The Touch (3 page)

Into a brain.

Except this brain wasn't living. It was remarkably lifelike and was in fact an exact replica of a human brain exposed by the removal of a disc of skull at the base of a spine, but there was no body connected to all of this, and no blood. The micro lasers were aimed into and through the matter—mostly polymers of various densities—that made up the replica brain.

Standing in the back of the control room, behind the technicians riveted to their monitors, were a man and woman, both in business suits. The man was Malcolm; slender, gray-haired and handsome in his late fifties, he had been the elder Dr. Blair's best friend, and would have been Lara's godfather, had her father believed in God. The woman was Brenda, who, at thirty-five, was seven years Lara's senior. Brenda had held various titles throughout her career, whatever Malcolm concocted for the company's board of directors to justify her salary, but what Brenda actually did was to watch over Lara like the sister she had never had, to bring an empathetic female presence into her life, to find the ways to nurture and protect her that Malcolm might miss. Malcolm had felt helpless as the elder Dr. Blair had worked himself to death, and he was determined not to let that happen to Lara. Malcolm and Brenda stood looking through the laboratory's observation windows, and they knew the stakes of the surgical trial Lara was about to attempt. They could barely watch.

And of all the focused people in the Surgical Sciences Suite, Lara Blair was most intense of all, her eyes dead still, transfixed as she shifted her instruments in tiny movements, deeper and deeper into the replica brain.

Then Lara froze. She had reached the section of the brain where she, and every other surgeon who had attempted such a procedure, had failed in all their attempts.

The technicians in the control room looked at each other.

Malcolm and Brenda held their breath; then they too looked at each other.

Still Lara did not move.

A technician's voice came softly through the speaker mounted beside the camera array above Lara's head. “Dr. Blair . . . ?”

“Yes!” she snapped, swift and tense. She took a deep, long breath and closed her eyes for a moment, struggling down through the layers of her consciousness to reach a state of transcendent poise. Since her last failed attempt she had spent endless hours studying meditation and yoga to mold her body, mind, and spirit into a unified, balanced whole. She focused on her lungs, and inwardly she chanted,
breathe . . . breathe . . . breathe . . .

She opened her eyes . . . burned her attention through the microscopic lens . . . and moved the probe.

Alarms screamed.

Lights flashed.

The monitors flickered on and off, and all of it shouted FAILURE.

The shrieking and flashing were obnoxious. The technicians sagged back in their seats. Lara slid her arm from the sensor sleeve, raked off the cap and mask, and took another deep breath, this one a full sigh of frustration. The door to the observation booth opened, and Malcolm and Brenda appeared beside her. Lara glanced up and shared a frustrated shake of the head with them.

An aide in a sports coat moved quickly up to Malcolm and whispered in his ear, “Sir, one of our scouts just brought in something that you really have to see.”

As Malcolm followed the aide out of the lab, Brenda looked down at the simulated body on the table with the penetrated skull and exposed brain. “Sorry, Roscoe. She's killed you again.” Brenda wore her hair long, curly, and unkempt—she claimed the static electricity of brushing was bad for the brain—and now she shook her wild curls and made a face, bugging her eyes behind her round glasses.

Lara shot her a stiff look. But if it weren't for Brenda's laughter, turning one more failure into just another bump in the road, Lara didn't know how she'd keep going. Even with her encouragement, with Malcolm and all the others—the best in the world—around her, she felt defeat eating her hopes. For the first time in her life she had begun to feel despair.

* * *

The conference room of Blair Bio-Medical Engineering, with the view of Lake Michigan outside the high-rise windows and the company logo carved in onyx on the back wall, suggested a company that had seldom known failure—an extremely lucrative company that hadn't lost the originality of its core business. Drawings of new bio-medical inventions lined the wall spaces; mock-ups of works-in-progress were handy on the cabinet behind Lara's chair as she took her place at the head of the table.

Gathered around the long polished mahogany surface in front of her were the company's lawyers, accountants, and media advisors. All of them wore suits; her engineers, researchers, and the physicians on her staff were the only ones who dressed casually in the Blair Bio-Med Building.

Lara still wore her medical gear, having just come from the operating simulator. Freed from the cap, mask, and goggles, she was elegant, her dark hair luxuriant and her blue eyes strikingly bright, and yet she had no self-consciousness of her appearance, as if beauty was something she had never had time to consider. She was still dwelling on the failure of their attempt, staring out the window as one of her techs began the post-experiment analysis. He was one of her younger techs, two years out of MIT; Lara's father had started the tradition of bringing new perspectives into old problems.

“The difficulty occurs in the turn around the cortex,” the young tech said and paused because he had no idea where the real difficulty occurred; nobody did.

“And how many attempts have we made?” Edwards, from Accounting, asked him.

As the young tech began checking his file to be sure, Lara snapped the answer: “Fifteen.”

“From the point of view of strict cost-effectiveness—”

“Retreat is not an option,” Lara said in a voice that allowed no discussion.

“We'll reconstruct the event and reformulate the route,” the young tech answered.

Lara dismissed him with a tiny nod. One of her Finance executives cleared his throat for some new business. “We've encountered a serious pricing issue. We spent four years and 12 million dollars to develop our heart shunt. We knew what we'd have to sell it for to make a profit. But Marketing has a problem—”

“It's not Marketing's problem,” her Chief of Sales broke in. “It's the company's problem. The national magazines are touting a new study that suggests—”

“Suggests?” Finance shot back.

“We have to take it seriously! It suggests Hispanics have this condition at an occurrence rate five times the national average. For us to charge—”

“We're a business!”

“So we can't look like gougers!”

Lara stood and moved to the windows, still lost in thought as the arguing continued behind her. Only Malcolm and Brenda, in the whole company, believed they could succeed with the project that had failed again that morning. The rest of the executive board was content to let Lara amuse herself as long as she wished, as long as they could keep the profits rolling in from the company's past inventions.

“So we explain our costs,” the Finance guy said.

“No matter how much truth we tell,” the Chief of Sales argued, “it won't matter. The public is emotional. We've had record profits—”

“—that we've earned through medical breakthroughs! Lara, obviously you're going to have to settle this. Lara . . . ? Lara.”

She glanced toward her executives, then stared out the window again. To them it seemed she had heard nothing of what they had been discussing. Then she said, “We trust the doctors.” Everyone at the table tried to catch up with her thinking, and they were still sitting there blinking when she added, “Most doctors in this country do work they never bill for. And they know which patients have insurance and which don't. For anyone who can't afford the device, we provide it free—through their doctor. We also make a donation from our charity budget to a victims' fund, and host a fund-raiser.”

“We're off the hook,” the Chief of Sales said. “We look great.”

“And we make a profit,” Finance agreed and whispered, “Why didn't we think of that?”

Sales whispered back, “Because we don't own the company.”

A breathless, excited Malcolm appeared at the conference room door. “Lara!” he called. “You've got to see this!”

Lara immediately left the meeting and followed Malcolm down a long corridor of cubicles to the stairway—Malcolm hated elevators—and they headed down two flights to the lab, while Lara's assistant Juliet called from the upper landing, “You have a financials conference in five minutes!”

“And I need your approval on the new graphics for the AMA Journal!” pleaded the copywriter who was waiting outside the boardroom. Lara and Malcolm disappeared into The Egg—the lab floor, where their new projects hatched. Malcolm struggled to contain his excitement. “For the last two years we've been beating the bushes looking for exceptional degrees of micro-manual dexterity to help with the Roscoe project. One of our scouts came across something at an art museum.”

“An art museum?”

“I know what you're thinking, our scouts shouldn't be wasting time looking at art, and I wish I could tell you it was part of our master plan to expand into unconventional areas to find unconventional talent, but the truth is, the guy was traveling around from one university hospital to another and kept being told time after time that the surgeon capable of the microscopic manipulations we're looking for just doesn't exist. So he took a break and walked into an art museum. And there they had an exhibition called ‘The Grandeur of the Small.'”

“He just stumbled onto it?”

“Fell face first into it.”

They stopped outside a windowed laboratory where several researchers worked. The activity inside was modern Bride of Frankenstein: high-tech instruments with an inventor's disarray. Malcolm couldn't explain further, he had to show her. He pushed open the airlock door and led her into a room bright with white enamel and chrome. His briefcase—Lara gave it to him on his birthday, the first year she took over the company after her father's death—was lying on one of the lab tables. The briefcase was the company's version of a safe; anything Malcolm put into it was not to be touched. Malcolm flipped open the brass latches and withdrew a protective box of polished chrome. He opened the box. It appeared to be empty.

Malcolm lifted a pair of tweezers, and used them to withdraw an almost invisible object and place it on the slide of a microscope station. The microscope there was capable of sweeping views of the object on the slide. Malcolm dialed in adjustments—he was both physician and engineer, as her father was—then stepped back; Lara moved to the microscope.

She looked through the eyepiece, stepped back, caught her breath, and looked again. What she saw through the eyepiece of the microscope was a sculpture of Abraham Lincoln standing instead of sitting at the Lincoln Memorial. When she stepped back again, her thoughts were racing. And Malcolm was grinning.

She wasn't. “Exactly how small is this?” she snapped.

“It would fit inside the eye of a needle,” Malcolm answered. Still grinning.

Lara looked back into the eyepiece. To the naked eye the object Malcolm held in the cushioned tweezers was no larger than a period in pica type. In the eyepiece Lincoln was majestic, chiseled as if from granite. There was emotion on the face of the Lincoln sculpture. Even discounting the carving's super miniaturization, it was a work of art, portraying the noble President having risen to his feet as if in outrage at the world he saw now. “And it's handmade?” Lara marveled, not quite able to believe what she was seeing.

“Not just that,” she heard Malcolm say beside her. “It's handmade . . . by a doctor.”

She backed away from the eyepiece.

“Using surgical instruments,” Malcolm added.

She dipped her head once again to the microscope's eyepiece, to take in the magnificence of the minuscule carving. “A man capable of making this . . .”

“That's right. Could do anything.”

She straightened and faced Malcolm. “What's the catch? Why isn't he here already?”

“We're checking him out now. But it seems this doctor, this . . .” He glanced to the notes his scouts brought him. “. . . this Andrew Jones? He quit operating. He supervises and teaches now, but he hasn't cut in two years. We'll work up a profile on him. Judging from the artistry of his work, this young doctor is deeply thoughtful . . . sensitive . . . a delicate man . . .”

4

At the moment when the people at Blair Bio-Med in Chicago were trying to divine his softer qualities, the Dr. Jones in question was on a rugby field on the campus of the University of Virginia. The sky was slate gray and blended with the ground, where the previous night's thin snow merged with the mud into a crusty sludge. Anyone out in this weather had to be crazy.

And the rugby players seemed just that, scrambling around and banging unpadded bodies in the bitter cold. From a vantage point outside the game, it looked like chaos; from inside the scrum it was, well, chaos—colliding shoulders, banging heads, swinging elbows. A kicking foot punched the ball high into the air; it tumbled through the stony sky and fell into the gnarly arms of a runner, who plunged only a few steps before his opponents dragged him to the ground and the players bunched together again in another scrum, a melee of grunting men, all bloody knees and knuckles.

The players had no real uniforms; they wore shirts of two basic colors, depending on which team they played for that day, and shorts of any color at all; mostly, that day, the dominant color was mud. None of them had particular team loyalty; when not enough players would show up on a particular day, enough guys would swap sides so they would field even numbers. They did this for fun.

They shoved each other for a few seconds, until one of them got his foot into the scrum deep enough to rake the ball back to his team's side, and as the ball tumbled out they scattered into formation, racing down the field shoveling lateral passes from player to player. An especially burly brute caught one of these passes and was charging down the sidelines when a blur—the thoughtful, sensitive, delicate Dr. Jones—streaked into him in a bone-banging collision. Heads bashed; the ball went flying. But nobody worried about the ball because of the impending fight; with several players spread around the ground like train cars in a railroad disaster, the runner's teammate yelled at Jones, “Hey, man, this ain't American football!”