‘Just plain habilitation without the “re”,’ Conway pointed out. ‘Don’t forget that Soames has never lived at all yet, in effect.’
‘I can tell you the chances of success,’ McCabe said brightly. ‘One in twenty, according to Bennett.’
‘Last time it was one in fifty, so the odds are decreasing.’
‘That’s a good sign,’ McCabe remarked, with a speculative gleam in his eye. ‘You know what I’m going to do right now, Dave?’
‘Start taking bets?’
‘No. As a matter of fact I’m going to turn myself into a human being again. I’m going to have a wash and a shave and then I’ve got an interesting proposition to put to that fascinating bitch in the EEG room. I’ll be back later.’
He rubbed his bristly chin with a ruminative air and went off in a hurry, leaving Conway faintly irritated. Echoes of Morry, with the same slightly salacious, opportunist attitude of mind, but then only a Morry or a McCabe could think of Ann Henderson as a fascinating bitch. At least, he decided, they’re still on the outside looking in, and they don’t really know the girl. McCabe’s wasting his time, just as Morry did, only Morry never knew when to stop.
He dismissed the unpleasant train of thought before it got under way and moved across to the other side of the theatre. One of the nurses was removing Soames’s thick black hair with electric clippers preparatory to shaving the scalp in readiness for the inevitable trepanning. Beyond them, by the opposite wall, three men in grey overalls were erecting a scaffolding of dural tubing. This mysterious activity explained itself when the double door of the theatre swung open abruptly to admit two more men carrying equipment of decidedly electronic aspect, among which was a gadget strongly resembling a small industrial-type television camera. He remembered then something of the elaborate arrangements which had been made to secure the maximum possible professional participation in Dr Takaito’s experimental operation: closed-circuit colour television for the benefit of more than two hundred doctors and brain specialists who would be watching video monitors in the lecture hall, and 16-millimetre cine cameras making a permanent record on colour film of the Japanese specialist’s technique and procedure. In addition, it was hoped to obtain a tape-recorded running commentary on the operation by Takaito himself, detailing (even if in Japanese) the purpose of his every move.
Conway found himself wondering what John Soames would think about it all—that is, if he were able to think. To be the focal point of so much expert attention and applied genius; to find consciousness and, in effect, life itself in the centre of the medical profession’s shrewdest and most capable brains... One could hardly ask for more. To be born, as it were, at the age of thirty, surrounded by solicitous if impersonal doctors, psychoneurologists and psychiatrists, with all the parameters of one’s new and unimaginable life proscribed (and, indeed, prescribed) in accordance with the best and most authoritative scientific principles of the day. In a way it was a chance in a billion, an opportunity which no newly born baby had ever been offered in history—and that, of course, was precisely what John Soames would be, if Dr Takaito’s operation proved successful; a baby with a blank mind in an adult body, starting with a clean sheet in terms of education and environment.
Suddenly, feeling in need of a cigarette, he left the cool green and white geometry of the operating theatre, and made his way to the main entrance of the clinic and the fresher informality of the outside world. The sun was shining on the lawns and flower beds, and a fresh breeze stirred the line of plane trees near the high brick wall which screened the arterial road beyond. For north-west London the atmosphere was unusually pastoral, and the grounds surrounding the building were spacious enough to suggest open parkland. The clinic itself—or the Osborne Psychoneural Institute, to give it its full name—was a curious blend of old and new. The main administrative section was accommodated in an old dark-grey Georgian-style house, rather large and stately, but faintly anachronistic in this day and age. It was probably a converted mansion, a relic of a more affluent and gracious era. On either side, and to the rear, modern red-brick buildings with metal framed windows spread out in cross formation, containing the various wards and laboratories. The Institute possessed a vaguely somnolent air of stillness and seclusion, as if civilisation were more than a thousand miles away; only occasionally could the rumble of heavy traffic be heard beyond the high perimeter wall which sealed off suburbia.
Idly he walked round to the rear of the building, to the edge of the small lake which glistened and quivered under the trees, smoking and thinking irrelevant thoughts. About the shape of the lake itself, for instance—ovoid with indentations, like an amoeba; and the trees with their underground roots forming a sombre inverted mirror image of the soaring overhead network of branches and twigs, balanced in a symmetry never observed and rarely visualised; two faces curiously blended, one round and smooth, adorned by the almost platinum blonde hair of Penelope, and the other rather lean with intense brown eyes and hair that was dark enough to be regarded as black, the face of Ann Henderson; the sheer ingenuity of Messiter’s new matrix computer with fifteen million transistorised memory units which could stimulate human thinking and learn by experience, but could never create even a simple concept or display the quality of imagination; Penelope’s shrill drunken laugh, always mildly hysterical in tone, and Ann’s low-pitched mellow voice, invariably quiet and sincere; Patterson’s clinical experiments with a derivative of mescalin in the treatment of schizophrenia, and the detailed work of Erlich Vosch in investigating the brain chemistry of dreams. Young men, Patterson and Vosch, still in their thirties and just a little older than himself—or Soames for that matter. Strange thing about the human brain, that in one man it should exhibit incredible powers of analysis and integration in the realm of ideas, while in another it simply refused to work at all.
With a faint sense of irony he noted the trend of his thoughts, curving inwards as always from the generalised external world to the particularised orbit of the mind, with the phantom overtones of women occasionally intruding irrelevantly. The psychiatrist’s syndrome—well, some psychiatrists, anyway.
He walked slowly and pensively round the lake and returned to the administrative block. The west wing of the mansion comprised living quarters for the resident staff, with kitchen and dining-room, and it was there that he had his own small but comfortable bed-sitter. He entered the building by the rear door and made his way downstairs to the dining-room in search of coffee, which was available on request any time after ten-thirty. Already there were a dozen or more people dispersed among the circular tables making the most of morning refreshment facilities. He collected his coffee from the counter, which was arranged on serve-yourself lines, and looked around for an empty table, feeling, if anything, just a little unsociable and not really in a conversational mood. Unexpectedly he found himself looking straight at Ann Henderson at an isolated table near the window. She smiled, and with that his feeling of insularity evaporated. He went over and joined her.
Ann was odd-woman-out in the general medical establishment of the Institute, an honour she shared with Pauline Stanton of the Radiography Department, but whereas Pauline was middle-aged and thick-set and wore horn-rimmed glasses, Ann was personable and shapely, and her features, if not exactly pretty, were certainly interesting. She had smooth black hair, cut relatively short but frequently untidy, and brown eyes, and she used negligible cosmetics. A curious liaison existed between Conway and the girl; they were precisely the same age, sharing the same birth date (and, in consequence, the same sign of the zodiac and the same astrological forecasts as promulgated in the evening papers—a device which had provided a useful conversational opening gambit on past occasions). Ann was not a doctor, but she held an engineering degree in electronics, and her particular responsibility was the E.E.G. Department where she supervised the use of the electroencephalograph. McCabe’s fascinating bitch, Conway thought ironically.
‘Hello, Dave,’ she said. ‘You look tired.�
�
‘Night duty,’ he remarked briefly.
‘In that case you ought to be catching up with your sleep.’
‘I am, but it doesn’t show.’
‘What does show is a Soames complex,’ she observed. ‘Most of the staff seem to be suffering from it this morning.’
He shrugged. ‘Medical history in the making—or does that sound pontifical? One has a duty to be present, I suppose, if only to make obeisances and scraping and bowing noises in the direction of Dr Takaito.’
‘You sound as if you dislike Dr Takaito.’
‘My dear Ann, I love the man. It’s so kind of him to drop by on his way to New York in order to help us out on this baffling Soames case. What, I ask myself, should we have done without Japanese intervention?’
‘You sound like McCabe,’ she accused. ‘He’s got a thing about the Japs. Apparently his father died on the Burma railway during the last war.’
He regarded her with raised eyebrows. ‘You seem to know a great deal more about McCabe’s background than I do.’
‘Now I begin to understand,’ she said, smiling. ‘It’s not Takaito who’s made you feel sour.’
‘How could he? I don’t even know the man.’
She hesitated for a moment, as if uncertain what to say. ‘As a matter of fact, Dave, I saw Andy McCabe a few minutes ago. He asked me to have dinner with him this evening and he’s got tickets for a show afterwards.’
Conway remained silent.
‘That new American musical,’ she went on. ‘ “What are Little Girls made of?”—it’s had very good reviews.’
‘When I saw Andy in the theatre about half an hour ago he didn’t seem in a fit state to know even what little boys are made of,’ he commented dryly.
‘Morry’s party, I suppose.’
‘Something, like that.’
‘Well, he’s washed and shaved since then and he looks reasonably civilised.’
He finished his coffee and stood up wearily. ‘Well, have fun, Ann.’
‘I’ll try,’ she said, eyeing him reflectively. ‘I can’t help wishing it was you, rather than Andy. You know what I mean, don’t you, Dave?’
‘Yes, I know what you mean. Some other time, perhaps. Tonight I have a previous engagement with Mr Soames’s brain.’
He began to walk away, but halted abruptly and turned back.
‘If you should find out what little girls are made of you’ll let me know, won’t you? It might help me to understand big girls.’
She said nothing, but just looked at him in a melancholy way, so he shrugged in what was meant to be a nonchalant manner and went on his way.
Back in his room he telephoned his wife, Penelope, but there was no reply from her Chelsea flat. The ringing tone repeated and repeated in the telephone earpiece, as it invariably did these days, until he hung up.
2
Dr Takaito was more than an hour late in arriving at the Institute, and this delay, coupled with the non-appearance of the Under-Secretary of State for the Ministry of Health who had promised to be on hand to welcome the Japanese VIP, had thrown Dr Alex Breuer into a bad-tempered flap. Breuer was the Director of the Institute, the man responsible for policy and planning, and the co-ordination of the various clinical programmes. He was big and fleshy, with a tentative moustache shading his upper lip like a half-grown mould culture, and he always wore impeccable dark suits which never varied by more than about one per cent from his favourite shade of grey. Between four and five o’clock he had his secretary telephone the House of Commons seven times to discover what the devil had happened to the Under-Secretary, only to learn on each occasion that an important debate was on in the House and a division was expected at any instant; until this momentous event had taken place it seemed unlikely that the Undersecretary would abandon his Parliamentary duties to shake the hand of the Japanese visitor who, in any case, was merely dropping in on his way to the USA.
By the time the big black Humber hired to convey Dr Takaito from the airport to the Institute rolled silently up the yellow driveway and stopped outside the administrative building, Dr Breuer was halfway through his third whisky and retrospectively drinking a toast to Guy Fawkes. He promptly rushed down to the main entrance, closely followed by Dr Bennett, his personal assistant, and Dr Slade, in charge of psychoneural research. Together they greeted the little Japanese specialist with beaming cordiality, and Dr Takaito in return beamed even more cordially through his heavy concave glasses. The chauffeur unloaded two large suitcases from the boot of the car, and solemnly the procession made its way back up the stairs to Dr Breuer’s private office.
Dr Takaito spoke English very well, but in the flat expressionless manner of the semantically insensitive oriental. Yes, he said in answer to the inevitable question, he had had a very fast and comfortable journey—these new jet-clippers were the last word, the very last word—but they had been held up for nearly an hour at Lydda due to some trouble with the radar. Yes, he had brought back the stereo x-rays of Soames’s brain and he wouldn’t need them any more as he had already prepared a complete set of working drawings. The operation would be a success, he was convinced of it. True, he had not yet encountered such a condition of synaptic coma in a dog, but—and this was the important point—he had been able to induce an equivalent coma by artificially creating certain types of neural barriers between specific cerebral lobes, and had restored normal brain functioning by removing the barriers. The Soames x-rays contained indications of great physical similarity. To prove the point he had brought along a selection of colour transparencies of excised dogs’ brains before and after treatment illustrating the remarkable resemblance with certain physical aspects of Soames’s brain.
Back in the office Dr Breuer and his colleagues inspected the transparencies with considerable interest while Dr Takaito, uninvited, helped himself to a sizeable whisky and soda with a practised hand while maintaining an intermittent running commentary.
‘That frontal view, for example, Dr Breuer. The meningeal layer is stained green. You can see that it has overgrown, as it were, and folded upon itself. The fold has forced its way between two small anterior lobes, setting up a partial neural barrier. It is not enough merely to remove the excess of meningeal tissue. One has also to restore a positive neural connection between the isolated lobes, and that calls for a refined grafting technique.’
‘Very interesting,’ Breuer murmured raptly. ‘By the way, do help yourself to a drink, Dr Takaito.’
‘Thank you, I will,’ said Takaito, finishing his drink and pouring another.
‘It seems to me,’ Breuer went on, ‘that here you have something new in cerebroneural surgery.’
‘New for humans, but not for dogs. One rarely encounters such a condition in a natural form, and even so, one hardly knows how to diagnose it without killing the patient first in order to stain the brain tissues and carry out a microscopic examination. Good for research, perhaps, but hardly therapeutic.’
‘As you know, we have made certain arrangements.’ Breuer explained. ‘Nearly two hundred doctors and specialists in psychoneurology have been invited to the Institute—indeed, they have been arriving most of the afternoon—to watch your operation with the aid of colour television. We also propose to have a film made, and we should be most grateful if, during the operation, you would comment on your procedure and explain each step as you carry it out. The commentary will be recorded on tape, of course, and will eventually be transferred to the film as a sound track.’
‘Of course,’ Takaito said generously, then wagged a cautiously reproving finger at the other man, ‘providing the operation is a success. If it should fail, then you will kindly do me the courtesy of erasing all permanent records.’ His lips twisted sardonically. ‘After all, as you know, we Japanese do not like to “lose face”, as you put it.’
‘Well...’ Breuer began doubtfully.
‘One does not want to have one’s failures preserved for—what is it you say?—for posterity.’<
br />
‘Sounds reasonable,’ Bennett commented, while Dr Slade merely nodded his head in a half-hearted fashion.
‘I still think the record would be valuable from the point of view of surgical technique,’ Breuer insisted stubbornly.
Dr Takaito smiled thinly. ‘A futile technique has no intrinsic value. However, as I am quite sure that the operation will succeed, the difficulty is hardly likely to arise—in which case I have no valid objection to your film cameras and tape recorders.’ His smile broadened affably. ‘And now, Dr Breuer, there is one small favour which I in turn would like to put to you—a reasonable favour, I feel, in view of the part I am to play in the experiment.’
‘Yes?’ Breuer said rather brusquely, putting the transparencies on his desk.
‘The after-treatment.’ Takaito folded his arms in a gesture of superficial humility. ‘I have a profound interest in psychotherapy. After all, one does not play with dogs just for amusement.’
‘I don’t understand, Dr Takaito...’
‘Let us assume that as a result of my operation Mr Soames suddenly finds himself with consciousness. What next? He has a mind—a blank mind, but he is an adult male. His mind has to be trained and orientated so that, in the course of time, he can take up a normal life as a useful citizen in your society. It will not be easy. There will be many problems. I should like to play my part in helping to solve those problems.’
‘Well,’ said Breuer thoughtfully, ‘I see no objection at all, but won’t it be rather difficult to play an active part from the other side of the world?’
Takaito pursed his lips primly. ‘I made my diagnosis and planned the operation from the other side of the world, as you so neatly put it, Dr Breuer...’
‘But surely,’ Dr Slade interposed, ‘the one is a matter of physical observation, while the other’—he smiled in a disarming way—‘well, one can see the brain—but not the mind.’
‘What Dr Slade means is that instructional psychotherapy can only be accomplished at first hand,’ Breuer said, pursuing the point. ‘Clearly the Institute’s psychiatric specialists must be the first authority in a case like this, though naturally we should always be willing to consider advice.’
The Mind of Mr Soames Page 2