“I should have been a podiatrist!” He stared at Blaise as if seeking forgiveness. “I told her. I wish I was wrong, but I’m not.”
Blaise went back in and took the chair MacReedy had vacated.
“Is it true, Blaise? About brain failures, little strokes? My father had them. I guess they didn’t know about chronic lead poisoning then. I don’t want to live like that.” Helen looked at him, pleading for something he didn’t want to hear.
Blaise stared at his hands between his knees. “Maybe something can be done.”
She waited.
“It’s Gordon’s work. But it isn’t safe.” Blaise was talking to his clenched fingers. “He’s transplanting cells into the brain. They grow and assume the functions of cells that are already there, and introduce new functions.”
“Brains from dead people?”
“No. Special laboratory-grown cells that are empty except for their genetic programming. Dobie has them.”
“Oh.” Helen lay back on her pillow. “That’s why Dr. Hemmett wanted the dog.”
“To cut up his brain for testing. Gordon needs a longterm test. He wants Dobie to mature, to see what changes the foreign cells make in his behavior. That’s why I . . . asked you to hold onto him. If I’d have any idea . . .” Blaise ground fingernails into his palms. “Maybe the others . . . but I didn’t think Hemmett would hurt anybody.”
“I know you didn’t, Blaise.”
Helen did not speak for a long time. Sometimes she seemed lost to him, and other times to be reading his mind.
“Would you stay with me, for a while, if I tried Dr. Hill’s way?”
“Forever, Helen.”
She closed her eyes and tears dripped from the fine blond lashes. “Don’t make impossible promises, Blaise. For a while is enough. I don’t want to be alone, and I want to be with you. Happiness for a little while is better than a long loneliness.”
“Stop—”
“Don’t be upset. It’s just my melancholic Slav coming out.” She gripped his hand and pressed it against her cheek. “Promise?”
“Anything for you.” Blaise meant it. Even in the hospital corridor with the echoed clicking of his heels keeping pace and his mind on Gordon.
He waited in the hillside home rented that morning from a lady who had been his mother’s friend, and who could be relied on for discretion. The house came complete with pots and pans and a telephone in somebody else’s name. He had already called from a pay phone to switch over from vacation service.
Half an hour after his arrival a truck growled up the hill. The driver and his helpers lugged Alfie inside. Dobie followed, slung in a mattress with four movers hanging onto the pop-out nylon handles. They made more trips with boxes of clothes.
“Leave the rest of it in the truck.” When the men ignored Blaise and continued unloading the driver repeated Blaise’s instruction in Oklahoma-accented Spanish.
Blaise handed him a folded stack of twenty-dollar bills.
Thumbing through the wad, counting, the driver said, “We take this stuff up to the locker in El Toro and store it for Sergeant H. McIntyre, USMC, and pay six months storage in advance?”
Blaise nodded.
The truck coasted downhill, motor catching with a little puff of smoke. The driver would be the only one who knew where they were going, or where they had been.
Dobie’s eyes were open and he wagged his stump of a tail even if he didn’t try to get up. His mattress was on the garage floor where an ocean breeze fluttered the window shades.
Blaise filled a mixing bowl from the kitchen with water and put it next to Dobie’s mattress. He left the door from the house into the garage open while he stood looking down at the dog, mentally running through everything for a last time.
Gordon had come on the phone at Heaven’s Gate practically immediately and suggested they meet again at the same place. Which meant they had listeners and not to say any more.
“Are you finally dried out?” Gordon had asked. “Groundup horn of fallow deer used to be a folk remedy.”
“I’m dry, Gordon. Forever.”
“A mere desiccated analogue of your former existence?” Gordon’s ironic tone carried a question mark.
Blaise hung up after explaining to Gordon what had happened to Helen and hinting at the cure. Gordon had not been enthusiastic. In the end, though, he said they would talk at Sea World. Blaise said he’d be dried out by then and hung up. A dry analogue of Sea World had to mean the zoo.
“You know, Dobie,” he mused, “the difference between you and me is that men have speech to hide their thoughts.”
Dobie wagged his pathetic stump of a tail at the sound of Blaise’s voice. That was Dobie’s problem. He’d believe any lie.
Blaise had to park a half mile from the entrance. He joined a group of parking-lot hikers who had asked directions, men in short-sleeved shirts that would leave their arms redder than the shirts by the end of the day. He aimed them at the entrance, losing himself amid their nonprotective coloration.
At the gift shop he bought a floppy straw hat and a T-shirt with a koala bear on the front. He stuffed the shirt in the hat and kept both on his knees as he rode the aircar to the hooved-animal mesa, gently swinging in the windless sky over shoulder to shoulder heads baking in the sun.
Gordon Hill was shaking his head sadly as an obese lady in pink shorts and yellow T-shirt tried to tempt a fallow deer with a candy bar. He lifted an eyebrow at Blaise. Blaise grinned and joined Gordon in his vigil. After a while the fat lady noticed she had their attention and furtively tugged at the bottom of her shorts. She waved the candy halfheartedly again before striding off stiff with embarrassment.
Gordon leaned elbows on the rail. The deer inspected his hands and decided he was even less interesting than a candy bar. It ambled off in the same direction the fat lady had taken.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this, Blaise.”
Blaise leaned on the rail alongside Gordon. “It’s not funny anymore.”
“The stockbroker lady?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.” Gordon turned around with his back against the rail. He wore a blue sportswear jacket and slacks combination and a blue-gray tie. The tie looked out of place for the zoo. “I didn’t know. If I had, I couldn’t have done anything.”
The road up the bone-dry hill with dusty animal paddocks on either side was empty of people. “I didn’t believe Hemmett was capable of this, either.”
Gordon took a white handkerchief from his pocket and polished his square rimless glasses. “Gregory West runs everything. Poor old Arthur Hemmett’s just along for the ride.”
Blaise struggled to breathe. He clung to the rail and tried to stand, but he was so light he kept falling away from the ground. Finally he could speak. “Gordon, I want you to come see Helen. I want you to treat her.” Then his lungs went on strike.
He opened his eyes and everything was out of perspective. Gordon towered over him and the attendant came running from the aircar station. Gordon took out his wallet and showed it to the attendant, who went away.
“You all right, Blaise?” Gordon helped him stand.
Blaise leaned against Gordon for support. Slowly they walked back to the aircar, Gordon holding him up until he could fall into the seat. Gordon took off his jacket, folding it across his knees, stuffing his tie in the breast pocket. He shook the T-shirt out and stuck the straw hat on Blaise’s head.
As they swayed back across the zoo two hundred feet in the air, Gordon seemed mildly pleased. Blaise studied him in silence, unable to guess what had brought about the unexpected change in his mood.
A mathematical model is only a design for improving intelligence. That it can be constructed does not mean that present technology is able, at this time, to implement the advances the model outlines. Failures are built in before successes.
FROM A SEMINAR ON
THE CUNNINGHAM EQUATIONS
CHAPTER 17
Dr. MacReedy a
ppeared like a jack-in-the-box when they signed in at the intensive care unit. The nurses wouldn’t let them see Helen. Blaise had the queasy, desperate feeling that he had acted too slowly.
MacReedy and Gordon huddled while Blaise, miserable and sick, stared through the ICU window at Helen lying still in the hospital bed. She was unimaginably fragile. “Come on.” Gordon had Blaise’s elbow in a firm grip and the three of them went into the room.
Helen barely breathed. Oxygen from a positive pressure gauge flowed into her through a nose clip.
“She’s worse.” Blaise couldn’t keep the dismay from his voice. He’d been raised to maintain an unflappable exterior. The mark of the well bred and the able. Only he didn’t care anymore and he couldn’t think why anyone else should.
MacReedy squeezed his hands together. “I’d warned you, Dr. Cunningham, that the deterioration would be unpredictable. I’m . . . sorry.” He walked away and then came back. “Miss McIntyre put you down as next of kin. Even signed a will naming you as beneficiary. A priest . . .” MacReedy looked at Gordon, his distress evident. “She asked for one, Dr. Cunningham. I don’t know how she knew.”
Blaise’s bones were long icicles in his flesh. “What next?”
“There’s no way of telling.” The brain surgeon picked at invisible threads in the sleeve of his jacket. “We can go ahead with exploratory surgery, but I wanted to talk to you first.” Blaise’s hairline was cold with sweat.
“You’re next of kin. When I asked Miss McIntyre about emergency procedures, she said the two of you had an understanding. That you would know what to do.”
Blaise felt dizzy. A buzzing filled his ears.
“Under these circumstances, Doctor, emergency surgery is discretional. The patient has not asked for it. She only indicated the decision would be up to you.”
Blaise fumbled with the chair. “It’s necessary now?”
“Yes, Doctor.” MacReedy seemed to be making the title a conspiratorial bond between the two of them.
“Do you need an immediate answer? Or is it all right if I sit here? She might come around?”
“You’ll know if we need an immediate answer, Doctor. I’ll get a chair for Dr. Hill. When you’ve made up your mind, tell the duty nurse. She’ll page me.”
After MacReedy left, a nurse carried in another chair. Gordon sighed as he sat. “They usually allow only one person at a time into ICU, when they let anybody in at all.”
“What did you talk to MacReedy about?”
“I showed him my membership in the American Society of Brain Surgeons. He didn’t tell me anything new.” Gordon paused. “How are you feeling?”
“Lousy.”
“Bad enough to pass out?”
Blaise thought about it a moment. “No.”
“If you fainted here, no one would think anything about it. They understand the tension.”
“I’m not going to faint. What would your miracle brain cells do for Helen in this situation?”
Gordon hunched forward and seemed to concentrate his energies to look into Helen’s body. “Eccentric respiration, weak pulse, symptoms of shock and system deterioration. The implant would absorb the injured tissue and replace it with new, altered cells. Providing she survived physically, and memory damage was minimal, she would heal.” Helen’s breath whispered in uncertain cadence. “Providing she survived?”
“No emergency operations. MacReedy would think he was dealing with a malignancy. He’d try to remove or kill those cells before they could spread. She could die before the cells can populate her cerebrum. But until the new cells take control of body functions she can suffer body death.”
“Does that mean you’ll do it?”
Gordon sighed. “Do I have a choice?”
“No.”
“I thought as much.”
“When?”
Gordon took a flat case out of his shirt pocket. “Watch the nurses. Don’t let anyone see what I’m doing.”
“Right now?” Blaise was having trouble breathing again.
“Do you think there’s time to spare?”
“Whatever you say, Gordon.”
Gordon pulled his chair up where he blocked the nurse’s view of Helen’s head. Gently he turned her face toward the window and had Blaise stand so he also blocked anyone from looking in.
Opening the case with one hand, Gordon removed a syringe in sanitary wrapping and a long, curved needle. He broke seals and screwed them together, then filled the needle with fluid from a plastic capsule. “Keep your eyes on the nurses.”
Blaise looked away from the wickedly curved needle to watch the nurse at the ICU station. She stretched and yawned, then saw Blaise and smiled. He stared at her like a terrified rabbit watching a coyote. She dropped her eyes and started writing on her report again.
A sharp click broke the silence and Blaise jumped.
“Nervous?” Gordon put the flat case back in his pocket.
Blaise nodded.
“Me, too. Tell the nurse you want to talk to Dr. MacReedy.”
Helen lay as she had been when they entered the room, face to the ceiling. The sheets covered her without a single wrinkle.
Blaise opened the door and walked to the nurse’s station.
Until now, the supplanted species, the root stock, as it were, has always disappeared in favor of its improved variation. The reasons, which may include such factors as competition for the same basic necessities as well as an inherent revulsion against an apparent aberration in its own gene stock, are unimportant. It is enough to accept this as fact.
FROM A SEMINAR ON
THE CUNNINGHAM EQUATIONS
CHAPTER 18
La Jolla sprawls like a fat green-checked snake, filling the gap between the ocean on one side and the crest of coastal hills on the other. In his mind’s eye Blaise saw Gordon’s year-old tan Ford rental as an ant climbing the snake’s spine. “Why not hide in another part of town, where nobody knows you?” Gordon asked.
“How big is the danger?”
“Money is involved.” Gordon seemed to wrestle with his conscience while he twisted and turned up the hillside that had grown in value and prestige since World War II.
Blaise looked at older houses with white wood siding surrounded by trees and shrubs hoary with age. An occasional Spanish stucco, like a chromium prosthesis amid aging, yellow teeth, broke the sameness. It seemed as if he’d lived all his life here. This neighborhood represented permanence, the place his parents always brought him back to. “I know the ground here. Anywhere else a stranger comes looking for me, I’d share his disadvantage.” He pointed. “There, that house.”
Making an old lady’s turn in the narrow lane, Gordon pulled the Ford into a lilac-screened driveway. The wide wheel base overlapped the cement strips. “I see why you drive a beetle.”
“Only because I couldn’t get a Model A.” Blaise unlocked the front door. They walked through to the garage and he switched on the light. Dobie’s eyes glinted in the sudden glare. When he saw Gordon, he whined and shimmied his stump of tail.
“Good boy.” Gordon knelt, rubbing the dog’s head and ears and Dobie whined in appreciation. After a minute of gentle roughhouse the Doberman’s neck tired and his head dropped to his paws. But his eyelids remained perked up in sharp V’s that raised soft wrinkles of black and golden-brown fur over his forehead. Gordon felt around the bandage, pulled Dobie’s eyelid back, and touched along the spinal column.
“Well?”
Gordon dusted his hands as he stood. “No inflammation, no signs of brain damage, no impairment of the nervous system. He’s doing well.”
“For sure?”
“A wild guess.” Gordon smiled. “The vet did a nice job. No extra slicing or hemorrhaging.”
“Coffee?”
Dobie was asleep again. Gordon hesitated, then nodded.
The coffee was instant, water out of the tap, but drinkably hot. Gordon sipped, staring across the table at Blaise. “You’re not drinking?”
>
“I decided to stop.” He rolled the hot cup between his hands. He didn’t have to tell Gordon he needed a drink.
In the hot yellow sunlight through the kitchen window Gordon’s face reassumed its granite demeanor.
“I appreciate what you did today. For Helen.”
Gordon tented his arms on the table, clasping his hands together, and then chewed lightly at the edge of his finger. The mannerism startled Blaise. Gordon had always seemed so steady, without nervous habits other than his perennial preoccupation with making everything neat and in its place.
“Do you need any pills?”
Blaise stared blankly across the table.
“You’ll have more of those anxiety attacks if you stay off the sauce. Worse, until you resolve your problem.”
“Pills won’t cure anything.” Blaise stared out the window. He didn’t want to look in Gordon’s face when they talked. And he had to talk. The attack at the zoo was the worst he remembered. At least when he was drunk he could pretend they didn’t happen, that they weren’t really so bad.
“Pills will keep you alive, Blaise. You’re going to have to get professional help.”
“A psychiatrist?”
Gordon spoke without natural cadence, feeling his way along a path where he knew he was tresspassing. “What else? If you go on this way you won’t have to worry about the future. And it’s not just you anymore. You’ve given a hostage to fortune.”
Gordon was right. It was not just fear of death that gnawed at him. Blaise feared helplessness, the inability to control his future, the knowledge that he would become a chattel whose sole raison d’etre was to be manipulated for somebody else’s purpose.
“Blaise, shutting down physical functions can cripple your mind, damage your heart. You could literally die of fright.”
“Not afraid. Been killing myself for years.” That was inane. He was babbling and the light was going out.
“—parents,” Gordon’s voice receded. “—must learn to see them as they were—not as you wanted them. You can’t go back.”
The Cunningham Equations Page 18