Interface (28 page)

"Check this out," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, leading him into the
room where Mohinder Singh had, for the last few days, been recovering from the operation.

"Is this going to be more wubba wubba?" Mr. Salvador said.

Mohinder Singh was sitting up in bed, as usual, and smoking, as usual. His scar was nearly obscured by the deepening shadow of his
hair. He looked up as Dr. Radhakrishnan and Mr. Salvador came
into the room, squinting at them impassively through cigarette
smoke.

Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke to him briefly in Hindi, gesturing in
the direction of an ashtray that rested on a table next to the bed on Mr. Singh's paralyzed left side.

Mr. Singh looked down at the hand and it began to twitch. Then
it jumped into the air like a small animal spooked by a sudden noise,
and came to a stop out in front of Mr. Singh's face. The hand began
to move toward his mouth, a few inches at a time, in a zigzagging course, like a sailboat trying to tack upwind into a moorage. As it got closer the fingers began to vibrate nervously. They wanted to
close over the cigarette but they didn't want to get burned.

Then, suddenly, he had gripped the cigarette. He yanked it out of his mouth and extended his arm out over the ashtray in one
explosive movement, scattering ashes the whole way. His hand vibrated for a moment above the general vicinity of the ashtray,
dumping a few more ashes from the end of the cigarette, some of
which actually landed in the ashtray.

Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke another couple of words and Mr.
Singh's hand dropped straight down into the ashtray, crushing the
cigarette and mostly putting it out. Then he jerked his hand back
into his lap, leaving the cigarette in the tray, spinning out a long tenuous line of smoke.

"Astonishing," Mr. Salvador said. He looked quite awake and
considerably less grumpy.

Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke another few words. Then he said, to
Mr. Salvador, "I have asked him his name."

Mr. Singh's mouth came open and then closed again, the lips
coming together: "Mmmmmo-

"Mo," Dr. Radhakrishnan echoed.

"Derrrrrr."

"-der. Mohinder."

"Ssssin."

"Mohinder Singh. Very good." Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke in
Hindi again, then translated: "What kind of lorry were you driving
at the time of your accident?"

"Ta . . . ta."

"That's right. A Tata 1210."

"Still no signs of tumor or rejection?"

"None."

"Right," Mr. Salvador said, "that's it, then." He spun on his heel
and burst out of the room.

Dr. Radhakrishnan waited for a few moments, then followed
him.

The offices were upstairs. He entered the stairwell and heard Mr.
Salvador above him, taking the steps two or three at a time.

By the time he had followed Mr. Salvador, quietly, up to the
office level, old Bucky had already got through to someone on the telephone:

"What? All right, I'll speak loudly. Can you hear me? Good.
Listen carefully; we are go for launch. Yes. Yes. Unequivocally.
Yes, you have a good day too."

17

Working out the politics of Mary Catherine's temporary
leave of absence from her residency and arranging the trip to the various and far-flung organs of the Radhakrishnan Institute took a few weeks. The trip itself lasted a week and a half. When Mary Catherine flew home from California, Mel drove his sports car, a
Mercedes 500 SL, down from Chicago and picked her up at the
Champaign-Urbana Airport. He took U.S. 45 from there; it passed
within two blocks of the Cozzano house and served almost as a
private driveway connecting the family with the outside world.
Mel preferred two-lane roads with lots of heavy trucks, because that
way he had something to pass.

Mel tried to make small talk as they blasted along between the
snowed-over cornfields. Mary Catherine was preoccupied and
spent most of the time squinting out the window. Farm
machinery threw spouts of black diesel straight up into the sky,
visible from miles away. From time to time the tires of the
Mercedes rumbled as they drove over a spot where mud and
cornstalks had been tracked across the road by a tractor and then
frozen down hard to the pavement. South of Pesotum it became
possible to see the towers of CBAP heaving up over the linear horizon, kicking out silvery bubbles of steam that dissolved into
the clouds.

"Something on your mind?" he asked.

"Just a lot of impressions in a short time," she said, shaking her
head. "I want to be coherent when I talk to Dad.

Mel grinned, just a bit. So that was it. Even in his current
condition, Dad continued to scare the hell out of Mary Catherine.

"Just give your professional opinion," Mel said. "After that, we're
all grownups."

He slowed the Mercedes and turned off the highway. The tires
started to buzz as they drove down brick streets. A plywood sign
marked the entrance to town:

WELCOME TO TUSCOLA
ATTEND OUR CHURCHES

"It's small in terms of staff. It is absolutely gigantic in terms of
resources. Everything they own seems to be brand new," Mary
Catherine said.

She was sitting on the sofa in the living room. Dad was sitting
directly across the coffee table from her, watching her face. Mel was
off to the side. Patricia was hovering, throwing logs on the fire,
getting coffee.

"If you buy their basic scientific approach, then these guys are
certainly equipped to move forward with it," Mary Catherine
continued. "They have money to burn."

"Do you buy it?" Mel said.

"It works on baboons. It makes paralyzed baboons capable of
moving, and even walking again. That has been proved, I think,
beyond a doubt."

"Does it work on femelhebbers?" Cozzano asked, using his new
word for people.

"I asked them that question many times," Mary Catherine said, "and I might as well have been saying 'femelhebbers' for all the
information I got."

Cozzano laughed and shook his head ruefully.

"I was skeptical going in. But what they have done is extremely
impressive, and it seems to me that if they could produce one
healthy person who has gone through their therapy, then we might actually have something."

"Tell me about your detailed impressions," Mel said.

"I saw the institute itself dead last - just this morning. These guys
made up the whole itinerary for me, so I didn't have much flexibility."

"Did you feel you were getting the Potemkin Village treat
ment?" Mel asked.

"Yes. But that's normal."

"True," Mel said.

"First place I went was Genomics, in Seattle. It's south of down
town, near the Kingdome, in a big old warehouse that they gutted
and redid. All pretty new and clean, as you'd expect. Most of the
space is used for things unrelated to this project. They have one
suite on the top floor where they do brain work for Radhakrishnan.
When I was there they had several cell-culturing projects
underway. It's a typical lab with small glass containers all over the
place with handwritten labels stuck to them, and by reading the
labels I could pick up the names of some of the subjects they're
working on. The names I saw were-" Mary Catherine leafed
through her notes for a second, "Margaret Thatcher, Earl Strong,
Easyrider, Scatflinger and Mohinder Singh."

An uneasy laugh passed around the table. "I know who the first
two are . . ." Mel said.

"That's what I thought. But later, when I went to Elton, I found
out that Margaret Thatcher and Earl Strong are two of their
baboons. They name all the baboons after political figures."

"Did you also see baboons named Easyrider and Scatflinger?"
Mel said. "Those sound more like animal names to me."

"No. And I have no ideas on Mohinder Singh, either."

"Mohinder Singh might be a baboon," Mel concluded, "named
after some guy in India that Radhakrishnan doesn't like. But it's
also possible that Mohinder Singh is a human being."

"They keep talking about their facilities in India," Mary
Catherine said. "It may be a person they are experimenting on out
there. Working on, I should say."

"Well, go on," Mel said.

"From Seattle I went to New Mexico for a couple of days. Very
nice facility there - the Coover Biotech Pavilion."

Mel and Cozzano exchanged looks.

"Again, they obviously know what they're doing. I spent a long
time going over detailed records of all of the baboons they've w
orked on. It's clear that they have learned a lot about this over the years. Their first subjects had rejection problems, or the biochips
failed to take, et cetera. Over time they have solved those problems.
Now they can do it almost routinely.

"Then I went to San Francisco and talked to some of the people
working on the chips at Pacific Netware. These guys are really
good - the best in the business. They were the only ones willing to
talk about the human element."

"What do you mean by that?" Mel said.

"All of the biologist types are gun-shy about the idea of doing
this with human beings. You can't get them to talk about it. It's
clear that there are some potential ethical problems there that they
have been trained to avoid. But the chipheads don't have any of
those cultural inhibitions. They would probably volunteer to get
these things implanted in their own heads."

"Why? Are they brain damaged?"

"No more so than anyone who works on computers for a living.
But to them, see, it's not a therapy so much as it is a way of
improving the human mind. That's what gets these guys psyched
about it."

"You're joking," Cozzano said.

"The biologists won't even allow themselves to think about
trying this on people - even several brain-damaged volunteers. The
computer people have already gone way beyond that point in their
thinking. Half the guys I talked to firmly believed that in ten or twenty years they would be walking around with supercomputers stuck in their heads."

"This is getting weird," Mel said.

"I don't want to wash a duck," Cozzano said. "I just want to
bring the trousers."

"Understood," Mary Catherine said, "but I'm here to talk about
the credibility of this process. And the point I'm making here is that
it is extremely credible as far as the people at Pacific Netware are
concerned."

"Okay, we got that point," Mel said. "Tell me about the
institute."

"Beautiful piece of real estate on the California coast. Very secluded. Has its own private airport. Lots of open space for recreation."

Once again, Mel Meyer and the Governor were exchanging significant looks. "A guy - even a famous guy - could get in and out of the place without being noticed?"

"Mel, you could fly in, go down the road to this institute, sun
yourself in the courtyard, swim on the beach, and no one would
ever see you."

"Read me the blueprints," Cozzano said.

"You want some information about the building?" Mary
Catherine guessed.

"Yes."

"The building is nice and new, like everything else. Some parts
of it aren't even finished yet. There's an incredible operating
theater, which looked like it was finished, but there's no way to tell
that without actually going in and trying to do brain surgery there.
And the actual rooms are luxurious. All private rooms. Big
windows with balconies over the ocean. The patients hang out on
the balconies, watch TV, listen to CDs, or whatever."

"You actually saw patients there?" Mel said.

"Yes. But because of privacy considerations, I couldn't go to
their rooms or talk to them. I saw one or two, from a distance,
sitting out on the balconies in their wheelchairs, reading news
papers or just staring into the distance."