Terminal Man (6 page)

“I don’t think it’s a good idea.” Benson would have been shaved by now; pre-op patients who had been shaved often didn’t want to see people.

“Just for a few minutes?”

“He’s heavily sedated,” he said.

She was clearly disappointed. “Then would you give him a message?”

“Sure.”

“Tell him I’m back in my old apartment. He’ll understand.”

“All right.”

“You won’t forget?”

“No. I’ll tell him.”

“Thank you.” She smiled. It was a rather nice smile, despite the long false eyelashes and the heavy make-up. Why did young girls do that to their faces? “I guess I’ll be going now.” And she walked off, short skirt and very long legs, a briskly determined walk. He watched her go, then hefted the bag, which seemed heavy.

The cop sitting outside the door to 710 said, “How’s it going?”

“Fine,” Morris said.

The cop glanced at the overnight bag but said nothing as Morris took it inside the room.

Harry Benson was watching a Western on television. Morris turned down the sound. “A very pretty girl brought you this.”

“Angela?” Benson smiled. “Yes, she has a nice exterior. Not a very complicated internal mechanism, but a nice exterior.” He extended his hand; Morris gave him the bag. “Did she bring everything?”

Morris watched as Benson opened it, placing the contents on the bed. There were a pair of pajamas, an electric razor, some after-shave lotion, a paperback novel.

Then Benson brought out a black wig.

“What’s that?” Morris asked.

Benson shrugged. “I knew I’d need it sooner or later,” he said. Then he laughed. “You
are
letting me out of here, aren’t you? Sooner or later?”

Morris laughed with him. Benson dropped the wig back into the bag, and removed a plastic packet. With a metallic clink, he unfolded it, and Morris saw it was a set of screwdrivers of various sizes, stored in a plastic package with pockets for each size.

“What’s that for?” Morris asked.

Benson looked puzzled for a moment. Then he said, “I don’t know if you’ll understand.…”

“Yes?”

“I always have them with me. For protection.”

Benson placed the screwdrivers back into the overnighter. He handled them carefully, almost reverently. Morris knew that patients frequently brought odd things into the hospital, particularly if they were seriously ill. There was a kind of totemic feeling about these objects, as if they might have magical preservative powers. They were often connected with some hobby or favorite activity. He remembered a yachtsman with a metastatic brain tumor who had brought a kit to repair sails, and a woman with advanced heart
disease who had brought a can of tennis balls. That kind of thing.

“I understand,” Morris said.

Benson smiled.

T
ELECOMP WAS EMPTY WHEN SHE CAME INTO
the room; the consoles and teleprinters stood silently, the screens blinking up random sequences of numbers. She went to the corner and poured herself a cup of coffee, then fed the test card from Benson’s latest psychodex into the computer.

The NPS had developed the psychodex test, along with several other computer-analyzed psychological tests. It was all part of what McPherson called “double-edged thinking.” In this case, he meant that the idea of a brain being like a computer worked two ways, in two different directions. On the one hand, you could utilize the computer to probe the brain, to help you analyze its workings. At the same time, you could use your increased knowledge of the brain to help design better and more efficient computers. As McPherson said, “The brain is as much a model for the computer as the computer is a model for the brain.”

At the NPS, computer scientists and neurobiologists
had worked together for several years. From that association had come Form Q, and programs like George and Martha, and new psychosurgical techniques, and psychodex.

Psychodex was relatively simple. It was a test that took straightforward answers to psychological questions and manipulated the answers according to complex mathematical formulations. As the data were fed into the computer, Ross watched the screen glow with row after row of calculations.

She ignored them; the numbers, she knew, were just the computer’s scratch pad, the intermediate steps that it went through before arriving at a final answer. She smiled, thinking of how Gerhard would explain it—rotation of thirty by thirty matrices in space, deriving factors, making them orthogonal, then weighting them. It all sounded complicated and scientific, and she didn’t really understand any of it.

She had discovered long ago that you could use a computer without understanding how it worked. Just as you could use an automobile, a vacuum cleaner—or your own brain.

The screen flashed “
CALCULATIONS ENDED. CALL DISPLAY SEQUENCE
.”

She punched in the display sequence for three-space scoring. The computer informed her that three spaces accounted for eighty-one percent of variance. On the screen she saw a three-dimensional image of a mountain with a sharp peak. She stared at it a moment, then picked up the telephone and paged McPherson.

McPherson frowned at the screen. Ellis looked over his shoulder. Ross said, “Is it clear?”

SERIAL PSYCHODEX SCORE REPRESENTATIONS SHOWING
INCREASED ELEVATION (PSYCHOTIC MENTATION)

“Perfectly,” McPherson said. “When was it done?”

“Today,” she said.

McPherson sighed. “You’re not going to quit without a battle, are you?”

Instead of answering, she punched buttons and called up a second mountain peak, much lower. “Here’s the last one previously.”

“On this scoring, the elevation is—”

“Psychotic mentation,” she said.

“So he’s much more pronounced now,” McPherson said. “Much more than even a month ago.”

“Yes,” she said.

“You think he was screwing around with the test?”

She shook her head. She punched in the four previous tests, in succession. The trend was clear: on each test the mountain peak got higher and sharper.

“Well, then,” McPherson said, “he’s definitely getting worse. I gather you still think we shouldn’t operate.”

“More than ever,” she said. “He’s unquestionably psychotic, and if you start putting wires in his head—”

“I know,” McPherson said. “I know what you’re saying.”

“—he’s going to feel that he’s been turned into a machine,” she said.

McPherson turned to Ellis. “Do you suppose we can knock this elevation down with thorazine?” Thorazine was a major tranquilizer. With some psychotics, it helped them to think more clearly.

“I think it’s worth a try.”

McPherson nodded. “I do, too. Janet?”

She stared at the screen and didn’t reply. It was odd how these tests worked. The mountain peaks were an
abstraction, a mathematical representation of an emotional state. They weren’t a real characteristic of a person, like fingers or toes, or height or weight.

“Janet? What do you think?” McPherson repeated.

“I think,” she said, “that you’re both committed to this operation.”

“And you still disapprove?”

“I don’t ‘disapprove.’ I think it’s unwise for Benson.”

“What do you think about using thorazine?” McPherson persisted.

“It’s a gamble.”

“A gamble not worth taking.”

“Maybe it’s worth it, and maybe it’s not. But it’s a gamble.”

McPherson nodded and turned to Ellis. “Do you still want to do him?”

“Yes,” Ellis said, staring at the screen. “I still want to do him.”

A
S ALWAYS
, M
ORRIS FOUND IT STRANGE TO
play tennis on the hospital court. The hospital buildings looming high above him always made him feel slightly guilty—all those rows of windows, all those patients
who could not do what he was doing. Then there was the sound. Or, rather, the absence of sound. The freeway ran near the hospital, and the reassuring
thwok!
of the tennis balls was completely obliterated by the steady, monotonous rush of passing cars.

It was getting dark now, and he was having trouble with his vision; the ball seemed to pop unexpectedly into his court. Kelso was much less hampered. Morris often joked that Kelso ate too many carrots, but whatever the explanation, it was humiliating to play late with Kelso. Darkness helped him. And Morris hated to lose.

He had long ago become comfortable with the fact of his own competitiveness. Morris never stopped competing. He competed in games, he competed in work, he competed with women. More than once Ross had pointed that out to him, and then dropped the subject in the sly way that psychiatrists raise a point, then drop it. Morris didn’t mind. It was a fact of his life, and whatever the connotations—deep insecurity, a need to prove himself, a feeling of inferiority—he didn’t worry about it. He drew pleasure from competition and satisfaction from winning. And so far in his life he had managed to win more often than not.

In part, he had joined the NPS because the challenges were very great and because the potential rewards were enormous. Privately, Morris expected to be a professor of surgery before he was forty. His past career had been outstanding—that was why Ellis had accepted him—and he was equally confident about his future. It wouldn’t hurt to be associated with a landmark case in surgical history.

All in all, he was in a good mood, and he played
hard for half an hour, until he was tired and it was too dark to see. He signaled to Kelso—no point in calling above the freeway sounds—to end the game. They met at the net and shook hands. Morris was reassured to see that Kelso was sweating heavily.

“Good game,” Kelso said. “Tomorrow, same time?”

“I’m not sure,” Morris said.

Kelso paused. “Oh,” he said. “That’s right. You have a big day tomorrow.”

“Big day,” Morris nodded. Christ, had the news even reached the pediatric residents? For a moment he felt what Ellis must be feeling—the intense pressure, abstract, vague, that came from knowing that the entire University Hospital staff was watching this procedure.

“Well, good luck with it,” Kelso said.

As the two men walked back to the hospital, Morris saw Ellis, a distant solitary figure, limping slightly as he crossed the parking lot and climbed into his car, and drove home.

A
T
6
A.M
. J
ANET
R
OSS WAS ON THE THIRD SURGICAL
floor, dressed in greens, having coffee and a doughnut. The surgeons’ lounge was busy at this hour. Although operations were scheduled to begin at six, most didn’t get going for fifteen or twenty minutes after that. The surgeons sat around, reading the newspaper, discussing the stock market and their golf games. From time to time one of them would leave, go to the overhead viewing galleries, and look down on their ORs to see how preparations were coming.

Ross was the only woman in the room, and her presence changed the masculine atmosphere subtly. It annoyed her that she should be the only woman, and it annoyed her that the men should become quieter, more polite, less jovial and raucous. She didn’t give a damn if they were raucous, and she resented being made to feel like an intruder. It seemed to her that she had been an intruder all her life, even when she was very young. Her father had been a surgeon who never bothered to conceal his disappointment that he had a daughter instead of a son. A son would have fitted into his scheme of life; he could have brought him to the hospital on Saturday mornings, taken him into the operating rooms—those were all things you
could do with a
son.
But a daughter was something else, a perplexing entity not suited for a surgical life. And therefore an intrusion …

She looked around at all the surgeons in the lounge, and then, to cover her unease, she went to the phone and dialed the seventh floor.

“This is Dr. Ross. Is Mr. Benson on call?”

“He was just sent.”

“When did he leave the floor?”

“About five minutes ago.”

She hung up and went back to her coffee. Ellis appeared and waved to her across the room. “There’ll be a five-minute delay hooking into the computer,” he said. “They’re tying in the lines now. Is the patient on call?”

“Sent five minutes ago.”

“You seen Morris?”

“Not yet.”

“He better get his ass down here,” Ellis said.

Somehow that made her feel good.

Morris was in the elevator with a nurse and Benson, who lay on a stretcher, and one of the cops. As they rode down, Morris said to the cop, “You can’t get off on the floor.”

“Why not?”

“We’re going onto the sterile floor directly.”

“What should I do?”

“You can watch from the viewing gallery on the third floor. Tell the desk nurse I said it was all right.”

The cop nodded. The elevator stopped at the second floor. The doors opened to reveal a hallway with people, all in surgical greens, walking back and forth. A
large sign read
STERILE AREA. NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION
. The lettering was red.

Morris and the nurse wheeled Benson out of the elevator. The cop remained behind, looking nervous. He pushed the button for the third floor, and the doors closed.