“Thomas Wolfe said that,” Blaise mumbled before he pitched forward and his forehead struck the edge of his coffee cup.
A mile away, the white plaster ceiling floated, its faint trowel lines throwing near-invisible shadows. Gordon drifted into view. “You passed out again. Your mind’s trying to shut you down. Sooner or later it will, if you don’t do something.” He struggled to sit and Gordon held him down. “Not sick!” Blaise gasped.
“Not at the moment. Just weak.” Gordon sat and rattled his spoon in his coffee cup. “You won’t talk about your parents when you’re drunk, and you can’t when you’re sober.”
“I suppose that’s a hint.”
Gordon nodded.
“It’s not their fault.” Blaise’s mind felt like crumpled cardboard. He kept trying to flatten it.
“That’s for you to fix in psychoanalysis.” Gordon’s spoon made a clinking sound and Blaise realized the cup was empty. “What about Linda? She’s a mother figure, you know.” Blaise snorted.
“Even fashion models can be mothers.”
Blaise shook his head.
“Perfect? Just like your mother?” Gordon played with his spoon and set the cup aside with a sigh. “I have to go.”
“Why did you bring that kit to the hospital, Gordon? If you didn’t want to do the implant?”
“What we want to do is often different from what we must. I owe you and Helen.” Gordon passed a hand over his face. “I only wish it were more than temporary.”
“Temporary? How long?”
Gordon stood. “Take care of Dobie and we’ll both know.”
“Why does Hemmett want Dobie bad enough to kill?”
“That’s what I’m waiting for Dobie to tell us. There must be a bomb in the genes. Maybe it’s age.” Gordon shook his head. “We’re like the man who jumped off the roof.”
Blaise stared.
“As he whizzed past his window he said, ‘So far, so good.’ That’s me. Miss McIntyre was just pushed. I don’t know how many floors are left to go.”
Blaise searched for something to say.
“We’d better get going. Dr. Hemmett foams at the mouth when I’m gone too long. He’d lock me up, but he doesn’t dare.”
“What are you going to tell him?”
“That I missed the plane.” Gordon grinned. “Don’t worry, Blaise. I’m not reduced to bringing a note from my parents. I have something to sell that they want to buy.”
Gordon walked to the door. “I’ll take you back to your car. But you ought to get something less conspicuous. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble just to have some stooge on a street corner see that yellow wreck and follow you here.”
“Go see your wife.”
Gordon snapped his head around, his face convoluted. “Don’t say no. I’ll . . . work out my problem. You work on yours. You owe us, you owe your wife. If our time is short, how long is it for you and her?”
“No!” Gordon opened the door.
“She’s at her mother’s. You don’t have to call. She told me she won’t set foot outside the door while you’re alive unless it’s to see you. She means it.”
Gordon pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Take care of your damn car!” he yelled and slammed the door. It was the first time Gordon ever raised his voice, much less swore at him. A sound in the garage caught Blaise. Dobie I was whining and trying to sit. “Lie down, Dobie,” Blaise said soothingly. “It’s going to be all right.”
He added silently, See your wife, Gordon. For your sake! After calling a cab, Blaise went into the dining room. The heavy smoked oak table had been pushed against the far wall to make room for Alfie next to the telephone and a wall plug. He tapped the keyboard and the monitor came to life.
"GOOD AFTERNOON, PROFESSOR. I AM RUNNING ON BATTERY POWER"
BATTERY POWER flashed on and off in a silent shriek for Blaise to take note.
He plugged the cord in.
"THANK YOU, PROFESSOR" Hex code streaked up the screen as Alfie checked those peripherals physically incorporated into its structure but denied access to batteries.
Blaise unplugged the telephone and substituted the modem cable. He instructed Alfie to monitor Helen’s hospital records. Standing in deep thought, he then told Alfie to dig for dirt on Technological Intelligence Laboratories, Limited, in Berkeley, and also Milo Burkhalter. He punched in Milo’s address. The doorbell rang. In La Jolla cab drivers didn’t honk. Alfie was acknowledging instructions. At the end of the acknowledgment the computer flashed the message, "MAY I START WITH MISS MCINTYRE, PROFESSOR?"
Helen might have said the monitor’s green clashed with the robin’s-egg-blue walls in the dining room. Blaise decided she would have been wrong. “Yes, Alfie. Watch Miss McIntyre every minute.”
"THANK YOU, PROFESSOR. WITHOUT FAIL"
Output from the machines monitoring Helen suddenly appeared down one edge of the monitor. Numbers fluttered, changing as she changed, and then on the rest of the monitor I information on other things streamed by as Alfie built a file. The bell rang again. Blaise went out to the cab, wondering what he didn’t know that Helen and Alfie knew.
The nurse at the ICU desk looked oddly at Blaise when he came in. “Dr. MacReedy wants to see you, Dr. Cunningham. Please wait until I locate him.”
“How’s Miss McIntyre?” He glanced through the observation window. Helen seemed much as she had earlier, but appearances meant nothing. She could be comatose and he wouldn’t know.
“Doctor will discuss that with you, sir.” The nurse pointedly ignored him while she scribbled on a duty roster.
Blaise took a chair in the hall and stared at the top of the nurse’s head. His breath was ragged. He struggled not to imagine before MacReedy presented facts. Helen might be dying because he had ordered treatment discontinued.
And solid, conservative Gordon might have acted as he thought best—might have used an empty hypodermic, believing it better to pretend and thus ensure an uncomplicated termination.
He wouldn’t do that! Blaise trusted Gordon. But Gordon might see the best solution that way. Blaise couldn’t shake the fear of what Gordon’s friendship could cost. His stomach tasted chalky, like the barium gunk used in gastrointestinal X-rays.
By the time MacReedy arrived Blaise was gasping. MacReedy had the nurse bring a paper cup of water. “I want you to change the surgical order.” MacReedy’s eyes were hot coals in deep, stress-blackened sockets.
“Why? We decided . . .”
“I know what I said before.” MacReedy’s voice was urgent, hoarse, as if burned out from rehearsing what he had to say. He seemed not to notice that he had interrupted Blaise. “I was wrong. Miss McIntyre has . . . improved.”
“That’s wonderful.” Blaise looked at him. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes.” MacReedy was sweating. “But you can’t depend on the change lasting. She’s stronger and apparently some of the damage is less significant than the mag scans led us to believe. We have a chance to contain the damage if we operate now.” Emotion seeped out of MacReedy in a silent tide.
“No!”
“Dr. Cunningham. You don’t know what you’re saying.” MacReedy raised his hands as though holding something fragile. “I was wrong once. I know how that looks. I can be wrong a second time. But if you don’t give in to my request, Doctor, between us we’ll kill or cripple this woman.”
MacReedy began pacing. “I’m sorry, Dr. Cunningham. I don’t mean it that way. I can’t blame you for reacting to my error. I’d have the same response if I were in your position.” He stared Blaise in the eye. “Please. You’ve got to trust me.
“You’re making it hard, Doctor. But you may not operate.” Blaise closed his eyes to the surgeon.
“I asked Miss McIntyre.”
The pressure on Blaise’s chest dropped away. “She’s lucid enough to talk?”
MacReedy licked dry lips. “She told me to do whatever you say.”
Blaise was taller than MacReedy. They stared at each other in silence.
The nurse at the ICU duty desk hid behind a magazine. Its cover had a fetus bright with blood and still in its membrane sack. The leader line was Legal Implications of Abortion and Insurance Liability.
“Can I see her?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.” Blaise closed the door behind himself. The chair remained beside the bed but he learned over and kissed Helen lightly on the temple before he sat.
“I’m glad you came again.” Her eyes were open, blue as a plasma arc reflected off stainless steel. The side of her face pressed into the starchy whiteness of the pillow but she could look into his eyes when he sat. Her voice was fragile.
“How could I stay away?” He joked gently, on watch for treacherous words and phrases.
“I wasn’t fair, was I?”
“You’re never unfair. Or mean.” Blaise stroked the side of her face.
“I know you really want that woman. And you think you’re responsible for what happened to me. But you’re not.”
“I am responsible.” Blaise touched her lips with his finger. “And I like you a lot more than I do Linda.”
“It’s hard for you to be truthful when the truth is hard on somebody else,” Helen said.
“Try believing me.” Blaise leaned closer.
Her eyes were misty. “Whatever you do is all right, Blaise. You don’t have to stay with me. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“He who’s afraid to ask remains a bachelor.”
“Do you really like me?”
“A bunch, sweet hips.”
“That’s not nice.” Helen sounded please.
“You don’t share my viewpoint.”
She rested, just looking at him. “The doctor wants me to approve an emergency operation.”
“Gordon came today, Helen. Earlier, with me.”
“I see.” She rested for a moment. “What should I do?”
“Gordon says you can’t let anybody inside your head. It’s gone too far to have a choice.”
“What do you say?”
“I have to trust Gordon.”
“All right. You tell the doctor.” She blinked. “Is it all right to be afraid?”
He kissed her. “I’m afraid, too.”
MacReedy went in after Blaise came out. He was back in a minute. “She must think you’re God, Doctor. I hope she’s right.”
“I want her back more than you do. If you’ve been wrong once, let’s pray I’m right once.”
“I don’t have much choice, do I?” MacReedy’s eyes were bleak, his lips tight.
Blaise stepped out into a moonless night made blacker by a ground fog from warm earth and ocean. Parking-lot lights spread a stark visibility over the asphalt. Blaise’s yellow VW stood out against darker shapes.
He was unlocking when he heard the sharp click of heels on the tarmac. “Nice seeing you again, Dr. Cunningham.” Blaise straightened looking at Sergio Paoli’s shadowy face. “We have an appointment, Doctor.”
“I thought you weren’t interested in me.”
“It does not have to be in Samarra.” Sergio saw Blaise’s lack of comprehension. “Those who seek, find sermons in stones. I, Professor, seek only to better myself.”
“How did you find me?”
“I didn’t learn until after it happened. But I knew you’re not the man to let your lady languish alone. I waited here.”
“You could have caught me when I went in.”
“I knew you’d be back, Doc. No reason to spoil your visit.”
Human intelligence, if applied to a machine, would allow it to evolve an answer to any problem within the scope of its memory and the limitations of its speed of operation.
FROM A SEMINAR ON
THE CUNNINGHAM EQUATIONS
CHAPTER 19
Vehiculō meō, doctissime Doctor doctorum.” Sergio opened the door to a black Chrysler with an aerodynamic, plastic-encased antennalike dish on top. “You know, there’s an academy in Perugia trying to remake Latin into what Esperanto never was nor will be.” He smiled. “Them old Italians never say ‘die.’ In vehiculo usque ad viam. Properly, of course, I should say carrus automovens but carro sounds tacky. At least in Italian. What do you think, Doc?”
“That I am neither ‘most learned’ nor ‘teacher of teachers.’ In any event, Ad quem finem?”
“To what avail? That’s a good question, Doc. The brains’ll have to tell you that. I just drive the car.”
“And other things.”
“And other things ” Sergio admitted. “Get in.”
“Et si non?”
“Doc, it’s a nice night. Don’t make it unpleasant.”
Blaise ducked his head and slid into the heavy newsmelling leather interior.
Sergio closed the door on his side and punched the ignition code into a fourteen-button keypad. Liquid crystal displays began pulsing in easy rhythms and eight colors. It took Blaise an instant to realize the motor was actually running.
Sergio punched again and a ghostly see-through image formed on the windshield. Blaise recognized a map, green streets with a red overlay line through La Jolla. The lower end terminated in a red dot in the hospital parking lot. The ocean was a mass of blue to the west. Elevations were indicated by topographical contours in false color.
“Impressive, Professor?” Sergio glanced at Blaise, then put the car in motion. The red dot began devouring the red line in tiny, smaller-than-Pacman gulps. “It’s the newest advance on the old Mirv system. Instead of an overlay street map on a screen and a tracking dot controlled by navigation satellites, Chrysler put a whole computer in the car. It reads a videotape and translates it to a screen image based on a navsat fix. Neat, don’t you think, Doctor?”
“Yes. It is.”
“You’re the expert, Doc. Anyway, once the area is on screen, you enter your destination. The computer scrolls the tape and finds a route.”
“And you follow the yellow brick road.”
“Red.”
Sergio tapped instructions and the map shrunk. Unoccupied sections of the monitor began showing fuel, miles per gallon, speed, temperature, and oil pressure. Sergio laughed. “This car had all kinds of trash on the display when I went to take delivery. A gas can. An oil spout. A thermometer. A waterfall, for Christ’s sake! The salesman almost had a fit when I told him to get rid of that caca. But the manager dug up a secretary and she reprogrammed this turkey in ten minutes. Some secretary,” Sergio added in a fond voice. “Are you impressed, Professor?”
“Yes.”
“You’re lying, Doc. Anybody drives a relic like that beetle doesn’t give a damn about cars.”
“I imagine the computer in here cost more than my VW did new.” Blaise admitted.
“See? I’m thinking about becoming a psychiatrist. Clean work, and I’ve always known when somebody lied to me.”
“It’s a promising line of work.” Blaise knew he should be making frantic plans to escape—foolhardy stunts like opening a door and falling out at sixty miles an hour. Instead, he listened.
“Yeah.” Sergio drove in silence for a while. City lights reflected off overcast to maintain a tenuous barrier against total darkness. The car continued eating up the red line and the background kept shifting.
“Adne coeli portam?”
“Yeah, we’re going to Heaven’s Gate.” Sergio concentrated on the road. “You know, Doc, I’m not happy about this.”
“What are they going to do?”
“They don’t tell me nothing, Doc. I’m just a dumb button man from Jersey that friends West and Hemmett borrowed and gave an injection so he could work smarter. I’m just a handy new tool. Like this computer in the car.”
“Have they taken the treatment themselves?”
“Funny you should ask that, Doc.” Sergio’s voice lost its banter. “I was going to ask you why they didn’t. God knows some of those guys could use a little more IQ.”
“Maybe they know something.”
“Maybe you know something, Doc.”
Sergio drove in silence to a door marked employees but did not get out of the car. “I talked to West’s old man about you,” he finally said. “He hates Gregory with a purple passion. I think he hates me because I work for his son. He said something very funny, Doc. He gave me hell for talking worse Sicilian than the blond American I was sent to check.” Sergio looked at Blaise. “You lied, Doc, on the plane when you didn’t admit you knew Italian. And I couldn’t tell.”
“Nobody’s perfect.”
“For your sake, I hope you are, Doc.”
They got out of the car. Sergio unlocked the service entrance in the rear of the building before the headlights turned off and recessed. The night was darker at Heaven’s Gate than it had been in La Jolla.
Sergio led the way down a thickly carpeted hallway lit by low-wattage floodlights. He paused at a heavy walnut door and knocked with one knuckle. A voice inside said. “Come in.”
Face blank as he pushed the door open, Sergio’s grating New Jersey voice picked up in midsentence. “—really oughta learn Italian, Doc. It’s a beautiful language.” Facing the man inside, he added. “Scusa, Don Gregorio. Ecco la mercanzia”
Gregory West turned away from Arthur Hemmett whom he’d obviously been lecturing. “Grazz’,” he said. “Aspetta con Brun’,” He said he would tell Sergio’s patron of his good work. It was not necessary to add that Sergio and Bruno were to do their waiting in the hall.
Sergio put the essence of a bow into his nod, beckoning the man who sat at a desk by the door laying out Tarot cards. Silently, barrel-chested Bruno stood and followed Sergio. West sat on the bare desktop and examined Blaise. “Apparently, Dr. Cunningham, I didn’t pay enough attention to you while you were in the employ of GENRECT.”
Having met Giovanni Oesti, the resemblance between Gregory and his father was obvious. West was simply Oesti in English. That transportation made, the short, compact West with his high cheekbones and sharply delineated features and skin that looked perpetually tanned seemed a younger twin.
“You wanted to see me. I’m here.”
“True, Doctor. We, Dr. Hemmett and I, think it is in all our best interests to have a talk and perhaps right old wrongs.”
The Cunningham Equations Page 19