Terminal Man (4 page)

Ellis paced back and forth, the foot of his bad leg scraping slightly along the floor. Ross knew he was feeling threatened, under attack. Normally Ellis was careful to minimize his disability, concealing it so that the limp was noticeable only to a trained eye. But if he was tired, or angry, or threatened, the flaw appeared. It was almost as if he unconsciously wanted sympathy: don’t attack me, I’m a cripple.

“I understand your objection,” Ellis said. “In the terms you present it, your argument is unanswerable. But I would like to consider the problem from a somewhat different viewpoint. It is perfectly true that Benson is disturbed, and that our operation probably won’t change that. But what happens if we
don’t
operate on him? We know that his seizures are life-threatening—to himself, to others. His seizures have already gotten him into trouble with the law, and his seizures are getting worse. The operation will prevent seizures, and we think that is an important benefit to the patient.”

High up, Manon gave a little shrug. Janet Ross knew the gesture; it signaled irreconcilable differences, an impasse.

“Well, then,” Ellis said, “are there other questions?”

There were no other questions.

“J
ESUS FUCKING
C
HRIST
,” E
LLIS SAID, WIPING
his forehead. “He didn’t let up, did he?”

Janet Ross walked with him across the parking lot toward the Langer research building. It was late afternoon; the sunlight was yellowing, turning pale and weak.

“His point was valid,” she said mildly.

Ellis sighed. “I keep forgetting you’re on his side.”

“Why do you keep forgetting?” she asked. She smiled as she said it. As the psychiatrist on the NPS staff, she’d opposed Benson’s operation from the beginning.

“Look,” Ellis said. “We do what we can. It’d be great to cure him, but we can’t do that. We can only help him to a partial cure. So we’ll do that. We’ll help him. It’s not a perfect world.”

She walked alongside him in silence. There was nothing to say. She had told Ellis her opinion many times before. The operation might not help—it might, in fact, make Benson much worse. She was sure Ellis understood that possibility, but he was stubbornly ignoring it. Or so it seemed to her.

Actually, she liked Ellis, as much as she liked any
surgeon. She regarded surgeons as flagrantly action-oriented men (they were almost always men, which she found significant) desperate to do something, to take some physical action. In that sense, Ellis was better than most of them. He had wisely turned down several stage-three candidates before Benson, and she knew that was difficult for him to do, because he was terribly eager to perform the new operation.

“I hate all this,” Ellis said. “Hospital politics.”

“But you want to do Benson.…”

“I’m ready,” Ellis said. “We’re all ready. We have to take that first big step, and now is the time to take it.” He glanced at her. “Why do you look so uncertain?”

“Because I am,” she said.

They came to the Langer building. Ellis went off to an early dinner with McPherson—a political dinner, he said irritably—and she took the elevator to the fourth floor.

After ten years of steady expansion, the Neuropsychiatric Research Unit encompassed the entire fourth floor of the Langer research building. The other floors were painted a dead, cold white, but the NPS was bright with primary colors. The intention was to make patients feel optimistic and happy, but it always had the reverse effect on Ross. She found it falsely and artificially cheerful, like a nursery school for retarded children.

She got off the elevator and looked at the reception area, one wall a bright blue, the other red. Like almost everything else about the NPS, the colors had been McPherson’s idea. It was strange, she thought, how much an organization reflected the personality of its
leader. McPherson himself always seemed to have a bright kindergarten quality about him, and a boundless optimism.

Certainly you had to be optimistic if you planned to operate on Harry Benson.

The Unit was quiet now, most of the staff gone home for the night. She walked down the corridor past the colored doors with the stenciled labels:
SONOENCEPHALOGRAPHY, CORTICAL FUNCTION, EEG, RAS SCORING, PARIETAL T
, and, at the far end of the hall,
TELECOMP
. The work done behind those doors was as complex as the labels—and this was just the patient-care wing, what McPherson called “Applications.”

Applications was ordinary compared to Development, the research wing with its chemitrodes and compsims and elad scenarios. To say nothing of the big projects, like George and Martha, or Form Q. Development was ten years ahead of Applications—and Applications was very, very advanced.

A year ago, McPherson had asked her to take a group of newspaper science reporters through the NPS. He chose her, he said, “because she was such a piece of ass.” It was funny to hear him say that, and shocking in a way. He was usually so courtly and fatherly.

But her shock was minor compared to the shock the reporters felt. She had planned to show them both Applications and Development, but after the reporters had seen Applications they were so agitated, so clearly overloaded, that she cut the tour short.

She worried a lot about it afterward. The reporters hadn’t been naïve and they hadn’t been inexperienced. They were people who shuttled from one scientific arena to another all their lives. Yet they were rendered
speechless by the implications of the work she had shown them. She herself had lost that insight, that perspective—she had been working in the NPS for three years, and she had gradually become accustomed to the things done there. The conjunction of men and machines, human brains and electronic brains, was no longer bizarre and provocative. It was just a way to take steps forward and get things done.

On the other hand, she opposed the stage-three operation on Benson. She had opposed it from the start. She thought Benson was the wrong human subject, and she had just one last chance to prove it.

At the end of the corridor, she paused by the door to Telecomp, listening to the quiet hiss of the printout units. She heard voices inside, and opened the door. Telecomp was really the heart of the Neuropsychiatric Research Unit; it was a large room, filled with electronic equipment. The walls and ceilings were soundproofed, a vestige of earlier days when the readout consoles were clattering teletypes. Now they used either silent CRTs—cathode-ray tubes—or a print-out machine that sprayed the letters with a nozzle, rather than typed them mechanically. The hiss of the sprayer was the loudest sound in the room. McPherson had insisted on the change to quieter units because he felt the clattering disturbed patients who came to the NPS for treatment.

Gerhard was there, and his assistant Richards. The wizard twins, they were called: Gerhard was only twenty-four, and Richards even younger. They were the least professional people attached to the NPS; both men regarded Telecomp as a playground filled with complex toys. They worked long but erratic hours, frequently
beginning in the late afternoon, quitting at dawn. They rarely showed up for group conferences and formal meetings, much to McPherson’s annoyance. But they were undeniably good.

Gerhard, who wore cowboy boots and dungarees and satiny shirts with pearl buttons, had gained some national attention at the age of thirteen when he built a twenty-foot solid-fuel rocket behind his house in Phoenix. The rocket possessed a remarkably sophisticated electronic guidance system and Gerhard felt he could fire it into orbit. His neighbors, who could see the nose of the finished rocket sticking up above the garage in the backyard, were disturbed enough to call the police, and ultimately the Army was notified.

The Army examined Gerhard’s rocket and shipped it to White Sands for firing. As it happened, the second stage ignited before disengagement and the rocket exploded two miles up; but by that time Gerhard had four patents on his guidance mechanism and a number of scholarship offers from colleges and industrial firms. He turned them all down, let his uncle invest the patent royalties, and when he was old enough to drive, bought a Maserati. He went to work for Lockheed in Palmdale, California, but quit after a year because he was blocked from advancement by a lack of formal engineering degrees. It was also true that his colleagues resented a seventeen-year-old with a Maserati Ghibli and a propensity for working in the middle of the night; it was felt he had no “team spirit.”

Then McPherson hired him to work at the Neuropsychiatric Research Unit, designing electronic components to be synergistic with the human brain. McPherson, as head of the NPS, had interviewed dozens
of candidates who thought the job was “a challenge” or “an interesting systems application context.” Gerhard said he thought it would be fun, and was hired immediately.

Richards’s background was similar. He had finished high school and gone to college for six months before being drafted by the Army. He was about to be sent to Vietnam when he began to suggest improvements in the Army’s electronic scanning devices. The improvements worked, and Richards never got closer to combat than a laboratory in Santa Monica. When he was discharged, he also joined the NPS.

The wizard twins: Ross smiled.

“Hi, Jan,” Gerhard said.

“How’s it going, Jan?” Richards said.

They were both offhand. They were the only people on the Staff who dared refer to McPherson as “Rog.” And McPherson put up with it.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ve got our stage three through grand rounds. I’m going to see him now.”

“We’re just finishing a check on the computer,” Gerhard said. “It looks fine.” He pointed to a table with a microscope surrounded by a tangle of electronic meters and dials.

“Where is it?”

“Under the stage.”

She looked closer. A clear plastic packet the size of a postage stamp lay under the microscope lens. Through the plastic she could see a dense jumble of microminiaturized electronic components. Forty contact points protruded from the plastic. With the help of the microscope, the twins were testing the points sequentially, using fine probes.

“The logic circuits are the last to be checked,” Richards said. “And we have a backup unit, just in case.”

Janet went over to the file-card storage shelves and began looking through the test cards. After a moment, she said, “Haven’t you got any more psychodex cards?”

“They’re over here,” Gerhard said. “You want five-space or
n
-space?”

“
N
-space,” she said.

Gerhard opened a drawer and took out a cardboard sheet. He also took out a flat plastic clipboard. Attached to the clipboard by a metal chain was a pointed metal probe, something like a pencil.

“This isn’t for the stage three, is it?”

“Yes,” she said.

“But you’ve run so many psychodexes on him before—”

“Just one more, for the records.”

Gerhard handed her the card and clipboard. “Does your stage three know what’s going on?”

“He knows most of it,” she said.

Gerhard shook his head. “He must be out of his mind.”

“He is,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

At the seventh floor, she stopped at the nurses’ station to ask for Benson’s chart. A new nurse was there, who said, “I’m sorry but relatives aren’t allowed to look at medical records.”

“I’m Dr. Ross.”

The nurse was flustered. “I’m sorry, Doctor, I didn’t see a name tag. Your patient is in seven-oh-four.”

“What patient?”

“Little Jerry Peters.”

Dr. Ross looked blank.

“Aren’t you the pediatrician?” the nurse asked, finally.

“No,” she said. “I’m a psychiatrist at the NPS.” She heard the stridency in her own voice, and it upset her. But all those years growing up with people who said, “You don’t
really
want to be a doctor, you want to be a nurse,” or, “Well, for a woman, pediatrics is best, I mean, the most natural thing.…”

“Oh,” the nurse said. “Then you want Mr. Benson in seven-ten. He’s been prepped.”

“Thank you,” she said. She took the chart and walked down the hall to Benson’s room. She knocked on Benson’s door and heard gunshots. She opened the door and saw that the lights were dimmed except for a small bedside lamp, but the room was bathed in an electric-blue glow from a TV. On the screen, a man was saying, “… dead before he hit the ground. Two bullets right through the heart.”

“Hello?” she said, and swung the door wider.

Benson looked over. He smiled and pressed a button beside the bed, turning off the TV. His head was wrapped in a towel.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, coming into the room. She sat on a chair beside the bed.

“Naked,” he said, and touched the towel. “It’s funny. You don’t realize how much hair you have until somebody cuts it all off.” He touched the towel again. “It must be worse for a woman.” Then he looked at her and became embarrassed.

“It’s not much fun for anybody,” she said.

“I guess not.” He lay back against the pillow. “After they did it, I looked in the wastebasket, and I was
amazed. So much hair. And my head was cold. It was the funniest thing, a cold head. They put a towel around it. I said I wanted to look at my head—see what I looked like bald—but they said it wasn’t a good idea. So I waited until after they left, and then I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. But when I got there …”

“Yes?”

“I didn’t take the towel off.” He laughed. “I couldn’t do it. What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. What do you think it means?”

He laughed again. “Why is it that psychiatrists never give you a straight answer?” He lit a cigarette and looked at her defiantly. “They told me I shouldn’t smoke, but I’m doing it anyway.”

“I doubt that it matters,” she said. She was watching him closely. He seemed in good spirits, and she didn’t want to take that away from him. But on the other hand, it wasn’t entirely appropriate to be so cheerful on the eve of brain surgery.

“Ellis was here a few minutes ago,” he said, puffing on the cigarette. “He put some marks on me. Can you see?” He lifted up the right side of his towel slightly. exposing white pale flesh over the skull. Two blue “X” marks were positioned behind the ear. “How do I look?” he asked, grinning.