The Eye of Horus (29 page)

“The magic Eye of Horus.”

She nodded. “Each part of the eye is also the sign for a fraction. This line stands for a half, this for a quarter, an eighth, this a sixteenth, a thirty-second, and a sixty-fourth. Physicians used those symbols to designate the amount of each ingredient in a medicine. That’s why the Eye of Horus is the symbol of health, of being whole.”

“You must’ve left one out. The fractions you mentioned don’t add up to one.”

“The rest is for the magic that makes the eye shine with life.” She drew an R, extended the leg as she had the tear line, and then crossed it. “You’re still printing the Eye of Horus on your prescription pad.”

“Remind me never to play Trivial Pursuit with you,” Max muttered. “Anything else?”

Kate fluttered her eyelashes in an exaggerated show of thinking. “Uh, let me see.” Something in her voice caused Sam to wag his tail. “Oh, but surely he already knows that,” she said to the dog.

“Try me,” Max insisted, daring her.

“One medical papyrus, an old one, suggests that the Egyptians believed a woman could get pregnant through the mouth.”

As the slow grin she liked to watch started in his eyes, then spread to his lips and took a decidedly devilish turn, Kate felt her cheeks go hot and knew she was blushing.

He said it anyway. “I guess that tells us something about their sexual practices, doesn’t it?”

She was saved by the phone. It was Cleo, and Max handed her the receiver, then absented himself so they could talk in private. The first thing Cleo asked was when she was coming back, which she avoided answering by describing her arrangement with Mike Tinsley. When Kate asked about Tashat, Cleo told her the mummy was back in storage.

“I’ve got the head and your drawings in my office.” Cleo paused. “I knew you were good, Katie, but—damn, this is going to sound maudlin, and maybe it’s just the time of day
or the amount of light coming in through the window, but I could swear the expression on her face changes. Sometimes it feels as if she’s watching me with that little smile, like she knows something I don’t.”

Kate recognized it for the compliment Cleo meant it to be. “Well, you might want to hold off using any of that stuff for a while. Max and I are working on something that could change everything. Nothing definite yet, but it could send Dave to the showers with his tail between his legs. Are you sure everything’s okay, Cleo, that he isn’t going to take what happened with me out on you?”

“Listen, when I heard what he did I got to thinking about some other stuff that never sounded quite right. Decided to conduct what you might call an urban dig, inside the museum. I’ve also got Phil playing the rich collector with a couple of New York dealers. So not to worry. If what I suspect is true, Dave’s the one who’ll be out on the street, not me.”

After breakfast Max made no move to go change, and then surprised Kate by suggesting that they play a few games of tennis.

“I haven’t played since college, and I never was very good. Certainly no match for you. I wish you wouldn’t feel you have to entertain me.”

“I don’t. Wednesdays are my day at the Health Sciences Center, but I already called Ben, told her I wouldn’t be in until after lunch. Thought you might want to come along, see what we’re doing and get a look at one of the imaging machines I told you about, that you’re not going to run into outside a major medical school. Fast MRI.”

“What does that mean?”

“That we can watch the brain while it’s functioning—that it can produce pictures quick enough to catch a fleeting thought.”

“Are you sure I won’t be in the way?”

He shook his head. “Go put on your Reeboks, or what
ever, while I get a couple of rackets. Maybe we can teach Sam to retrieve the balls.”

Curiosity got the better of her. “Who’s Ben?”

“Beth Casey, one of the bright new stars in the Department of Neuroscience. Everybody calls her Ben—you know, the doctor in that old TV program?”

Kate didn’t have a clue, maybe because TV had been offlimits a lot of the time when she was growing up—punishment for “not paying attention.” When she didn’t respond, Max quickly dismissed it with, “I guess that was before your time,” making Kate wish she hadn’t asked.

Cute as a bug’s ear—that was Ben Casey. But it didn’t take Kate long to discover that appearances could be deceiving. Despite the pixie smile and demeanor, the young neurophysiologist was dead serious about “what makes us tick”—the same driving force that had cooled Max’s youthful ardor for Egyptology.

“From what Max told me, you’re probably familiar with a lot of this,” she began, “but if you have any questions, about anything, don’t hesitate to ask.” She glanced at Max. “Klaus is in the hole, waiting. Harry’s in there with him.”

Max nodded and led Kate into the adjacent room, where a man stood talking to a mop-headed, bespectacled teenager, who sat in what looked like an oversize club chair. Unlike the scanner chambers Kate was familiar with, this one had been designed to allow a patient to sit up, which she realized was necessary for someone to perform a task like writing, or fitting pieces into a jigsaw puzzle.

Max addressed the man standing beside the scanner. “Harry Blanton masquerades as the psychologist on the team, though he’s too sane to be very convincing,” he began by way of introduction. “And Klaus Rodenberg is our resident software genius, a man of multiple talents. He’s not only bilingual but ambidextrous. That’s why he spends a lot of time in here letting us try to figure out how he does it.”

Close-up Klaus looked closer to fifty than fifteen. It was only the unkempt hair and rubbery posture that gave the impression of a perennial teenager, that made him look immature or at least unfinished. Kate wanted to ask the psychologist why, if they were really creative or innovative, so many computer nerds looked like clones of Bill Gates.

“Klaus, Harry—this is Kate McKinnon.” Both men smiled and nodded. That Max didn’t bother to identify who she was made her suspect that they already knew.

“How long is it safe to be in there?” she asked Klaus. She had only a superficial familiarity with research on brain function, mostly from newspaper reports that were frustratingly devoid of details about how the experiments were carried out, which left the findings impossible to evaluate.

“We limit ourselves to an hour at a time since we’re not sure about the effects of long-term exposure to electromagnetic fields. But we don’t have any evidence that it scrambles your brain, if that’s what you mean. No injection of radioactive glucose, either, which you have to do with PET. That’s why these fast little babies have changed the entire landscape of brain research.”

“We better get out of here, give you time to slow down,” Max said, motioning for Harry to proceed with the blindfold and earphones.

Kate followed him back to the larger room, where Beth Casey waited. While Max set up the machine he explained to Kate how the process worked.

“With these beefed-up magnets we can watch the brain’s circuitry as it thinks, talks, imagines, or just listens—by exploiting the fact that activated brain cells use more oxygen than cells at rest. As the red cells give up oxygen the blood moves toward tiny veins that carry it back to the lungs.” He glanced up to make sure she was following what he said, so Kate nodded. “What the scanner detects is this blood flow, because deoxygenated blood gives off a different magnetic signal than oxygenated blood. The machine captures the magnetic waves from the shifting blood supply in the brain,
the software converts the electronic data into detailed images and gives us moving pictures of the activated networks.”

She nodded again, and Beth picked up where Max had stopped. “We start by eliminating as much sensory stimuli from the outside as possible, to get a baseline image of the brain at rest. We have a pretty good idea of what that should look like from previous sessions with Klaus, but we still have to wait for the brain to settle into a passive mode. The protocol we’re following today deals with the silent generation of words and images. First Harry will give him a letter of the alphabet and ask him to silently sound out every word he can think of that begins with that letter. Generally we see a lot of variation between subjects on this task, with different areas of the known language regions lighting up but synchronized with one or more of the hearing areas.” She stopped talking when images began to appear on the monitor of the command console.

For a while neither Max nor Beth spoke except to clue Kate about what Klaus was being asked to do. Fascinated by the constant ebb and flow of colors—mostly yellows, greens, and orange—she couldn’t take her eyes from the monitor, even to search for a stool.

“Here’s where Harry asks him to picture a black cat,” Beth explained. One area glowed bright yellow, and not far from it, a section of dark green turned yellow-green. “And now he’s thinking about drawing the cat with his left hand. The right motor cortex lights up because he’s preparing for movement even if he doesn’t actually do it. But watch what happens when he’s asked to imagine drawing the cat with his right hand.” Kate saw both the right and left motor cortex light up. “The same thing happens when a right-handed person is asked to draw with his left hand,” Max added.

“Now we’re heading into the final run,” Beth told her. “This is where Harry gives him a list of technical requirements related to processing information with a computer, and asks him to try to solve the problem in his head, without
any feedback from outside to stimulate the visual cortex.” The monitor began flashing like a neon sign, colors going on and off as signals raced along unseen neural pathways from one part of the brain to another. “That’s complexity of the highest order—abstract analysis and then synthesis,” Beth observed.

“Look at the energy it takes, and the extent of involvement. See where the yellows burn orange and even red in some places.” Max shook his head in wonder.

“What?” Kate demanded, wanting to know the reason for the look on his face.

He gave her a self-conscious smile. “Watching the human brain perform still gives me the shivers. I can hardly believe my luck in being alive here and now instead of back when Tashat lived.” He got up, as if suddenly realizing that he’d been sitting while Kate was standing. “Would you like to give it a try?”

Kate hesitated for a second, then shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

Twenty minutes later she was the one in the hot seat, trying to follow the directions being fed into her ears—to not think about anything—without success. How could anybody be conscious and not think? Didn’t that define consciousness?

“You’re still racing your motor,” Max told her through the earphones. “We’re going to pipe in a mixture of frequencies called white noise for a few minutes, see if that helps you slow down.”

The utter silence that followed was so profound it brought a new thought. Was this what it was like to be entombed?

With no competing outside stimuli, the sense of déjà vu that had been waiting in the wings of her mind moved center stage, coloring and shaping every picture that flashed before her inner eye. How it had looked and felt as she passed through the big cylindrical CT scanner, aware that the people outside could see through her skin. See all the places that hurt.

“Kate? Are you okay?” Silence, then, “We don’t have to do this. You can come out if you want.” Max sounded concerned, worried. Anxious.

“No, but I’m probably too new at this to clear my mind. Do you think it might help if we started some task?”

“Okay, but anytime you want to quit just say so. Harry’s going to hand you a pad of paper and a pencil. First we want ycu to picture two animals. Any two animals.” She did what he asked. “Now draw them.” She did that, too, sketching quickly, and was barely finished when he spoke again. “Tell me what the animals are doing.” She tried to, but a song by the Beatles came over the earphones, drowning out the sound of her own voice. Then, without warning, the music stopped and she heard several sharp clicks, followed by more instructions, this time from Beth Casey.

Kate wished they would decide what they wanted her to do. Or not do. It was frustrating, not being allowed to complete the tasks they asked her to do, but she tried to put a lid on her feelings, to be ready for the next one.

“Bear with us a minute, Katie,” Max murmured into her earphones. She waited, wishing they would get their act together, which finally made her smile. How many times had
she
been on the receiving end of that one?

“Next we’re going to read you a list of animals. We want you to say yes when you hear the name of any animal you think is dangerous. Ready?” She said yes, then waited.

“Monkey.” Pause. “Dog. Sheep.” Pause. “Cat.”

“Yes!”

“Horse.” Pause. “Owl. Lion.” Long pause, then “Mouse.”

“Yes!” As soon as she said it she tried to take it back. “I must’ve been thinking rat.”

“That’s okay. Let’s just go on.” Pause. “Armadillo.”

“Yes … no. I’m not sure.”

“Scorpion.”

“Yes!”

“Sam.”

She started laughing, and felt the tension drain from her
body, freeing her of the confusion and frustration born of never being sure she would be able to decipher or understand what was going on around her.