CHAPTER FIVE
Exhaustion was overtaking Marsh, and he was beginning to feel that the situation was hopeless. He’d been in Raymond Torres’s offices for most of the day, and for most of the day he’d been by himself. Not that it hadn’t been interesting; it had, despite the overriding fear for his son’s life that had never left his consciousness since the moment he had arrived that morning.
He’d stared at the Institute through bleary eyes. The building itself was a bastard—it had obviously started out as a home, and an imposing one. But from the central core of the mansion—for a mansion it had been—two wings had spread, and no attempt had been made to make them architecturally compatible with the original structure. Instead, they were sleekly functional, in stark contrast with the Georgian massiveness of the core. The buildings were surrounded by a sprawling lawn dotted with trees, and only a neat brass plaque mounted on the face of a large rock near the street identified the structure: INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMAN BRAIN.
Inside, a receptionist had led him immediately to Raymond Torres’s office, where he’d turned all of Alex’s records over to the surgeon himself, who, without so much as glancing at them, had given them to an assistant. When the assistant had disappeared, Torres had offered him a chair, then spent what Marsh thought was an unnecessarily long time lighting his pipe.
It took Marsh only a few seconds to decide that there was nothing of Torres’s scientific reputation in either his manner or his bearing. He was tall, and his chiseled features were carefully framed by prematurely graying hair in a manner that seemed to Marsh more suitable for a movie star than a scientist. The star image was further enhanced by the perfectly cut tan silk suit Torres wore, and the cool casualness of his posture. For all his fine credentials, the first impression Raymond Torres gave his visitor was that of a society doctor more interested in the practice of golf than in the practice of medicine.
Nor was Marsh’s instinctive dislike of the man alleviated by the fact that once the pipe was lit, the meeting had lasted only long enough for Torres to tell him that there would be no decision made until his staff had been able to analyze Alex’s case, and that the analysis would take most of the day.
“I’ll wait,” Marsh had said. From behind his desk, Raymond Torres had shrugged with apparent disinterest. “As you wish, but I could just as easily call you when I’ve come to a decision.”
Marsh had shaken his head. “No. I have to be here. Alex is my only child. There’s … well, there’s just nowhere else for me to go.”
Torres had risen from his chair in a manner that Marsh found almost offensively dismissive. “As I said, as you wish. But you’ll have to excuse me—I have a great deal to do this morning.”
Marsh had stared at the man in stunned disbelief. “You’re not even interested in hearing about the case?”
“It’s all in the records, isn’t it?” Torres had countered.
“Alex isn’t in the records, Dr. Torres,” Marsh had replied, his voice trembling with the effort to control his anger. Torres seemed to consider his words for a moment, but didn’t reseat himself, and when he finally replied, his voice was cool.
“I’m a research man, Dr. Lonsdale. I’m a research man because, as I discovered long ago, I don’t have much of a bedside manner. There are those, I know, who don’t think I relate to people very well. Frankly, I don’t care. I’m interested in helping people, not in coddling them. And I don’t have to know the details of your son’s life in order to help him. I don’t care who he is, or what he’s like, or what the details of his accident were. All I care about are the details of his injuries, so that I can make a reasonable judgment about whether or not I can help him. In other words, everything I need to know about your boy should be in his records. If there is anything missing, I—or someone on my staff—will know, and do whatever has to be done to rectify the matter. If you want to spend the rest of the day here, just in case we need you, I have no objection. Frankly, I doubt we’ll need you. If we need anybody, it will be the patient’s attending physician.”
“Frank Mallory.”
“Whoever.” Torres shrugged disinterestedly. “But feel free to stay. We have a comfortable lounge, and you’ll certainly find plenty to read.” Suddenly he smiled. “All of it, of course, having to do with our work. One thing I insist on is that the lounge be well stocked with every article and monograph I’ve ever written.”
Offended as he was by the man’s open pride in himself, Marsh managed to keep silent, for without Torres, he knew there was no hope for Alex at all. And by two o’clock that afternoon he’d become totally convinced that whatever Raymond Torres lacked in personal warmth, he more than made up for in professional expertise.
The articles he’d read—and he’d read at least thirty of them, forcing himself to maintain his concentration through the interminable hours—covered a wide field of interest. Torres had not only made himself an expert on the structure of the brain, but he had also become a leading theorist on the functioning of the brain as well. In dozens of articles, Torres had described cases in which he’d found methods with which to circumvent damaged areas of a brain, and utilize other, healthy areas to take over the functions of the traumatized tissue. And through it all ran one constant theme—that the mysteries of the human brain were, indeed, solvable, but that the potentialities of the brain were only just being discovered. Indeed, he’d summed it up in a few sentences that had particularly intrigued Marsh:
The backup systems of the brain appear to me to be almost limitless. Long ago, we discovered that if a portion of the brain fails, another portion of the same brain can sometimes take over the function of the failed portion. It is almost as if each area of the brain not only knows what every other area does, but can perform that work itself if it really has to. The problem, then, seems to be one of convincing a damaged brain not to give up, and, further, of making it aware of its own problems so that it may redistribute its work load among its healthy components.
Marsh had read and reread that article several times when the receptionist suddenly appeared, smiling warmly at him.
“Dr. Lonsdale? Dr. Torres will see you now.” He put the journal aside and followed the neat young woman back to Torres’s office. Nodding a greeting, Torres beckoned him to a chair near his desk. In another chair, already seated, was Frank Mallory.
“Frank? What are you doing here?”
“I asked him to come,” Torres replied. “There are some things I have to review with him.”
“But Alex—”
“He’s stable, Marsh,” Frank told him. “There haven’t been any changes in his condition for several hours. Benny’s there, and a nurse is always in the room.”
“If we may proceed,” Torres interrupted. He turned toward a television screen on a table next to his desk. The screen displayed a high-resolution photograph of a human brain.
“It’s not what you think it is,” Torres said. Startled, both Marsh Lonsdale and Frank Mallory glanced toward Torres.
“I beg your pardon?” Frank asked.
“It’s not a photograph. It’s a computer-generated graphic representation of Alexander Lonsdale’s brain.” He paused a beat; then: “Before the accident.”
Mallory’s gaze shifted back to the screen. “Here’s what happened,” he heard Torres’s voice say. “Or, more exactly, here’s a reconstruction of what happened.” He typed some instructions into the keyboard in front of him, and suddenly the image on the monitor began to move, turning upside down. Then, at the bottom of the screen, another shape came into view. As the three of them watched, the image of the brain came into contact with the other object, and suddenly began to distort. It was, Marsh realized, just like watching a movie of someone’s head being smashed against a sharp rock.
In slow motion, he could see the skull crack, then splinter and begin to cave in.
Beneath the skull, brain tissue gave way, part of it crushed, part of it torn. Fragments of skull broke away, lacerating the brain further. Frank Mallory and Raymond Torres watched in silence, but Marsh was unable to stifle a groan of empathic pain. Suddenly it was over, and the brain was once again right-side-up. And then, as Torres tapped more instructions into the computer, the image changed again.
“Christ,” Mallory whispered. “That’s not possible.”
“What is it?” Torres demanded.
“It’s Alex’s head,” Mallory breathed. Marsh, his face ashen, gazed at Mallory, but the other man’s eyes remained fixed on the screen. “It’s his head,” Mallory breathed. “And it looks just the way it did when they brought him into the hospital. But … how?”
“We’ll get to that,” Torres replied. Then: “Dr. Mallory, I want you to concentrate on that image very hard. This is very important. How close is that picture to what you saw when they brought the patient in?” He held up a cautioning hand. “Don’t answer right away, please. Examine it carefully. If you need me to, I can rotate the image so you can see it from other angles. But I need to know how exact it is.”
For two long minutes, as Marsh looked on in agonized silence, Mallory examined the image, asking Torres to turn it first in one direction, then in another. At last he nodded. “As far as I can tell, it’s perfect. If there are any flaws, I can’t see them.”
“All right. Now, the next part should be easier for you. Don’t say anything, just watch, and if there’s anything that doesn’t look as you remember it, tell me.”
As they watched, the image came to life once more. A forceps appeared and began removing fragments of bone from the brain. Then the forceps was gone, and a probe appeared. The probe moved, and a small bit of brain tissue tore loose. Mallory winced.
It went on and on, in agonizing detail. For each fragment of bone that was removed from the wound, a new wound was inflicted on Alex’s brain. And then, after what seemed an aeon, it was over.
Frank Mallory was staring at an exact image of Alex’s brain after he’d finished cleaning his wounds.
“Well?” Torres’s voice asked.
Mallory heard his own voice shake as he spoke. “Why did you show me that? Just to prove my incompetence?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Torres snapped. “Aside from the fact that I don’t need to waste my time with such a thing, you’re not an incompetent. In fact, you did as good a job under the circumstances as could have been expected. What I need to know is whether that reconstruction was accurate.”
Mallory chewed his lip, then nodded. “I’m afraid so. I’m sorry—I was doing my best.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Torres remarked coldly. “Just think about it.”
“It’s accurate,” Mallory assured him. “Now, can you tell us how you did it?”
“I didn’t do it,” Torres replied. “A computer did it all. For the last”—he glanced at the clock on his desk—“six hours, we’ve been feeding the computer information. Much of it the results of the CAT scan your lab did in La Paloma. Fortunately, that was a good job too. But our computer goes a lot further than yours. Your machinery can display any aspect of the brain, from any angle, in two dimensions. Ours is much more sophisticated,” he went on, and suddenly his eyes, so cool and aloof until now, took on a glowing intensity. “Once it had all the data, it was able to reconstruct everything that happened to Alexander Lonsdale’s brain from the first impact to the time of the CAT scan. For ourselves, an educated guess would have been the best we could do. We would have been able to extrapolate the approximate shape of the traumatizing instrument, and the probable angle from which it struck. And that would have been about all. But the wounds are extensive, and the computer is designed to handle a great many variables simultaneously. According to the computer, what you just saw is 99.624 percent accurate, given that the input was accurate. That’s why I wanted you to look at the reconstruction. If there were any basic errors in the data, they would have been magnified by the extrapolation process to the point where you’d have seen something significantly in error. But you didn’t, so we can assume that what we saw is what happened.”
While Mallory sat in silence, Marsh voiced the question that was in both their minds. “Why is that important? It seems to me that what comes next is what we should be concerned with.”
“Exactly,” Torres agreed. “Now, watch carefully. What you’re about to see is going to be at high speed, but it’s what we think we can do for Alexander.”
“Everyone calls him Alex,” Marsh interjected.
Torres’s brows arched slightly. “Very well. Alex. It makes no difference what we call him.” He ignored the flash of anger in Marsh’s eyes, and his fingers once more flew over the keyboard. The picture began to change again. As the two doctors from La Paloma watched in fascination, layers of brain tissue were peeled back. Certain tissue was removed entirely; some was simply maneuvered back into place. The chaos of the wound began to take on a semblance of order, and then, slowly, the mending process began, beginning deep within the medulla and proceeding outward through the various lobes of the brain. At last it was over, and the image on the screen was once again filled with the recognizable shape of a human brain. Certain areas, however, had taken on various shades of red, and Marsh’s frown reflected his puzzlement.
“Those are the areas that are no longer functional,” Torres told him before he could ask his question. “The pale pink ones are deep within the brain, the bright red ones on the surface. The gradations, I think, are obvious.”
Mallory glanced at Marsh, whose attention seemed totally absorbed by the image on the screen. Finally he turned to Torres, his fingers interlaced beneath his chin. “What you’ve shown us is pure science fiction, Dr. Torres,” he said. “You can’t cut that deep, and make repairs that extensive, without killing the patient. Beyond that, it appears to me that what you’re proposing to do is to reconstruct Alex’s brain, even to the extent of repairing nerve cells. Frankly, I don’t believe you or anyone else can do that.”
Torres chuckled. “And, of course, you’re right. I can’t do that, nor can anybody else. Unfortunately, I’m much too large, and my hands are much too clumsy. Which is why Alexan—Alex,” he corrected himself, “is going to have to be brought here.” He switched off the monitor and rose from his chair. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”
They left Torres’s office and walked down a corridor that led to the west wing of the building. A security guard looked up at them as they passed, then, recognizing Torres, went back to gazing at the television monitor at his desk. Finally they turned into a scrub room, beyond which was an operating room. Wordlessly Torres stood aside and let the two others precede him through the double doors.
In the center of the room was an operating table, and against one wall was the customary array of O.R. equipment—all the support systems and monitors that both Marsh and Frank Mallory were used to. The rest of the room was taken up with an array of equipment the likes of which neither of them had ever seen before.
“It’s a computerized microsurgical robot,” Torres explained. “In the simplest terms possible, all it does is reduce the actions of the surgeon—in this case, me—down from increments of millimeters into increments of millimicrons. It incorporates an electron microscope, and a computer program that makes the program you just saw look like simple addition in comparison to advanced calculus. In a way,” he went on, the pride in his voice belying his words, “with the development of this machine, I’ve reduced myself from being a brain surgeon to being little more than a technician. The microscope looks at the problems, and then the computer analyzes them and determines the solutions. Finally it tells me what to attach to what, and I make the movements relative to an enlarged model of the tissue. The robot reduces my motions and performs the procedures on the real tissue. And it works. Physically, that machine and I can repair much of the damage done to Alex Lonsdale’s brain.”
Marsh studied the equipment for several minutes, then turned to face Torres once again. When he spoke, his voice clearly reflected the uncertainty he was feeling. “What are the chances of Alex surviving the operation?”
Torres’s expression turned grim. “Let’s go back to my office. The computer can tell us that, too.”
No one spoke again until they were back in the old core building, with the door to Torres’s office closed behind them. Marsh and Frank Mallory took their seats, and Torres switched the computer back on. Quickly he began entering a series of instructions, and then the monitor flashed into life:
SURGERY PERFORMED SURGERY NOT PERFORMED
PROBABILITY OF SURVIVAL
PAST ONE WEEK 90% 10%
PROBABILITY OF
REGAINING CONSCIOUSNESS 50% .02%
PROBABILITY OF
PARTIAL RECOVERY 20% 0%
PROBABILITY OF
TOTAL RECOVERY 0% 0%
Marsh and Mallory studied the chart, then, still staring at the screen, Marsh asked the first question that came to mind.
“What does partial recovery mean, exactly?”
“For starters, that he’ll be able to breathe on his own, and that he’ll be both cognizant of what is going on around him and able to communicate with the world beyond his own body. To me, anything less is no recovery at all. Though such a patient may be technically conscious, I still consider him to be in a state of coma. I find it inhuman to keep people alive under such circumstances, and I don’t believe that simply because such people can’t communicate their suffering, they are therefore not suffering. For me, such a life would be unbearable, even for a few days.”
Marsh struggled to control the inner rage he was feeling at this cool man who was able to discuss Alex so dispassionately. And yet, deep down, he wasn’t at all sure he disagreed with Torres. Then he heard Frank Mallory asking another question.
“And full recovery?”
“Exactly what the words say,” Torres replied. “In this case, full recovery is simply not possible. Too much tissue has been destroyed. No matter how successful the surgery might be, there will never be total healing. He might, however—and I want to stress the word ‘might’—recover what anyone would consider a remarkable number of his faculties. He might walk, talk, think, see, hear, and feel. Or he could recover any combination of those abilities.”
“And you, I assume, are willing to perform the surgery?”
Torres shrugged. “I’m afraid I don’t like the odds,” he said. “I’m a man who doesn’t like to fail.”
Marsh felt a knot forming in his stomach. “Fail?” he whispered. “Dr. Torres, you’re talking about my son. Without you, he’ll die. We’re not talking success or failure. We’re talking life or death.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it,” Torres replied. “In fact, under certain conditions, I will do it.”
Marsh’s relief was apparent in his sigh, and he allowed himself to slump in his chair. “Anything,” he whispered. “Anything at all.”
But Frank Mallory was suddenly uneasy. “What are those circumstances?” he asked.
“Very simple. That I be given complete control over the case for as long as I deem necessary, and that I be absolved of any responsibility for any of the consequences of either the surgery or the convalescent period.” Marsh started to interrupt, but Torres pressed on. “And by convalescent period, I mean until such time as I—and only I—discharge the patient.” He reached into a drawer of his desk and withdrew a multipage document, which he handed to Marsh. “This is the agreement that you and the boy’s mother will sign. You may read it if you want to—in fact I think you should—but not so much as a comma of it can be changed. Either you sign it or you don’t. If you do, and your wife does, bring the boy here as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the riskier the surgery will be. As I’m sure you know, patients in your son’s condition rarely get stronger—if anything, they get weaker.” He rose from his chair, indicating his dismissal. “I’m sorry this has taken so long, but I’m afraid there was no choice. Even my computers need time to work.”
Mallory rose to his feet. “If the Lonsdales decide to go ahead, when will you do the surgery, and how long will it take?”
“I’ll do it tomorrow,” Torres replied. “And it will take at least eighteen hours, with fifteen people working. And don’t forget,” he added, turning to Marsh. “The odds are eighty percent that we’ll fail, at least to some extent. I’m sorry, but I don’t believe in lying to people.”
He opened the door, held it for Marsh and Frank, then closed it as soon as they had stepped through.
Raymond Torres sat alone for a long time after showing the two doctors from La Paloma out of his office.
La Paloma.
Odd that this case—the most challenging case he’d ever been given the opportunity to work on—should not only come from the town he’d grown up in but also involve someone he’d known all his life.
He wondered if Ellen Lonsdale would even remember who he was. Or, more to the point, who he’d been.
Probably not.
In La Paloma, as in most of California during those years of his childhood, he and all the other descendants of the old Californios had been regarded as just more Mexicans, to be ignored at best, and despised at worst.
And in return, his friends had despised the gringos even more than they were despised themselves.
Raymond Torres could still remember the long nights in the little kitchen, when his grandmother listened to the indignities his mother and her sisters had suffered at the hands of their various employers, then talked, as she always did, of the old days before even she had been born, when the Meléndez y Ruiz family had owned the hacienda, and the Californios were preeminent. Back then, it had been the families of Torres and Ortiz, Rodríguez and Flores who had lived in the big white houses on the trail up to the hacienda. Over and over, his grandmother had told the legend of the massacre at the hacienda, and the carnage that followed as one by one the old families were driven from their homes, and slowly reduced to the level of peones. But things would change, his grandmother had insisted. All they and their friends had to do was maintain their hatred and wait for the day when the son of Don Roberto de Meléndez y Ruiz would return and drive the gringos away from the lands and homes they had stolen.
Raymond had listened to it all, and known it was all useless. His grandmother’s tales were no more than legends, and her certainty of future vengeance no more solid than the ghost on which her hopes depended. When she had finally died, he’d thought it might end, but instead, his mother had taken up the litany. Even now, the old legends and hatreds seemed to be all she lived for.
But there would be no revenge, and there would be no driving away of the gringos, at least not for Raymond Torres. For himself, he had taken another path, ignoring the slights of the gringos and closing his ears to the hatreds of his friends and their plans for someday avenging their ancestors.
For Raymond Torres, vengeance would be simple. He would acquire a gringo education and become as superior to the gringos as they thought they were to him. But his superiority would be real, not imagined.
Now, finally, the day had come when they needed him.
And he would help them, despite the fury he would face from his mother.
He would help them, because he had long ago decided that all the years of having been dismissed as being unworthy of the gringos’ attention would best be avenged by the simple act of forcing them to realize that they had been wrong; that he had always been their equal. He’d always been their equal, though he’d never had their power.
Now, because of an accident on the very site of the ancient massacre, that power had come into his hands.
The skill he would need he had acquired over long years of hard work. Now he would combine that skill with the power they would give him to rebuild Alex Lonsdale into something far more than he had been before his accident.
Slowly and carefully he began making the preparations to rebuild Alex Lonsdale’s mind.
In the demonstration of his own genius, he would have his own revenge.
“But why can’t he do it here?” Ellen asked. Several hours of fitful sleep had eased the exhaustion she had felt that morning, but she still found it impossible to absorb every word Marsh had spoken. Patiently Marsh explained it once again.
“It’s the equipment. It’s extensive, and it’s all built into his O.R. It simply can’t be moved, at least not quickly, and not into our facility. We just don’t have the space.”
“But can Alex survive it?”
This time it was Frank who answered her question. “We don’t know,” he said. “I think he can. His pulse is weak, but it’s steady, and the respirator can go in the ambulance with him. There’s a mobile ICU in Palo Alto, and we can use that.”
There was a silence, then Marsh spoke, his voice quiet but urgent. “You have to decide, Ellen. This waiver needs both our signatures.”
Ellen gazed at her husband a moment, her thoughts suddenly far in the past.
Raymond Torres. Tall and good-looking, with dark, burning eyes, but no one anyone would ever consider going out with. And he’d been smart, too. In fact, he’d been the smartest person in her class. But strange, in a way she’d never quite understood, nor even, for that matter, cared about understanding. He’d always acted as though he was better than anyone, and never had any friends, either of his own race or of hers. And now, suddenly, the life of her son depended on him.
“What’s he like?” she suddenly asked.
Marsh looked at her curiously. “Does it matter?”
Ellen hesitated, then slowly shook her head. “I don’t suppose so,” she replied. “But I used to know him, and he was always … well, I guess he seemed arrogant, and sometimes he was almost scary. None of us ever liked him.”
Marsh smiled tightly. “Well, he hasn’t changed. He’s still arrogant, and I don’t like him at all. But he might be able to save Alex.”
Once more Ellen hesitated. In times past, she and Marsh used to spend hours discussing their problems, listening to each other, balancing their thoughts and feelings, weighing what was best for them. But in the last few months—or had it become years?—that easy communication had been lost. They had been too busy—Marsh with the expanding Medical Center, herself with the expanding social life that had accompanied the building of the Center. What had been sacrificed, finally, was their ability to communicate with each other. Now, with Alex’s life hanging in the balance, she had to come to a decision.
She made up her mind. “We don’t have a choice, do we?” she asked. “We have to try.” She picked up the pen and signed the waiver, which she had not bothered to read, then handed it back to Marsh. A sudden thought flashed through her mind.
If Raymond Torres thinks it will work, why won’t he take responsibility for it?
Then she decided that she didn’t want to know the answer to that question.