I laughed. I liked Faust. He was funny, smart, and unpretentious.
I checked my watch. “Uh-oh. I need to get you to Engineering. You’ve got an eleven o’clock meeting there, don’t you?” He nodded, so I steered him toward the gate and locked it behind us. On the drive across the river to the main campus, I worked up my nerve. “Mind if I ask your advice about something?”
“My advice? Sure, ask away. Just remember, though, it’s worth what you pay for it.”
I hesitated, unsure how much background to give. “I have a colleague here,” I began. “A pathologist—the medical examiner, actually. He suffered traumatic injuries to his hands recently. He lost the thumb, index finger, and middle finger of his right hand and all of his left hand.”
He nodded. “I remember reading about this. Gamma-radiation burns, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” I was surprised; he reallyhad done his homework.
“That’s a shame. Devastating blow for a physician. Would’ve been worse if he were a surgeon, though. At least he can’t do any harm to his patients, since they’re already dead.” He made a face. “Ouch, that sounded harsh. I apologize. What I meant—”
I waved the apology aside. “It’s okay. I’ve had the same thought a dozen times. I’ve even thought, ‘Too bad he’s not a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist could get by without hands.’”
“Could be,” he said, “but every psychiatrist I know is already pretty strange. Can you imagine how it would mess with the mind of a shrink to lose his hands?”
I tried picturing it—a Freudian analyst on his own couch, staring at the empty cuffs of his tweed jacket—and in spite of myself I laughed. “We are both bad men,” I said. “Both going to hell.”
“If a little gallows humor is a burning offense, we’ll have lots of company,” he responded. “So tell me about your pathologist friend and about the sort of advice you think I might be able to give.”
“One of the options he’s considering is a prosthesis called the i-Hand,” I said. “A bionic hand. If you take off the rubber skin, you can see a metallic version of bones through the fingers. They’re made of some high-tech engineered plastic, and they’re rigged to flexors and extensors and little motors that mimic the tendons in a living hand.”
He nodded. “I’m familiar with the i-Hand,” he said. “It’s a good prosthesis, but I do have one thing against it.”
My heart sank on Garcia’s behalf. “What do you have against it?”
“The fact that we don’t hold the patents on it.” He laughed. “Kidding. Mostly. But myoelectric prostheses are a multimillion-dollar revenue stream, and the embarrassing truth is, this itty-bitty company got out of the gate ahead of OrthoMedica with a better product, and we’re still playing catch-up.” His expression sobered. “It’s not just about money, of course—it’s about need. Worldwide, thousands of people every year lose hands and feet and arms and legs. Did you know that in some parts of the world—Afghanistan, for instance—kids are used as human land-mine detectors? Taliban commanders send kids through areas they think might be mined, and if the kids don’t get blown up, the soldiers know the area’s clear. If the kids do get blown up, the soldiers send more kids through, till they’ve set off all the mines.” He shook his head sadly. “A bionic hand or a carbon-fiber leg isn’t an option for those kids in Afghanistan,” he went on. “They get a cauterized stump and a crutch, maybe a hook in place of their hand, if they’re lucky.” He gave his head a harder shake. “But your friend Dr. Garcia, he’s got some pretty good options, and the i-Hand might just be the best, at least for now.”
“Why ‘for now’—will his options be better later?”
“Sure,” he said. “Prosthetic technology’s always advancing. Today’s prostheses—including the i-Hand—are controlled by consciously twitching various muscles in the arm. It works, but it’s an extra step. Think about it: When you want to pick up a glass of water, you don’t have to tell your muscles,
‘Arm, extend. Now stop. Fingers and thumb, contract.’ Your brain thinks, ‘I want a drink,’ and all the other steps follow automatically. Right now the Pentagon’s putting a lot of R&D money into developing hands and arms that’ll be wired into the brain like that. So a year or two from now…”
“Might be too long for Dr. Garcia to wait,” I finished. “There’s nothing else on the market now you’d recommend above the i-Hand?”