Interface (13 page)

"So what do you do with this stuff? Fry it up or just eat it cold?"
one of them had said, as they were piling the monkey chow into
his truck.

"I feed it to brain-damaged lower primates," Dr. Radhakrishnan
had said. "Would you like a sample?"

The one thing they valued him for - that gave him potential
status as a human being in their eyes - was his monster truck: 454
cubic inches of V-8 power, double wheels on the rear axle, a thick
black roll bar brandishing great mesh-covered Stalag 17 searchlights
that could pick out a shrew on a rock in a midnight windstorm
across two miles of chaparral. He had traded in a BMW for this
coarse and ungainly machine halfway through his first winter here,
almost two years ago, when he found out that the ultimate driving
machine simply did not go in a six-foot snowdrift.

The double-edged windshield wipers smeared blood across the windshield in gory arcs, giving him a partial view of the loading
dock. It wasn't real blood, of course. After the first few attacks, they
had decided it was politically incorrect to use the real stuff and they
had switched to Karo syrup with red dye in it. In the cold February
air, it congealed on contact. Dr. Radhakrishnan preferred the real
blood; it was easier to wash off.

A dozen of his grad students and lab techs were waiting for him
around back at the loading dock. Dr. Radhakrishnan pulled up to it and left the motor running. They jumped into the back like a commando team and formed a human chain, passing the fifty-
pound sacks of monkey chow up across the dock and into the
freight elevator. Radhakrishnan had a total of fifteen grad students:
four Japanese, two Chinese, three Korean, one Indonesian, three
Indian, one Pakistani, and one American. They had learned to
work together well at times such as this, even the American.

He pulled his empty truck around into the parking lot. Dr.
Radhakrishnan had a reserved parking space near the entrance.
Right now half a dozen activists were occupying it with their
bodies, staging a die-in. Most of them were just doing it in their
Levi's and Timberland's, but the star of the show was a person in a
gorilla suit with a big steel colander over his head with a pair of jumper cables clamped on to it. The gorilla spazzed out and died
grandly as Dr. Radhakrishnan's blood-soaked four-by-four cruised
past in low gear, a shattered balloon fluttering from the radio
antenna, and parked in an unreserved spot farther from the door.

They thought they were going to force Dr. Radhakrishnan to
change his ways by making him feel bad. They thought that the
way to make him feel bad was to make him feel unliked. They were
desperately wrong on both counts.

He shoved a magnetically coded ID card into a slot, punched in
a secret code, and the door opened for him. This new facility had
been built securely, because they knew that the animal rights
people would try to find a way in. They didn't have a chance; they were like raccoons trying to break into a missile silo.

The top floor belonged to Radhakrishnan and his crew. He had
to punch in more numbers to get out of the elevator lobby. Then
he smelled home. It had the sharp disinfectant smell of a doctor's
office with a low undertone of barnyard.

A baboon was sitting in a stainless steel chair in the Procedure Room, wrists and ankles loosely taped in place. The baboon was anesthetized and did not need to be restrained; otherwise, the tape
wouldn't have held him. All it did was fix him in a convenient
position.

The entire top of the baboon's skull had been removed to expose
the brain. Park and Toyoda were under the hood, as it were,
working on the baboon's electrical system. Toyoda had his hands
in there, maneuvering a narrow probe with a miniature video camera on the end of it. The output of the video camera was
splashed up on a big-screen Trinitron. Nearly inaudible high-
pitched ticking and whistling sounds emerged from the headphones of his Walkman; he was listening to some particularly noxious form of American music.

Park held a retractor with one hand and a mug of coffee in the
other. Both of them ignored the baboon and kept their eyes on the
TV set. It was providing live coverage of the interior spaces of the
baboon's brain: a murkey universe of gray mush with the occasional
branching network of blood vessels.

"A little bit left," Park suggested. The camera swung in that
direction and suddenly there was something different, something
with hard, straight edges, embedded in the brain tissue. It did not
seem to have been dropped into a hole, though; it seemed as
though the brain had grown around it, like a tree growing around a fence post. The object was a neutral, milky white, with a serial
number stamped into the top. Any layman coming in off the street
would have identified the substance as teflon. It was just translucent
enough that one could make out, inside the teflon shell, a sort of
squared-off sunburst pattern, like the rising sun flag of the Imperial
Japanese Navy, etched in silver against a neutral gray background.
At the center of that sunburst was a tiny square region that
contained several hundred thousand microscopic transistors.

But neither Park nor Toyoda nor Dr. Radhakrishnan looked at
that part of it. They were all looking at the interface - the boundary
between the sharp edge of the teflon casing and the brain tissue,
with its infinite, organic watershed system of capillaries. It looked good: no swelling, no necrosis, no gap between the baboon and the
microchip.

"A keeper," Toyoda said, grinning, pronouncing this newly
acquired bit of American slang with great precision.

"Bingo," Park said.

"Which baboon is this?" Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

"Number twenty-three," Toyoda said. "We implanted three
weeks ago."

"How long has he been off the antirejection meds?"

"One week."

"Looks like he'll do well," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "I suppose
we should go ahead and give him a name."

"Okay," Park said as he slurped uncertainly at his lukewarm java.
"What do you want to call him?"

"Let's call him Mr. President," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

Two men were waiting for Dr. Radhakrishnan in front of his office.
It was unusual, this early in the morning; Dr. Radhakrishnan's
secretary wouldn't even be here for another half hour. One of the
men was Dr. Artaxerxes Jackman, of all people, looking somewhat grumpy and astonished. The other man was a stranger, a man in his
forties with sandy blond hair. He was wearing the best suit that Dr.
Radhakrishnan had ever seen west of the Mississippi, a charcoal-gray number with widely spaced stripes, sort of a City of London number.
Both men stood up as Dr. Radhakrishnan entered the room.

"Dr. Radhakrishnan," Jackman said, "no one was here so we just
figured we'd set up and wait for you. I want you to meet Mr.
Salvador here."

"Dr. Radhakrishnan, it's a pleasure and an honor," Salvador said,
extending his hand. He wore no jewelry except for cufflinks; when
he extended his arm, just the right amount of cuff - plain, basic
white - protruded from the sleeve of his jacket. He did not go in
for the crushing American style of handshake. His accident was
definitely not American either, but beyond that, it was as untraceable
as a ransom note.

"You are up bright and early," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, ushering
Mr. Salvador into his office. Jackman had already departed, slowly
and reluctantly, casting glances over his shoulder.

"No earlier than you, Dr. Radhakrishnan, and certainly no
brighter," Mr. Salvador said. "Jet lag would not allow me to sleep
later and so I thought I would get an early start."

Dr. Radhakrishnan handed him some coffee. Salvador held the
mug out in front of him for a moment, examining it like a freshly
excavated amphora, as though he had never seen coffee served in
anything other than a cup with a saucer. "Comanches," Salvador
paid, reading the mug.

"That is the name of the football team associated with this institution," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

"Ah, yes, football," Salvador said, his memory jogged. He was s
howing all the signs of a man who had just flown in from some o
ther hemisphere and who was trying to get cued into the local c
ulture. "That's right, this must be high football territory. The pilot t
old me that we are on mountain time here. Is that correct?" "Yes. Two hours behind New York, one ahead of L.A."
"I didn't know that such a time zone existed until this morning."
"Neither did I, until I came here."

Salvador took a sip of coffee and sat forward, all business.
"Well, I would love to indulge my weakness for endless small talk
, but it would be wrong to waste your time, and it is rude for m
e to sit here being mysterious. I understand that you are the w
orld's best brain surgeon."

"That is flattering but not exactly true. I could not even aspire to
that tide unless I devoted myself to doing procedures."

"But instead you have chosen to devote your career to research."

"Yes."

"It is a common career choice among the very finest medical minds. There's more of a challenge in trying something new, isn't there?"