Interface

7

Gangadhar V.R.J.V.V. Radhakrishnan, M.D., Ph.D., had not cracked a skull in seventy-nine days and he was not happy about it. Even the shaven-headed thugs stamping out license plates ten miles down the road at the New Mexico State Men's Reformatory would get rusty without their daily quota of practice on the license-plate stamping machine. For a neurosurgeon, eleven weeks without pressing the madly vibrating blade of the bone saw against a freshly peeled human skull was intolerable.

In order to crack a skull he had to get to a decent hospital. In order to reach a decent hospital from here, he had to use the Elton State University airplane. But every time he needed it, the football coach had taken it out on a recruiting trip to L.A. or Houston. This was in direct violation of Dr. Radhakrishnan's contract with Elton State, which stated that he would have access to the airplane as needed.

The only person who could help him was Dr. Artaxerxes Jackman, the president of Elton State University, and Jackman had to be approached in the right way. Jackman had a Ph.D. in education and higher administration. It was almost criminal fraud to call him a doctor, but in the academic sense, a doctor he was. Dr. Radhakrishnan had not spent most of his life in his native India without figuring out that important positions are quite often filled by underserving swine, who must be deferred to in any case.

His own father was a case in point. Forty years ago, about the time Gangadhar had been born, Jagdish Radhakrishnan had been a rising young idealist in the Nehru administration. That very idealism had led to an appointment on the Railway Corruption Enquiry Committee of 1953. Jagdish had carried out his respon­sibilities zealously, refusing to pull his punches even when it became evident that he was getting close to many a high-ranking official. He found himself summarily transferred to a low post in the Sheet Mica Price Controller's organisation, where he had lan­guished ever since, living only for the achievements of his two sons: Arun, the golden boy, the firstborn son, now a member of Parliament, and to a lesser extent, Gangadhar.

Gangadhar V.R.J.V.V. Radhakrishnan knew that the faculty of Elton State University was, in the academic world, roughly equivalent to the Sheet Mica Price Controller's Organisation, and that if he ever wanted to get out of this place he would have show more discretion - more savvy - less boneheaded idealism than his father had back in the 1950s. For half a year he had been trying, diplomatically and politely, to get in for a face-to-face with Dr. Jackman, but there meeting kept getting postponed.

Before he even veered into the parking lot of the Coover biotechnology pavilion, blood balloons began to detonate on the windshield of his full-sized, one-ton, six-wheel-drive Chevy pickup truck. He kept driving even though he could no longer see through the windshield. If he was lucky, he might run over an animal rights activist and then claim it was an accident. The truck was not in a mood to slow down; it was heavily laden with fifty-pound sacks of Purina Monkey Chow. He had just paid for the monkey chow himself, with his own money, down at the grain elevator - the closest thing there was to a skyscraper in Elton, a white tubular obelisk sticking up above the railroad tracks on the edge of town. He had talked to the grinning windburned Nazis, given them his money, endured their snickering at his accent and their remarks about his heavy winter coat.

"So what do you do with this stuff? Fry it up or just eat it cold?" one of them had said, as they were piling the monkey chow into his truck.

"I feed it to brain-damaged lower primates," Dr. Radhakrishnan had said. "Would you like a sample?"

The one thing they valued him for - that gave him potential status as a human being in their eyes - was his monster truck: 454 cubic inches of V-8 power, double wheels on the rear axle, a thick black roll bar brandishing great mesh-covered Stalag 17 searchlights that could pick out a shrew on a rock in a midnight windstorm across two miles of chaparral. He had traded in a BMW for this coarse and ungainly machine halfway through his first winter here, almost two years ago, when he found out that the ultimate driving machine simply did not go in a six-foot snowdrift.

The double-edged windshield wipers smeared blood across the windshield in gory arcs, giving him a partial view of the loading dock. It wasn't real blood, of course. After the first few attacks, they had decided it was politically incorrect to use the real stuff and they had switched to Karo syrup with red dye in it. In the cold February air, it congealed on contact. Dr. Radhakrishnan preferred the real blood; it was easier to wash off.

A dozen of his grad students and lab techs were waiting for him around back at the loading dock. Dr. Radhakrishnan pulled up to it and left the motor running. They jumped into the back like a commando team and formed a human chain, passing the fifty-pound sacks of monkey chow up across the dock and into the freight elevator. Radhakrishnan had a total of fifteen grad students: four Japanese, two Chinese, three Korean, one Indonesian, three Indian, one Pakistani, and one American. They had learned to work together well at times such as this, even the American.

He pulled his empty truck around into the parking lot. Dr. Radhakrishnan had a reserved parking space near the entrance. Right now half a dozen activists were occupying it with their bodies, staging a die-in. Most of them were just doing it in their Levi's and Timberland's, but the star of the show was a person in a gorilla suit with a big steel colander over his head with a pair of jumper cables clamped on to it. The gorilla spazzed out and died grandly as Dr. Radhakrishnan's blood-soaked four-by-four cruised past in low gear, a shattered balloon fluttering from the radio antenna, and parked in an unreserved spot farther from the door.

They thought they were going to force Dr. Radhakrishnan to change his ways by making him feel bad. They thought that the way to make him feel bad was to make him feel unliked. They were desperately wrong on both counts.

He shoved a magnetically coded ID card into a slot, punched in a secret code, and the door opened for him. This new facility had been built securely, because they knew that the animal rights people would try to find a way in. They didn't have a chance; they were like raccoons trying to break into a missile silo.

The top floor belonged to Radhakrishnan and his crew. He had to punch in more numbers to get out of the elevator lobby. Then he smelled home. It had the sharp disinfectant smell of a doctor's office with a low undertone of barnyard.

A baboon was sitting in a stainless steel chair in the Procedure Room, wrists and ankles loosely taped in place. The baboon was anesthetized and did not need to be restrained; otherwise, the tape wouldn't have held him. All it did was fix him in a convenient position.

The entire top of the baboon's skull had been removed to expose the brain. Park and Toyoda were under the hood, as it were, working on the baboon's electrical system. Toyoda had his hands in there, maneuvering a narrow probe with a miniature video camera on the end of it. The output of the video camera was splashed up on a big-screen Trinitron. Nearly inaudible high-pitched ticking and whistling sounds emerged from the headphones of his Walkman; he was listening to some particularly noxious form of American music.

Park held a retractor with one hand and a mug of coffee in the other. Both of them ignored the baboon and kept their eyes on the TV set. It was providing live coverage of the interior spaces of the baboon's brain: a murkey universe of gray mush with the occasional branching network of blood vessels.

"A little bit left," Park suggested. The camera swung in that direction and suddenly there was something different, something with hard, straight edges, embedded in the brain tissue. It did not seem to have been dropped into a hole, though; it seemed as though the brain had grown around it, like a tree growing around a fence post. The object was a neutral, milky white, with a serial number stamped into the top. Any layman coming in off the street would have identified the substance as teflon. It was just translucent enough that one could make out, inside the teflon shell, a sort of squared-off sunburst pattern, like the rising sun flag of the Imperial Japanese Navy, etched in silver against a neutral gray background. At the center of that sunburst was a tiny square region that contained several hundred thousand microscopic transistors.

But neither Park nor Toyoda nor Dr. Radhakrishnan looked at that part of it. They were all looking at the interface - the boundary between the sharp edge of the teflon casing and the brain tissue, with its infinite, organic watershed system of capillaries. It looked good: no swelling, no necrosis, no gap between the baboon and the microchip.

"A keeper," Toyoda said, grinning, pronouncing this newly acquired bit of American slang with great precision.

"Bingo," Park said.

"Which baboon is this?" Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

"Number twenty-three," Toyoda said. "We implanted three weeks ago."

"How long has he been off the antirejection meds?"

"One week."

"Looks like he'll do well," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "I suppose we should go ahead and give him a name."

"Okay," Park said as he slurped uncertainly at his lukewarm java. "What do you want to call him?"

"Let's call him Mr. President," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

Two men were waiting for Dr. Radhakrishnan in front of his office. It was unusual, this early in the morning; Dr. Radhakrishnan's secretary wouldn't even be here for another half hour. One of the men was Dr. Artaxerxes Jackman, of all people, looking somewhat grumpy and astonished. The other man was a stranger, a man in his forties with sandy blond hair. He was wearing the best suit that Dr. Radhakrishnan had ever seen west of the Mississippi, a charcoal-gray number with widely spaced stripes, sort of a City of London number. Both men stood up as Dr. Radhakrishnan entered the room.

"Dr. Radhakrishnan," Jackman said, "no one was here so we just figured we'd set up and wait for you. I want you to meet Mr. Salvador here."

"Dr. Radhakrishnan, it's a pleasure and an honor," Salvador said, extending his hand. He wore no jewelry except for cufflinks; when he extended his arm, just the right amount of cuff - plain, basic white - protruded from the sleeve of his jacket. He did not go in for the crushing American style of handshake. His accident was definitely not American either, but beyond that, it was as untrace­able as a ransom note.

"You are up bright and early," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, ushering Mr. Salvador into his office. Jackman had already departed, slowly and reluctantly, casting glances over his shoulder.

"No earlier than you, Dr. Radhakrishnan, and certainly no brighter," Mr. Salvador said. "Jet lag would not allow me to sleep later and so I thought I would get an early start."

Dr. Radhakrishnan handed him some coffee. Salvador held the mug out in front of him for a moment, examining it like a freshly excavated amphora, as though he had never seen coffee served in anything other than a cup with a saucer. "Comanches," Salvador paid, reading the mug.

"That is the name of the football team associated with this institution," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

"Ah, yes, football," Salvador said, his memory jogged. He was showing all the signs of a man who had just flown in from some other hemisphere and who was trying to get cued into the local culture. "That's right, this must be high football territory. The pilot told me that we are on mountain time here. Is that correct?" "Yes. Two hours behind New York, one ahead of L.A." "I didn't know that such a time zone existed until this morning." "Neither did I, until I came here."

Salvador took a sip of coffee and sat forward, all business. "Well, I would love to indulge my weakness for endless small talk, but it would be wrong to waste your time, and it is rude for me to sit here being mysterious. I understand that you are the world's best brain surgeon."

"That is flattering but not exactly true. I could not even aspire to that tide unless I devoted myself to doing procedures."

"But instead you have chosen to devote your career to research."

"Yes."

"It is a common career choice among the very finest medical minds. There's more of a challenge in trying something new, isn't there?"

"In general, yes."

"Now, it is my understanding - and please correct me if I say something stupid - that you are developing a process to help persons who have suffered brain damage."

"Certain types of brain damage only," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, trying to be discouragingly cautious; but Mr. Salvador was not even slightly deterred.

"As I understand it you implant some kind of device in the damaged part of the brain. It connects itself to the brain on one side and to the nerves on the other, taking the place of damaged tissue."

"That is correct."

"Does it work with aphasia?"

"Pardon me?"

"A speech impediment - caused, say, by a stroke?"

Dr. Radhakrishnan was badly thrown off stride. "I know what aphasia is," he said, "but we do our work on baboons. Baboons can't talk."

"Suppose they could?"

"Speculatively, it would depend on the extent and the type of the damage."

"Dr. Radhakrishnan, I would appreciate it very much if you would listen to a tape for me," Salvador said, pulling a microcassette recorder out of his pocket.

"A tape of what?"

"Of a friend of mine who recently became ill. He suffered a stroke in his office. Now, as luck would have it, this took place while he was dictating a letter on a tape machine."

"Mr. Salvador, excuse me, but what are you getting at here?" Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

"Nothing really," Salvador said, good-humored and unruffled as if this were an entirely normal procedure.

"Are you about to ask me for some kind of a medical opinion?" "Yes."

Radhakrishnan had a canned speech cued up, about how the doctor/patient relationship was extremely solemn and how he could not even dream of diagnosing a patient without hours of examination and the all-important paperwork. But something stopped him from saying it.

It might have been Mr. Salvador's unpretentious and offhand manner. It might have been his personal elegance, his obvious status as a member of the upper class, which made it painful to bring up such banal issues. And it might have been the fact that he had been escorted here personally by Jackman, who would not have bothered to do so unless Mr. Salvador were very important. Mr. Salvador took Dr. Radhakrishnan's silence as permission. "The first voice you will hear will be that of my friend's secretary, who discovered him after the stroke." And he started the tape rolling. The sound quality was poor but the words were clear enough.

"Willy? Willy, are you all right?" The secretary sounded hushed, almost awed.

"Call." This command did not sound finished; the man wanted to say, "Call someone," but he could not summon forth the name. "Call whom?"

"Goddamn it, call her!" The man's voice was deep, his enunciation flawless. "Call whom?"

"The three-alarm lamp scooter." "Mary Catherine?" "Yes, goddamn it!"

"That's all there is," Mr. Salvador said, switching off the machine. Dr. Radhakrishnan raised his eyebrows and took a deep breath. "Well, based on this kind of evidence, it's difficult-"

"Yes, yes, yes," Mr. Salvador said, now sounding a bit annoyed, "it's hard for you to speculate and you can't say anything on the record and all that. I understand your position, doctor. But I attempting to engage you in a purely abstract discussion. Perhaps it would have been better if we had met over dinner, rather than in such a formal setting. We could arrange that, if it would help to get you in the right frame of mind."

Radhakrishnan felt miserably stupid. "That would be difficult to arrange in Elton," he said, "unless you are very fond of chili."

Mr. Salvador laughed. It sounded forced. But it was nice to make the effort.

"Speaking very abstractly, then," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, "if the stroke hit his frontal lobes, he may very well have personality changes, which my therapy could not fix. If that part of his brain was spared, then the cursing probably reflects frustration. Your friend, I would wager, is a successful and powerful man, and you imagine how such a man would feel if he could not even say simple sentences."

"Yes, that puts it in a new light."

"But I can't say much more than that without more data."

"Understood." Then, offhandedly, as if asking for directions to the men's room, Salvador said: "Can you fix the aphasia, then? Assuming your off-the-cuff diagnosis is correct."

"Mr. Salvador, I hardly know where to begin."

Mr. Salvador took out a cigar, a mahogany baseball bat of a thing, and scalped it with a tiny pocket guillotine. "Begin at the beginning," he suggested. "Care for a cigar?"

"To begin with," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, accepting the cigar, "there are ethical questions that entirely rule our performing an experimental procedure on a human subject. So far we've only done this on baboons."

"Let us do a little thought experiment in which we set aside, for the time being, the ethical dimension," Mr. Salvador said. "Then what?"

"Well, if a doctor were willing to do this, and the patient fully understood what he was getting into, we would first have to build the biochips. In order to do this we would have to take a biopsy a few weeks ahead of time, that is, take an actual sample of the patient's brain tissue, then genetically reengineer the nerve cells - in and of itself, hardly a trivial operation - and grow them in vitro until we had enough."

"You do that here?"

"We have an arrangement with a biotech firm in Seattle."

"Which one, Cytech or Genomics?"

"Genomics."

"What is their role?"

"They implant the desired chromosome and then culture the cells in vitro."

"They grow them in a tank," Mr. Salvador translated.

"Yes."

"How long does that phase last?"

"A couple of weeks usually. Cell culture is dodgy. Once we had gotten the cultured cells back from Seattle, we would fabricate the biochips."

"How long does that take?" Mr. Salvador was obsessed with time.

"A few days. Then we would proceed to the implantation."

"The actual operation."

"Yes."

"Tell me about that."

"We identify the dead portions of the brain and remove them cryosurgically. It's rather like a dentist drilling out a cavity, cutting away damaged material until he hits a sound part of the tooth."

Mr. Salvador winced exquisitely.

"When we do this on baboons, we do it in a specially con­structed operating room here that is not sterile. It is not even minimally fit for humans. So in order to do this operation on a human, it would be necessary to build a specially designed operating theater from scratch. The operating room would prob­ably cost more than this entire building in which we are sitting."

This last statement was intended to scare Mr. Salvador off, but it seemed only to bore him. "Have you ever got to the point of drawing up plans and specifications for such a facility?"

"Yes, in a speculative way." Anyone who knew the first thing about grantsmanship always had that kind of thing lying around, to demonstrate the need for far greater amounts of money.

"May I take a copy with me?"

"The plans are on disk. You'll need a fairly powerful Calyx system just to open them up."

"Is that some sort of computer thing? Calyx?"

"Yes. A parallel operating system."

"It is something that one could buy?"

"Yes, of course."

"Who makes it?"

"It's an open system. So there are many such machines on the market - mostly aimed at engineers and scientists."

"Who makes the best sort of Calyx machine?"

"Well, it was invented by Kevin Tice, of course."

Mr. Salvador smiled. "Ah, yes. Mr. Tice. Pacific Netware. Marin Country. Superb. I shall see if Mr. Tice can supply us with a nice machine that will run his Calyx operating system."

Dr. Radhakrishnan assumed that Mr. Salvador was employing a bit of synecdoche here. But he was not entirely sure. "If you do get access to a Calyx machine, with the proper CAD/CAM software, these disks will run on it."

"Then I would be delighted to take a disk with me, with your permission," Mr. Salvador said. Without further discussing that issue of permission, he continued, "Now, what happens after the operation?"

"Once the implantation had been performed, if the patient did not die in the process, there would be a period of a few weeks in which we would keep him on antirejection meds and monitor him closely in order to make sure that his body did not reject the implant. Assuming it worked, he would then have to be retrained. The patient tries to move the paralyzed part of his body. If the movement is correct, then we instruct the chip to remember the pathway taken by the signals from the brain into the nerve. If it is incorrect, we instruct the chip to block that path. Gradually, the good paths get reinforced and the bad ones get blocked."

"How do you instruct the chip? How do you give it feed-back, as it were, once it is implanted inside the patient's head?"

"It includes a miniaturized radio receiver. We have a transmitter that simply broadcasts the instructions directly into the patient's skull."

"Fascinating. Utterly fascinating," Mr. Salvador said, sincerely enough. "And what is the range of this transmission?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Well, how far away from the transmitter can the patient be?"

Dr. Radhakrishnan smiled the same smile he had used with Jackman. "You misconstrue me," he said. "We do not use radio transmission because we need to talk to the patient's biochip from a distance. We use it because this enables us to communicate with the biochip without using an actual wire through the skull into the brain.

"I see, of course," Mr. Salvador said dismissively. "But radio is radio, isn't it?"

Dr. Radhakrishnan smiled and nodded. He could not find any way to disagree with the statement "radio is radio."