Interface. Part 11

"Oh," Dr. Radhakrishnan said disappointedly. "I was hoping to take a look at the stock quotes."

"Say no more," Mr. Salvador said. He put his cigar down and moved to the front of the cabin. He sat down in a leather swivel chair in front of a portable communications setup that was built into theforward bulkhead of the Gyrfalcon, just behind the c.o.c.kpit. It included a telephone and a fax machine, a keyboard, and a couple of flat-screen monitors. The fax machine had been oozing paper almost since the moment they had taken off in Elton, and by now a long curlicue had piled up beneath it on the deck.

"These Gale birds are pricey but they have peerless avionics," Mr. Salvador continued, punching away on the keyboard.

A stock ticker materialized at the bottom of one of the monitor screens, scrolling from right to left.

"Can you make this out from where you are?"

"Yes, I can see it very clearly, thank you."

"I should have antic.i.p.ated our interest and had it running when you came aboard. My apologies."

"Oh, I'm not that much of a player," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, embarra.s.sed by the fuss. "But I have a bit of stock in Genomics, that company in Seattle. When we began working with them, I was so impressed that I decided to buy in."

"And it's been moving rapidly of late, making you a nervous wreck," Mr. Salvador said.

"Exactly. Takeover rumors. I told my broker to sell at eighty-three."

"Then you made out brilliantly." "I did? What do you mean?"

"Genomics was just bought out by Gale Aeros.p.a.ce this morning. At eighty-five. You called it exactly."

"Gale Aeros.p.a.ce now owns Genomics?" Dr. Radhakrishnan said. He was relieved and delighted. But he also thought it was just a bit eerie. He glanced around at the interior of the jet's cabin as if it might be able to tell him something. "Yes."

"Why would a rocket and missile company want to own a scruffy little genetic engineering firm in Seattle?"

"Diversification!" Mr. Salvador said. "An intelligent enough strategy in this age of world peace, wouldn't you say?"

"Yes. Now that you mention it, it does seem perfectly logical." "While we happen to be on the subject of tissue culture, did you get my other package? The tissue samples?" Mr. Salvador said.

Tissue samples was a nice word for it. "I did," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "They were good clean samples. Whoever took them for you knew his business." "We try to hire well," Mr. Salvador said.

"This is the first opportunity I have had to work with human brain tissue," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

As he delivered this sentence, he slowed down, sensing that he was on slick footing.

Mr. Salvador smiled understandingly. "I know that the regulations on these things in the States can be quite stifling."

"Exactly. Anyway, I, uh, or we, my students and I, were not sure exactly - we have so little experience."

Dr. Radhakrishnan knew that he was groping pathetically, but Mr. Salvador kept smiling and nodding. "We have, anyway, initiated the cell culturing process with those samples . . . sent them on to Genomics. There were a few false starts-"

"Naturally. That's how science works."

"-but the samples you gave us were so, well, generous, so large, that we had a lot of margin for error. I am almost surprised, well . . ." "Yes?"

"Of course human brains are larger than baboon brains, so my perspective is skewed just a bit, but if I were to take samples of a human brain that were so large, I would" - again, he sensed he was on slick footing - "well, let us say that in America, with its malpractice hysteria, where you always have to cover your tail-" "Ridiculous." Mr. Salvador agreed. "-lawyers-"

"Carping and niggling and backfilling," Mr. Salvador said. "In some ways, Doctor, America is the best place in the world to do research. In other ways, with its litigiousness, it is a terrible place. We think that India and America may be able to complement each other in this respect."

He was so good. "Exactly. Mr. Salvador, you have a knack." "I am so pleased that we are able to see eye to eye on this," Mr. Salvador said.

"How are the, uh, patients doing, by the way?" Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "Ha! I almost called them specimens.""Call them whatever you like," Mr. Salvador said. "They are doing well. You will be able to examine them shortly. Of course we would not have selected them for inclusion in this program if they had not already suffered neurological damage, so this makes answering your question somewhat problematic."

"Yes, I see your point." "Well. I don't mean to wear you out with all this technical chitchat. We'll be taking the great circle route to Delhi," Mr. Salvador said. "We'll make refueling stops in exciting places Anchorage and Seoul. There's a private cabin on the other side of that bulkhead where you can get some rest, and while you're there I'm sure that Maria will be happy to give you a ma.s.sage or engage you in conversation or whatever it is that would make the time go faster."

"Ah," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "I thought I smelled perfume." "As you can see, Mr. Coover is a consummate host. My job does not come with such fringes, but I have more than enough to occupy myself." Mr. Salvador nodded in the direction of the communications rig on the bulkhead.

"You are a busy man," Dr. Radhakrishnan observed. "Great things are afoot," Mr. Salvador said with uncharacteristic gusto. "For certain people, this is a fascinating time to be alive."

Dr. Radhakrishnan certainly felt that way. "How long have you been working for Mr. Coover?"

Mr. Salvador paused before answering, his face alert, his eyes glittering. He was not thinking about how to answer so much as he was studying Radhakrishnan's face. He seemed, as usual, ever so slightly amused.

"I wouldn't make unwarranted a.s.sumptions," he said.

Dr. Radhakrishnan wanted to pursue this line of questioning but he had realized that, by asking about Mr.

Salvador's background, he had blundered into the realm of bad taste. And that was much worse than bad morals or bad manners for a certain kind of person. However, he sensed without having met her that Maria would be a much more accessible person on all levels. "I'm going to freshen up," he said, nodding toward the private cabin in the back. "Take your time and relax," Mr. Salvador said, "it's a long way to India."

In his usual style, Mr. Salvador had gone to great lengths to make Dr. Radhakrishnan feel at home in Delhi, even though Delhi was his home. A large suite had been rented out at the spectacular Imperial Hotel, an aptly named pile sitting at the end of a palm-tree-lined drive just off Janpath. It was just south of Connaught Circus and less than a mile from where the inst.i.tute was being constructed. Mr. Salvador had rented out a couple of floors of the hotel. During the course of the long flight across the Pacific, Maria had developed quite an infatuation with Dr. Radhakrishnan and insisted that she be allowed to stay in Delhi for a while; Mr.

Salvador had grudgingly granted her a suite of her own, just down the hall from Dr. Radhakrishnan's. Mr.

Salvador was staying at the other end of the hall in lesser but still opulent surroundings.

When Dr. Radhakrishnan arrived at the Imperial, a pleasant surprise awaited: his entire extended family. They all cheered and hugged and kissed him right there in the parlor of his suite and then moved downstairs to a banquet room for a lengthy dinner. Dr. Radhakrishnan felt like a conquering hero back from the wars, being welcomed home by the maharaja with a royal feast.

After that, Maria had to nurse him through a day or two of hangover, fatigue, and jet lag. When he finally felt ready, he called for a car and told the driver to take him southward down Janpath into the New Delhi South Extension, where, he had been a.s.sured, the temporary laboratories of the Radhakrishnan Inst.i.tute were bustling away.

On his way out of the hotel, he met a young American fellow in the elevator. Dr. Radhakrishnan could have met this man in Antarctica and still recognized him immediately as an American high-tech entrepreneur. He was in his early thirties. He had long hair that had probably been cut in the mirror at home. He beard. He wore gla.s.ses. He was dressed in blue jeans, sneakers, a decent enough striped white shirt, and a crumpled wool blazer. He was carrying a briefcase in one hand and a rather formidable laptop computer in the other.

And one other key point: unlike everyone else he had met since the beginning of the flight to Delhi, he did not make any effort to brown-nose. "Hi, you must be Radhakrishnan," the man said. "I'm Peter Zeldovich. Most people I work with call me Zeldo. That's my handle on most e-mail systems. Nice tomeet you." He put his laptop on the floor of the elevator and stuck out hand; Dr. Radhakrishnan shook it, limply and reluctantly.

"Gotten over your jet lag yet?" this man said as they took the elevator down to lobby level.

Dr. Radhakrishnan had already forgotten his proper name. He was terrible with names. Now he knew why everyone called this person Zeldo. His real names vanished instantly from memory; Zeldo lingered unremovably on the doorstep of the mind, like a steaming t.u.r.d left behind by a stray dog.

Hopefully they would not be working together very much.

Naturally they would not have to work together. It was Dr. Radhakrishnan's inst.i.tute, he was in charge, he could send Zeldo back to his festering West Coast bachelor pad whenever he got to be too annoying. Which might not take very long, at this rate. "Heard you were on your way in to the Barracks, so I thought I'd hitch a ride with you," Zeldo said as they exited into the lobby. "The Barracks?"

"Yeah. That's what we've been calling the temporary inst.i.tute. Guess you haven't seen it yet."

"Why would you call it by that name?" Of course it was superfluous even to ask questions like this; these breezy American chaps had to have nicknames for everything.

"Because that's what it is. It's down south, on the edge of this military zone-" "The Defence Colony?"

"Yeah." Zeldo reached for one of the doors, almost colliding with the turbaned doorman who opened it for him. Dr. Radhakrishnan had only been back in the civilized world for a couple of days, but now it felt as if he had never left, and as if the years in Elton were nothing more than a frigid nightmare, "Anyway, the temporary lab facilities are set up in these barracks-type buildings. Soviet concrete things, you know. It'll be okay for the time being, I guess."

Zeldo had the presence of mind to allow the driver to open the car door for him, and he slid into the seat ahead of Dr. Radhakrishnan. He folded up his long legs so that his knees were pressed against the back of the driver's seat and piled the briefcase and the computer on his lap. The driver pulled out on to Janpath, ignoring the painted lanes and creating his own, in the traditional local style.

"I'm the chiphead from Pacware," Zeldo said, as if Dr. Radhakrishnan were supposed to know what that meant. "What is Pacware?"

"Pacific Netware. I design logic devices - chips - for them." "Am I to gather that you are connected, in some way, with my inst.i.tute?"

Zeldo gaped at him. "Sure," he said. "I'm doing the hardware design on the silicon portion of the new model biochips." "I was not aware that a new model was required."

Zeldo shrugged. "New models are always required," he said. "Hardware design is a fast-moving target.

You don't update your designs every few months, you're working with Stone Age technology."

Dr. Radhakrishnan was finding it very difficult to keep his temper under control. Perhaps he was still just a bit irritable from his travels. For him to come home in triumph and finally to receive the recognition he deserved, and then to be stuck in an elevator, and a car, with this laid-back Yank who told him he was back in the Stone Age- But he held his tongue, because he had an inkling that Zeldo might be half right. The chips they put into the baboons were off-the-shelf models with limited capabilities. It was a basic fact, with electronics, that if you designed a customized chip to do a particular job, it could work thousands of times faster than an off- the-shelf model.

If Zeldo could do this job properly and build a new, specialized chip for this purpose, it might vastly improve the capabilities of Dr. Radhakrishnan's implant.

Actually, bringing in a "chiphead" from a hot company like Pacific Netware was a brilliant idea. He wished he had thought of it himself. He wondered who had thought of it.

"Did they try to set you up with a babe?" Zeldo said. "I'm sorry? A babe?"

"Yeah. A chick. You know, a prost.i.tute." Dr. Radhakrishnan wished that Zeldo had not used this word.

"They did with me," Zeldo said. "Bought me a first cla.s.s ticket on British Airways to get me over here from San Francisco. Soon as I get on, this incredible woman sits down next to me. She was playing footsy with me before we even pulled away from the gate. G.o.d, she was a hot lady."Dr. Radhakrishnan smiled conspiratorially. "You liked her, eh?" he said.

"Well, she didn't have a lot going for her intellectually," Zeldo said, frowning, "and I'm involved in a monogamous relationship at home."

They did not converse much more until they arrived at the Defence Colony, whose gate was guarded by heavy machine guns in sandbag nests, manned by eagle-eyed Sikhs. The Sikhs let them through without opening fire; a minute or two later they were at the Barracks.

They had obviously been constructed to house troops a.s.signed to guard duty and other low-level work in the Defence Colony. Because this was Delhi, and the Defence Colony was prestigious, they were actually quite nice, for barracks. Each building was thirty or forty meters long, wide enough for a row of beds down either side with a broad aisle down the middle. They were all concrete and concrete block, with tin roofs, and it was clear that they had been hastily painted and retrofitted with better electrical service and air- conditioning. The Radhakrishnan Inst.i.tute now occupied two of these buildings. Building 1 was filled with offices and laboratories. Building 2 was filled with beds. The beds were filled with brain damage cases.

Strokes were generally not a major health problem in India. The cla.s.sic stroke patient was a fat old smoker and though may people smoked in India, few people were fat and many did not have the opportunity to get old. Fortunately, from the point of view of research, any time you got nearly a billion people living and working in conditions not notable for safety, you did not have to rely on strokes in order to see a broad and deep spectrum of brain damage.

On his initial inspection of Building 2, Dr. Radhakrishnan saw a fascinating a.s.sortment of unfortunates who had been combed from the slums. It seemed that Mr. Salvador had some sort of connection with the Lady Wilburdon Foundation, a British charity group that operated free clinics and hospitals all over India. Mr.

Salvador had exploited this connection, recruiting medical students from all over the country as brain damage talent scouts who would scan incoming cases and let him know of any promising prospects. In addition to the two whose brains had already been sampled, Dr. Radhakrishnan saw a man who had had a brick dropped on his head in a construction site. A soldier shot through the brain during ethnic violence in Srinagar. A lunch delivery boy from Delhi who had been thrown off his motorcycle rickshaw in a collision with a lorry. A street kid from Bombay who, in trying to do a second-story job on an old colonial structure, had slipped and fallen twelve feet; a spike on the wrought-iron fence had entered his open mouth, pa.s.sed up through his palate, and impaled his brain.

Even by Western standards, the care these patients were receiving was fairly generous. The building was no architectural gem, but it was clean and well maintained. It was not lavishly appointed with high-tech equipment, but it was well-staffed with attentive nurses and nursing students who were clearly doing all they could to see to the patients' individual needs. And none of these patients was paying a single rupee.

Most of them had no rupees to begin with.

Building 1 had its own generators, a pair of brand-new Honda portable units delivering a hundred and twenty volts of all-American sixty-cycle power. The juice was filtered and conditioned through an uninterruptible power supply and then routed through shiny, freshly installed conduit to be a generous number of galvanized steel junction boxes, bolted to the barracks walls every couple of meters, studded with American-style three-p.r.o.ng outlets. All of this had been setup so that Zeldo and his ilk could fly straight in from California, drop their wh.o.r.es off at the Imperial, and plug their computer and other more arcane devices straight into the wall without having to deal with the awful culture shock of incompatible plugs and voltages. More to the point, the Honda generators would not flicker, spike, brown out, and back out as the Delhi grid was apt to. No precious data would be lost to unpredictable Third World influences.

Zeldo and a couple of other slangy pizza-eating beards from America had laid claim to one end of Building 1 and set up their own little outpost of heavy metal music and novelty foam-rubber sledgehammers for pounding on their workstations when they got frustrated. They had even erected a sign: PACIFIC NETWARE-ASIAN HEADQUARTERS. On his way in, Dr. Radhakrishnan had noted the presence of a freshly installed satellite dish, and he could not help but suppose that they were connected to that.

Mr. Salvador had his own little nook at the other end of the building, as far away from the foam rubbersledgehammers as he could get. He was not in at the moment, but Dr. Radhakrishnan knew Mr. Salvador's style when he saw it: a heavy antique desk, comfortably scuffed, an electric shoe polisher, and every communications device known to science.

The intervening s.p.a.ce was all at Dr. Radhakrishnan's disposal. At this point it was all new, empty desks and new, empty filing cabinets. A few people had already moved in. Supposedly, Toyoda was on his way in from Elton and might have already arrived. There were also a few promising Indian graduate students whom Mr. Salvador had managed to recruit away from their positions in America and Europe, and there were signs that some of these people had already arrived, claimed desks, and gotten down to work.

At the moment there was nothing for Dr. Radhakrishnan to do except sit down with a big stack of medical records that had been a.s.sembled on the head cases in Building 2, and sort through them, looking for patients with the right sort of brain damage.

A couple of hours after Dr. Radhakrishnan arrived, a patient named Mohinder Singh was brought in. He was a lorry driver from Himachal Pradesh, way up north in the foothills of the Himalayas. He had been driving down a mountain road with a bundle of half-inch pipe lashed to the back of his lorry. The pipes were apparently of different lengths; some stuck out farther than others. His brakes had gone out and he had gone off the road and slammed into something. The bundle of pipes had shot forward. The longest one had come in through the back window of the truck, struck him just behind the ear, pa.s.sed all the way through his head, and emerged through one of the eyeb.a.l.l.s. A nearby road crew had used a hacksaw to cut off most of the pipe, leaving only the portion that was stuck through his head, and he had been evacuated to a nearby Lady Wilburdon Charities clinic where he had been noticed by one of the talent scouts.

He did not look very promising at first. It seemed likely that the pipe had smashed things around quite a bit inside there and bruised large portions of the brain. But Dr. Radhakrishnan had not gotten to where he was by being hasty and superficial. He shipped Singh down the road to the All-India Inst.i.tute of Medical Sciences for a series of head scans.

AIIMS was India's foremost medical research inst.i.tute and it was only a couple of minutes away from the Barracks along the Delhi Ring Road. They would be able to take some excellent pictures of Mr. Singh's brain with the equipment they had there. And, in a stroke of luck, the chunk of pipe that was still embedded in Mr. Singh's head was made out of copper, a nonmagnetic substance; they would be able to run him through an NMR scanner without turning it into a projectile.

Dr. Radhakrishnan was stunned to learn that the pipe had gone through his head almost three days previously. He must have beer in great pain, but he refused to acknowledge it. From the head down he was well-nourished and in perfect health. This was one patient who was not going to go into shock every time they put a needle in his arm.

When Singh came back from AIIMS with a stack of films and scans piled on his chest, Dr. Radhakrishnan was pleasantly surprised. The pipe was thin-walled, cut off fresh and sharp on the end that had gone through Singh's head. As best as Dr. Radhakrishnan could tell from trying to interpret the images, it had sliced its way through the soft, gelatinous brain tissue, rather than shoving it around and bruising it. It had acted almost like a core sampler.

Once the pipe was taken out and some of the mess cleaned up, a.s.suming that Singh did not get infected, which was simply a question of antibiotics, he was going to be an ideal candidate for therapy.

"Not a whiner," Mr. Salvador said, when he came by later to inspect. "Robust. Positive att.i.tude, as far as I can tell. Willing to try just about anything. He reminds me of the chap in the States."

"What chap?"

"Whom you heard on the tape. Whose scans you looked at."

"Ah, yes."

A thrilling sensation suddenly washed over Dr. Radhakrishnan's body. A wave of adrenaline seemed to be rushing through his circulatory system like a chemical tsunami. He opened his eyes a little wider and blinked a few times as though he had just stepped out into bright warm sunlight after a long winter in Elton, NewMexico, and his body rocked from side to side just a little bit, its stance and balance changing as he stood up straighter, breathed a little deeper. The jet lag vanished. He looked around him, suddenly taking in the room with the frighteningly intense glare of a raptor soaring on a mountain thermal. His hands tingled, almost as if the saw and the drill were already there, buzzing away, slicing heedlessly through bone, penetrating into the core of some other human being.

Mr. Salvador could take his Gyrfalcon jet and his cars and his inst.i.tutes and his hotel suites. He could take them all back to America. It wouldn't matter. This was the feeling that Dr. Radhakrishnan V.R.J.V.V.

Gangadhar lived for.

All of the nurses and orderlies in this part of the barracks had risen uncertainly to their feet. "What are you waiting for!?" he snapped.

"This poor man has a pipe through his head! Let's get it out."

13.

"I'm going to be real straight with you," Mel said.

"Somehow I'm not surprised," Mary Catherine said. They were sitting together at a corner table in an old-fashioned family-type Italian restaurant. The restaurant was across the street and down the block from the hospital where Mary Catherine had spent most of the last four years. When families of stricken patients had to eat, they gathered around the big circular tables here and glumly plunged their forks into deep, steaming dishes of lasagna, like surgeons around an operating table.

"You dad is not a happy camper right now," Mel continued. "And it's going to get worse in a week or two, when we have to come out and tell the public that he has suffered a stroke. I don't know how he's going to react."

She slapped her menu down on the table and stopped even pretending to read it. "Enough, enough," she said. "What the h.e.l.l are you saying?"

"Your dad would rather die than live the way he is now," Mel said.