Terminal Man (23 page)

The reporters were writing fast.

“—we had 14,500 murders, 36,500 rapes, and 306,500 cases of aggravated assault. All together a third of a million cases of violence. That doesn’t include automobile deaths, and a lot of violence is carried out with cars. We had 56,000 deaths in autos, and three million injuries.”

“You always were good with figures,” Gerhard said, watching.

“It’s working, isn’t it?” Ellis said.

“Yeah. But you have a squinty, untrustworthy look.”

“That’s my normal look.”

Gerhard laughed.

On the screen, a reporter was saying, “And you think these figures reflect physical brain disease?”

“In large part,” Ellis said. “Yes. One of the clues pointing to physical brain disease in a single individual is a history of repeated violence. There are some famous examples. Charles Whitman, who killed seventeen people in Texas, had a malignant brain tumor and told his psychiatrist for weeks before that he was having thoughts about climbing the tower and shooting people. Richard Speck engaged in several episodes of brutal violence before he killed eight nurses. Lee Harvey Oswald repeatedly attacked people, including his wife on many occasions. Those were famous cases. There are a third of a million cases every year that are not famous.
We’re trying to correct that violent behavior with surgery. I don’t think that’s a despicable thing. I think it’s a noble goal and an important goal.”

“But isn’t that mind control?”

Ellis said, “What do you call compulsory education through high school?”

“Education,” the reporter said.

And that ended the interview. Ellis got up angrily. “That makes me look like a fool,” he said.

“No, it doesn’t,” Anders, the cop, said.

S
HE WAS BEING POUNDED, BEATEN SENSELESS
by brutal, jarring blows. She rolled away and moaned.

“Come on,” Gerhard said, shaking her. “Wake up, Jan.”

She opened her eyes. The room was dark. Someone was leaning over her.

“Come on, come on, wake up.”

She yawned. The movement sent streaks of pain down through her neck. “What is it?”

“Telephone for you. It’s Benson.”

That jolted her awake faster than she would have thought possible. Gerhard helped her sit up, and she shook her head to clear it. Her neck was a column of pain, and the rest of her body was stiff and aching, but she ignored that.

“Where?”

“Telecomp.”

She went outside into the hallway, blinking in the bright light. The cops were still there, but they were tired now, eyes dulled, jaws slack. She followed Gerhard into Telecomp.

Richards held out the phone to her, saying, “Here she is.”

She took the receiver. “Hello? Harry?”

Across the room, Anders was listening on an extension.

“I don’t feel good,” Harry Benson said. “I want it to stop, Dr. Ross.”

“What’s the matter, Harry?” She could hear the fatigue in his voice, the slow and slightly childlike quality. What would one of those rats say after twenty-four hours of stimulation?

“Things aren’t working very well. I’m tired.”

“We can help you,” she said.

“It’s the feelings,” Benson said. “They’re making me tired now. That’s all. Just tired. I want them to stop.”

“You’ll have to let us help you, Harry.”

“I don’t believe you will.”

“You have to trust us, Harry.”

There was a long pause. Anders looked across the room at Ross. She shrugged. “Harry?” she said.

“I wish you never did this to me,” Benson said. Anders checked his watch.

“Did what?”

“The operation.”

“We can fix it for you, Harry.”

“I wanted to fix it myself,” he said. His voice was very childlike, almost petulant. “I wanted to pull out the wires.”

Ross frowned. “Did you try?”

“No. I tried to pull off the bandages, but it hurt too much. I don’t like it when it hurts.”

He was really being quite childlike. She wondered if the regression was a specific phenomenon, or the result of fear and fatigue.

“I’m glad you didn’t pull—”

“But I have to do
something
,” Benson said. “I have to stop this feeling. I’m going to fix the computer.”

“Harry, you can’t do that. We have to do that for you.”

“No. I’m going to fix it.”

“Harry,” she said, in a low, soothing, maternal voice. “Harry, please trust us.”

There was no reply. Breathing on the other end of the line. She looked around the room at the tense, expectant faces.

“Harry, please trust us. Just this once. Then everything will be all right.”

“The police are looking for me.”

“There are no police here.” she said. “They’ve all gone. You can come here. Everything will be all right.”

“You lied to me before,” he said. His voice was petulant again.

“No, Harry, it was all a mistake. If you come here now, everything will be all right.”

There was a very long silence, and then a sigh. “I’m sorry,” Benson said. “I know how it’s going to end. I have to fix the computer myself.”

“Harry—”

There was a click, and then the buzz of a disconnection. Ross hung up. Anders immediately dialed the phone company and asked whether they had been able to trace the call. So that was why he had been looking at his watch, she thought.

“Hell,” Anders said, and slammed the phone down. “They couldn’t get a trace. They couldn’t even find the incoming call. Idiots.” He sat down across the room from Ross.

“He was just like a child,” she said, shaking her head.

“What did he mean about fixing the computer?”

“I suppose he meant tearing out the wires from his shoulder.”

“But he said he tried that.”

“Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t,” she said. “He’s confused now, under the influence of all the stimulations and all the seizures.”

“Is it physically possible to pull out the wires, and the computer?”

“Yes,” she said. “At least, animals do it. Monkeys …” She rubbed her eyes. “Is there any coffee?”

Gerhard poured her a cup.

“Poor Harry,” she said. “He must be terrified out there.”

Across the room, Anders said, “How confused do you suppose he is, really?”

“Very.” She sipped the coffee. “Is there any sugar left?”

“Confused enough to mix up computers?”

“We’re out of sugar,” Gerhard said. “Ran out a couple of hours ago.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“He had wiring plans for the hospital,” Anders said. “The main computer, the computer that assisted in his operation, is in the hospital basement.”

She set down her coffee cup and stared at him. She frowned, rubbed her eyes again, picked the coffee up, then set it down once more. “I don’t know,” she said finally.

“The pathologists called while you were asleep,”
Anders said. “They determined that Benson stabbed the dancer with a screwdriver. He attacked the mechanic, and he attacked Morris. Machines and people connected with machines. Morris was connected with his own mechanization.”

She smiled slightly. “
I’m
the psychiatrist around here.”

“I’m just asking. Is it possible?”

“Sure, of course it’s possible.…”

The telephone rang again. Ross answered it. “NPS.”

“Pacific Telephone liaison here,” a male voice said. “We’ve rechecked that trace for Captain Anders. Is he there?”

“Just a minute.” She nodded to Anders, who picked up the phone.

“Anders speaking.” There was a long pause. Then he said, “Would you repeat that?” He nodded as he listened. “And what was the time period you checked? I see. Thank you.”

He hung up, and immediately began dialing again. “You better tell me about that atomic power pack,” he said as he dialed.

“What about it?”

“I want to know what happens if it’s ruptured,” Anders said, then turned away as his call was put through. “Bomb squad. This is Anders, homicide.” He turned back to Ross.

Ross said, “He’s carrying around thirty-seven milligrams of radioactive plutonium, Pu-239. If it breaks open, you’ll expose everyone in the area to serious radiation.”

“What particles are emitted?”

She looked at him in surprise.

“I’ve been to college,” he said, “and I can even read and write, when I have to.”

“Alpha particles,” she said.

Anders spoke into the phone. “Anders, homicide,” he said. “I want a van at University Hospital right away. We’ve got a possible radiation hazard pending. Man and immediate environment may be contaminated with an alpha emitter, Pu-239.” He listened, then looked at Ross. “Any possibility of explosion?”

“No,” she said.

“No explosive,” Anders said. He listened. “All right. I understand. Get them here as quickly as you can.”

He hung up. Ross said, “Do you mind telling me what’s going on?”

“The phone company rechecked that trace,” Anders said. “They’ve determined that there were no calls into the NPS from the outside at the time Benson called. None at all.”

Ross blinked.

“That’s right,” Anders said. “He must have called from somewhere inside the hospital.”

Ross stared out the fourth-floor window at the parking lot, and watched as Anders gave instructions to at least twenty cops. Half of them went into the main hospital building; the rest remained outside, in little groups, talking together quietly, smoking. Then a white bomb-squad van rumbled up, and three men in gray metallic-looking suits lumbered out. Anders talked to them briefly, then nodded and stayed with the van, unpacking some very peculiar equipment.

Anders walked back toward the NPS.

Alongside her, Gerhard watched the preparations. “Benson won’t make it,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “I keep wondering if there is any way to disarm him, or immobilize him. Could we make a portable microwave transmitter?”

“I thought of that,” Gerhard said. “But it’s unsafe. You can’t really predict the effect on Benson’s equipment. And you know it’ll raise hell with all the cardiac pacemakers in other patients in the hospital.”

“Isn’t there anything we can do?”

Gerhard shook his head.

“There must be
something,
” she said.

He continued to shake his head. “Besides,” he said, “pretty soon the incorporated environment takes over.”

“Theoretically.”

Gerhard shrugged.

The incorporated environment was one of the notions from the Development group of the NPS. It was a simple idea with profound implications. It began with something that everybody knew: that the brain was affected by the environment. The environment produced experiences that became memories, attitudes, and habits—things that got translated into neural pathways among brain cells. And these pathways were fixed in some chemical or electrical fashion. Just as a common laborer’s body altered according to the work he did, so a person’s brain altered according to past experience. But the change, like the calluses on a worker’s body, persisted after the experience ended.

In that sense, the brain incorporated past environments. Our brains were the sum total of past experiences—long after the experiences themselves were gone.
That meant that cause and cure weren’t the same thing. The cause of behavior disorders might lie in childhood experiences, but you couldn’t cure the disorder by eliminating the cause, because the cause had disappeared by adulthood. The cure had to come from some other direction. As the Development people said, “A match may start a fire, but once the fire is burning, putting out the match won’t stop it. The problem is no longer the match. It’s the fire.”

As for Benson, he had had more than twenty-four hours of intense stimulation by his implanted computer. That stimulation had affected his brain by providing new experiences and new expectations. A new environment was being incorporated. Pretty soon, it would be impossible to predict how the brain would react. Because it wasn’t Benson’s old brain any more—it was a new brain, the product of new experiences.

Anders came into the room. “We’re ready,” he said.

“I can see.”

“We’ve got two men for every basement access, two for the front door, two for the emergency ward, and two for each of the three elevators. I’ve kept men away from the patient-care floors. We don’t want to start trouble in those areas.”

Considerate of you, she thought, but said nothing.

Anders glanced at his watch. “Twelve-forty,” he said. “I think somebody should show me the main computer.”

“It’s in the basement,” she said, nodding toward the main building. “Over there.”

“Will you show me?”

“Sure,” she said. She didn’t really care. She no longer maintained any illusions about her ability to affect
the outcome of events. She realized that she was in the grip of an inexorable process involving many people and many past decisions. What would happen would happen.

She walked down the corridor with Anders, and found herself thinking about Mrs. Crail. It was odd; she hadn’t thought of Mrs. Crail in years. Emily Crail had been her first patient as a psychiatric resident, years ago. The woman was fifty, her children grown, her husband bored with her. She was suicidally depressed. Janet Ross had taken the case with a sense of personal responsibility; she was young and eager, and she fought Mrs. Crail’s impulses like a general fighting a war—marshaling resources, planning strategies, revising and updating battle plans. She nursed Mrs. Crail through two unsuccessful suicide attempts.

And then she began to realize that there were limits to her own energy, skills, and knowledge. Mrs. Crail was not improving; her suicidal attempts became more crafty; eventually she succeeded in killing herself. But by that time, Ross had—fortunately—detached herself from the patient.

As she was detached from Benson now.

They had reached the far end of the corridor when behind them, from Telecomp, they heard Gerhard shout, “Janet! Janet, are you still here?”

She returned to Telecomp, with Anders following along curiously. Inside the computer room, the console lights were flickering unsteadily.

“Look at this,” Gerhard said, pointing to one printout console.