on, this incredible woman sits down next to me. She was
playing footsy with me before we even pulled away from the gate.
God, she was a hot lady."

Dr. Radhakrishnan smiled conspiratorially. "You liked her, eh?"
he said.

"Well, she didn't have a lot going for her intellectually," Zeldo
said, frowning, "and I'm involved in a monogamous relationship at
home."

They did not converse much more until they arrived at the
Defence Colony, whose gate was guarded by heavy machine guns
in sandbag nests, manned by eagle-eyed Sikhs. The Sikhs let them
through without opening fire; a minute or two later they were at
the Barracks.

They had obviously been constructed to house troops assigned
to guard duty and other low-level work in the Defence Colony.
Because this was Delhi, and the Defence Colony was prestigious,
they were actually quite nice, for barracks. Each building was thirty
or forty meters long, wide enough for a row of beds down either side with a broad aisle down the middle. They were all concrete
and concrete block, with tin roofs, and it was clear that they had
been hastily painted and retrofitted with better electrical service and
air-conditioning. The Radhakrishnan Institute now occupied two
of these buildings. Building 1 was filled with offices and
laboratories. Building 2 was filled with beds. The beds were filled
with brain damage cases.

Strokes were generally not a major health problem in India. The classic stroke patient was a fat old smoker and though may people
smoked in India, few people were fat and many did not have the
opportunity to get old. Fortunately, from the point of view of
research, any time you got nearly a billion people living and
working in conditions not notable for safety, you did not have to
rely on strokes in order to see a broad and deep spectrum of brain
damage.

On his initial inspection of Building 2, Dr. Radhakrishnan saw a fascinating assortment of unfortunates who had been combed from
the slums. It seemed that Mr. Salvador had some sort of connection
with the Lady Wilburdon Foundation, a British charity group that
operated free clinics and hospitals all over India. Mr. Salvador had exploited this connection, recruiting medical students from all over
the country as brain damage talent scouts who would scan
incoming cases and let him know of any promising prospects. In addition to the two whose brains had already been sampled, Dr.
Radhakrishnan saw a man who had had a brick dropped on his
head in a construction site. A soldier shot through the brain during
ethnic violence in Srinagar. A lunch delivery boy from Delhi who
had been thrown off his motorcycle rickshaw in a collision with a
lorry. A street kid from Bombay who, in trying to do a second-
story job on an old colonial structure, had slipped and fallen twelve
feet; a spike on the wrought-iron fence had entered his open
mouth, passed up through his palate, and impaled his brain.

Even by Western standards, the care these patients were
receiving was fairly generous. The building was no architectural gem, but it was clean and well maintained. It was not lavishly
appointed with high-tech equipment, but it was well-staffed with
attentive nurses and nursing students who were clearly doing all
they could to see to the patients' individual needs. And none of
these patients was paying a single rupee. Most of them had no
rupees to begin with.

Building 1 had its own generators, a pair of brand-new Honda
portable
 
units
 
delivering a hundred and twenty volts
 
of all-
American sixty-cycle power. The juice was filtered and con
ditioned through an uninterruptible power supply and then routed
through shiny, freshly installed conduit to be a generous number of
galvanized steel junction boxes, bolted to the barracks walls every
couple of meters, studded with American-style three-prong outlets.
All of this had been setup so that Zeldo and his ilk could fly straight
in from California, drop their whores off at the Imperial, and plug
their computer and other more arcane devices straight into the wall
without having to deal with the awful culture shock of incompatible
plugs and voltages. More to the point, the Honda generators
would not flicker, spike, brown out, and back out as the Delhi grid was apt to. No precious data would be lost to unpredictable Third World influences.

Zeldo and a couple of other slangy pizza-eating beards from
America had laid claim to one end of Building 1 and set up their own little outpost of heavy metal music and novelty foam-rubber
sledgehammers for pounding on their workstations when they got
frustrated. They had even erected a sign: PACIFIC NETWARE-
ASIAN HEADQUARTERS. On his way in, Dr. Radhakrishnan
had noted the presence of a freshly installed satellite dish, and he
could not help but suppose that they were connected to that.

Mr. Salvador had his own little nook at the other end of the
building, as far away from the foam rubber sledgehammers as he
could get. He was not in at the moment, but Dr. Radhakrishnan
knew Mr. Salvador's style when he saw it: a heavy antique desk, comfortably scuffed, an electric shoe polisher, and every comm
unications device known to science.

The intervening space was all at Dr. Radhakrishnan's disposal. At
this point it was all new, empty desks and new, empty filing
cabinets. A few people had already moved in. Supposedly, Toyoda
was on his way in from Elton and might have already arrived.
There were also a few promising Indian graduate students whom
Mr. Salvador had managed to recruit away from their positions in
America and Europe, and there were signs that some of these
people had already arrived, claimed desks, and gotten down to
work.

At the moment there was nothing for Dr. Radhakrishnan to do
except sit down with a big stack of medical records that had been
assembled on the head cases in Building 2, and sort through them,
looking for patients with the right sort of brain damage.

A couple of hours after Dr. Radhakrishnan arrived, a patient named
Mohinder Singh was brought in. He was a lorry driver from
Himachal Pradesh, way up north in the foothills of the Himalayas.
He had been driving down a mountain road with a bundle of half-
inch pipe lashed to the back of his lorry. The pipes were apparently of different lengths; some stuck out farther than others. His brakes
had gone out and he had gone off the road and slammed into
something. The bundle of pipes had shot forward. The longest one
had come in through the back window of the truck, struck him just
behind the ear, passed all the way through his head, and emerged
through one of the eyeballs. A nearby road crew had used a
hacksaw to cut off most of the pipe, leaving only the portion that
was stuck through his head, and he had been evacuated to a nearby Lady Wilburdon Charities clinic where he had been noticed by one of the talent scouts.

He did not look very promising at first. It seemed likely that the
pipe had smashed things around quite a bit inside there and bruised
large portions of the brain. But Dr. Radhakrishnan had not gotten
to where he was by being hasty and superficial. He shipped Singh down the road to the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences for a
series of head scans.

AIIMS was India's foremost medical research institute and it was
only a couple of minutes away from the Barracks along the Delhi Ring Road. They would be able to take some excellent pictures of Mr. Singh's brain with the equipment they had there. And, in a stroke of luck, the chunk of pipe that was still embedded in Mr. Singh's head was made out of copper, a nonmagnetic substance;
they would be able to run him through an NMR scanner without
turning it into a projectile.

Dr. Radhakrishnan was stunned to learn that the pipe had gone through his head almost three days previously. He must have beer
in great pain, but he refused to acknowledge it. From the head
down he was well-nourished and in perfect health. This was one patient who was not going to go into shock every time they put a
needle in his arm.

When Singh came back from AIIMS with a stack of films and
scans piled on his chest, Dr. Radhakrishnan was pleasantly sur
prised. The pipe was thin-walled, cut off fresh and sharp on the end
that had gone through Singh's head. As best as Dr. Radhakrishnan
could tell from trying to interpret the images, it had sliced its way
through the soft, gelatinous brain tissue, rather than shoving it
around and bruising it. It had acted almost like a core sampler.

Once the pipe was taken out and some of the mess cleaned up,
assuming that Singh did not get infected, which was simply a
question of antibiotics, he was going to be an ideal candidate for
therapy.

"Not a whiner," Mr. Salvador said, when he came by later to
inspect. "Robust. Positive attitude, as far as I can tell. Willing to try
just about anything. He reminds me of the chap in the States."

"What chap?"

"Whom you heard on the tape. Whose scans you looked at."

"Ah, yes."

A thrilling sensation suddenly washed over Dr. Radhakrishnan's
body. A wave of adrenaline seemed to be rushing through his
circulatory system like a chemical tsunami. He opened his eyes a
little wider and blinked a few times as though he had just stepped
out into bright warm sunlight after a long winter in Elton, New

Mexico, and his body rocked from side to side just a little bit, its
stance and balance changing as he stood up straighter, breathed a
little deeper. The jet lag vanished. He looked around him, suddenly
taking in the room with the frighteningly intense glare of a raptor
soaring on a mountain thermal. His hands tingled, almost as if the
saw and the drill were already there, buzzing away, slicing
heedlessly through bone, penetrating into the core of some other
human being.

Mr. Salvador could take his Gyrfalcon jet and his cars and his
institutes and his hotel suites. He could take them all back to America. It wouldn't matter. This was the feeling that Dr. Radhakrishnan V.R.J.V.V. Gangadhar lived for.

All of the nurses and orderlies in this part of the barracks had risen
uncertainly to their feet. "What are you waiting for!?" he snapped.

"This poor man has a pipe through his head! Let's get it out."

13

"I'm going to be real straight with you," Mel said.

"Somehow I'm not surprised," Mary Catherine said.
They were sitting together at a corner table in an old-fashioned
family-type Italian restaurant. The restaurant was across the street
and down the block from the hospital where Mary Catherine had
spent most of the last four years. When families of stricken patients
had to eat, they gathered around the big circular tables here and
glumly plunged their forks into deep, steaming dishes of lasagna,
like surgeons around an operating table.

"You dad is not a happy camper right now," Mel continued.
"And it's going to get worse in a week or two, when we have to
come out and tell the public that he has suffered a stroke. I don't
know how he's going to react."

She slapped her menu down on the table and stopped even
pretending to read it. "Enough, enough," she said. "What the hell
are you saying?"