The Terminal Man

Wednesday, March 10, 1971: Implantation

At 6 a.m. Janet Ross was on the third surgical floor, dressed in greens, having coffee and a doughnut. The surgeons' lounge was busy at this hour. Although operations were scheduled to begin at six, most didn't get going for fifteen or twenty minutes after that. The surgeons sat around, reading the newspaper, discussing the stock market and their golf games. From time to time one of them would leave, go to the overhead viewing galleries, and look down on their ORs to see how preparations were coming.

She was the only woman in the room, and her presence changed the masculine atmosphere subtly. It annoyed her that she should be the only woman, and it annoyed her that the men should become quieter, more polite, less jovial and raucous. She didn't give a damn if they were raucous, and she resented being made to feel like an intruder. It seemed to her that she had been an intruder all her life, even when she was very young. Her father had been a surgeon who never bothered to conceal his disappointment and irritation that he had a daughter instead of a son. A son would have fitted into his scheme of life; he could have brought him to the hospital on Saturday mornings, taken him into the operating rooms - those were all things you could do with a son. But a daughter was something else, a perplexing entity not suited for a surgical life. And therefore an intrusion…

She looked around at all the surgeons in the lounge, and then, to cover her unease, she went to the phone and dialed the seventh floor.

"This is Dr. Ross. Is Mr. Benson on call?"

"He was just sent."

"When did he leave the floor?"

"About five minutes ago."

She hung up and went back to her coffee. Ellis appeared and waved to her across the room. "There'll be a five-minute delay hooking into the computer," he said. "They're tying in the lines now. Is the patient on call?"

"Sent five minutes ago."

"You seen Morris?"

"Not yet."

"He better get his ass down here," Ellis said.

Somehow that made her feel good.

Morris was in the elevator with a nurse and Benson, who lay on a stretcher, and one of the cops. As they rode down, Morris said to the cop, "You can't get off on the floor."

"Why not?"

"We're going onto the sterile floor directly."

"What should I do?" The cop was intimidated. He'd been docile and hesitant all morning. The routine of surgery left him feeling a helpless outsider.

"You can watch from the viewing gallery on the third floor. Tell the desk nurse I said it was all right."

The cop nodded. The elevator stopped at the second floor. The doors opened to reveal a hallway with people, all in surgical greens, walking back and forth. A large sign read STERILE AREA. NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION. The lettering was red.

Morris and the nurse wheeled Benson out of the elevator.

The cop remained behind, looking nervous. He pushed the button for the third floor, and the doors closed.

Morris went with Benson down the corridor. After a moment, Benson said, "I'm still awake."

"Of course you are."

"But I don't want to be awake."

Morris nodded patiently. Benson had gotten pre-op medications half an hour earlier. They would be taking effect soon, making him drowsy. "How's your mouth?"

"Dry"

That was the atropine beginning to work. "You'll be okay." Morris himself had never had an operation. He'd performed hundreds, but never experienced one himself. In recent years, he had begun to wonder how it felt to be on the other side of things. He suspected, though he would never admit it, that it must be awful.

"You'll be okay," he said to Benson again, and touched his shoulder.

Benson just stared at him as he was wheeled down the corridor to OR 9.

OR 9 was the largest operating room in the hospital. It was nearly thirty feet square and packed with electronic equipment. When the full surgical team was there - all twelve of them - things got pretty crowded. But now just two scrub nurses were working in the cavernous gray-tiled space. They were setting out sterile tables and drapes around the chair.

OR 9 had no operating table. Instead, there was a softly cushioned upright chair, like a dentist's chair. Janet Ross watched the girls through the windows in the door that separated the scrub room from the operating room. Alongside her, Ellis finished his scrub and muttered something about fucking Morris being fucking late. Ellis got profane before operations. He also got very nervous, though he seemed to think nobody noticed that. Ross had scrubbed with him on several animal procedures and had seen the ritual - tension and profanity before the operation, and utter bland calmness once things were under way.

Ellis turned off the faucets with his elbows and entered the OR, backing in so that his arms did not touch the door. A nurse handed him a towel. While he dried his hands, he looked back through the door at Ross, and then up at the glass-walled viewing gallery overhead. Ross knew there would be a crowd in the gallery watching the operation.

Morris came down and began scrubbing. She said, "Ellis wondered where you were."

"Tour guide for the patient," he said.

One of the circulating nurses entered the scrub room and said, "Dr. Ross, there's somebody here from the radiation lab with a unit for Dr. Ellis. Does he want it now?"

"If it's loaded," she said.

"I'll ask," the nurse said. She disappeared, and stuck her head in a moment later. "He says it's loaded and ready to go, but unless your equipment is shielded it could give you trouble."

Ross knew that all the OR equipment had been shielded the week before. The plutonium exchanger didn't put out much radiation - not enough to fog an X-ray plate - but it could confuse more delicate scientific equipment. There was, of course, no danger to people.

"We're shielded," Ross said. "Have him take it into the OR."

Ross turned to Morris, scrubbing alongside her. "How's

Benson?"

"Nervous."

"He should be," she said. Morris glanced at her, his eyes questioning above the gauze surgical mask. She shook her hands free of excess water and backed into the OR. The first thing she saw was the rad-lab man wheeling in the tray with the charging unit on it. It was contained in a small lead box. On the sides were stenciled DANGER RADIATION and the triple-blade orange symbol for radiation. It was all faintly ridiculous; the charging unit was quite safe.

Ellis stood across the room, being helped into his gown. He plunged his hands into his rubber gloves and flexed his fingers. To the rad-lab man he said, "Has it been sterilized?"

"Sir?"

"Has the unit been sterilized?"

"I don't know, sir."

"Then give it to one of the girls and have her autoclave it. It's got to be sterile."

Dr. Ross dried her hands and shivered in the cold of the operating room. Like most surgeons, Ellis preferred a cold room - too cold, really, for the patient. But as Ellis often said, "If I'm happy, the patient's happy."

Ellis was now across the room standing by the viewing box, while the circulating nurse, who was not scrubbed, put up the patient's X-rays. Ellis peered closely at them, though he had seen them a dozen times before. They were perfectly normal skull films. Air had been injected into the ventricles, so that the horns stood out darkly.

One by one the rest of the team filtered into the room.

All together, there were two scrub nurses, two circulating nurses, one orderly, Ellis, two assistant surgeons including Morris, two electronics technicians, and a computer programmer. The anaesthetist was outside with Benson.

Without looking up from his console, one of the electronics men said, "Any time you want to begin, Doctor."

"We'll wait for the patient," Ellis said dryly, and there were some chuckles from the Nine Group team.

Ross looked around the room at the seven TV screens. They were of different sizes and stationed in different places, depending on how important they were to the surgeon. The smallest screen monitored the closed-circuit taping of the operation. At the moment, it showed an overhead view of the empty chair.

Another screen, nearer the surgeon, monitored the electroencephalogram, or EEG. It was turned off now, the sixteen pens tracing straight white lines across the screen. There was also a large TV screen for basic operative parameters: electrocardiogram, peripheral arterial pressure, respirations, cardiac output, central venous pressure, rectal temperature. Like the EEG screen, it was also tracing a series of straight lines.

Another pair of screens were completely blank. They would display black-and-white image-intensified X-ray views during the operation.

Finally, two color screens displayed the LIMBIC Program output. That program was cycling now, without punched-in coordinates. On the screens, a picture of the brain rotated in three dimensions while random coordinates, generated by computer, flashed below. As always, Ross felt that the computer was another, almost human presence in the room - an impression that was always heightened as the operation proceeded.

Ellis finished looking at the X-rays and glanced up at the clock. It was 6:19; Benson was still outside being checked by the anaesthetist. Ellis walked around the room, talking briefly to everyone. He was being unusually friendly, and

Ross wondered why. She looked up at the viewing gallery and saw the director of the hospital, the chief of surgery, the chief of medicine, and the chief of research all looking down through the glass. Then she understood.

It was 6:21 when Benson was wheeled in. He was now heavily pre-medicated, relaxed, his body limp, his eyelids heavy. His head was wrapped in a green towel.

Ellis supervised Benson's transfer from the stretcher to the chair. As the leather straps were placed across his arms and legs, Benson seemed to wake up, his eyes opening wide.

"That's just so you don't fall off," Ellis said easily.

"We don't want you to hurt yourself."

"Uh-huh," Benson said softly, and closed his eyes again. Ellis nodded to the nurses, who removed the sterile towel from Benson's head. The naked head seemed very small - that was Ross's usual reaction - and white. The skin was smooth, except for a razor nick on the left frontal. Ellis's blue-ink

"X" marks were clearly visible on the right side.

Benson leaned back in the chair. He did not open his eyes again. One of the technicians began to fix the monitor leads to his body, strapping them on with little dabs of electrolyte paste. They were attached quickly; soon his body was connected to a tangle of multicolored wires running off to the equipment.

Ellis looked at the TV monitor screens. The EEG was now tracing sixteen jagged lines; heartbeat was recorded; respirations were gently rising and falling; temperature was steady. The technicians began to punch pre-op parameters into the computer. Normal lab values had already been fed in. During the operation, the computer would monitor all vital signs at five-second intervals, and would signal if anything went wrong.

"Let's have music, please," Ellis said, and one of the nurses slipped a tape cartridge into the portable cassette recorder in a corner of the room. A Bach concerto began to play softly. Ellis always operated to Bach; he said he hoped that the precision, if not the genius, might be contagious.

They were approaching the start of the operation. The digital wall clock said 6:29:14 a.m. Next to it, an elapsed-time digital clock still read 0:00:00.

With the help of a scrub nurse, Ross put on her sterile gown and gloves. The gloves were always difficult for her. She didn't scrub in frequently, and when she plunged her fingers into the gloves she caught her hand, missing one of the finger slots and putting two fingers in another. It was impossible to read the scrub nurse's reaction; only her eyes were visible above the mask. But Ross was glad that Ellis and the other surgeons were turned away attending to the patient.

She stepped to the back of the room, being careful not to trip over the thick black power cables that snaked across the floor in all directions. Ross did not participate in the initial stages of the operation. She waited until the stereotaxic mechanism was in place and the coordinates were determined. She had time to stand to one side and pluck at her glove until all the fingers were in the right slots. There was no real purpose for her to attend the operation at all, but McPherson was insistent that one member of the non-surgical staff scrub in each day that they operated. He felt it kept the Unit more cohesive. At least that was what he said.

She watched Ellis and his assistants across the room draping Benson; then she looked over to the draping as seen on the closed-circuit monitor. The entire operation would be recorded on video tape for later review.

"I think we can start now," Ellis said easily. "Go ahead with the needle."

The anaesthetist, working behind the chair, placed the needle between the second and third lumbar spaces of Benson's spine. Benson moved once and made a slight sound, and then the anaesthetist said, "I'm through the dura. How much do you want?"

The computer console flashed "OPERATION BEGUN." The computer automatically started the elapsed-time clock, which ticked off the seconds.

"Give me thirty cc's to begin," Ellis said. "Let's have X-ray, please."

The X-ray machines were swung into position at the front and side of the patient's head. Film plates were set on, locking in with a click. Ellis stepped on the floor button, and the TV screens glowed suddenly, showing black-and-white images of the skull. He watched in two views as air slowly filled the ventricles, outlining the horns in black.

The programmer sat at the computer console, his hands fluttering over the buttons. On his TV display screen, the words "PNEUMOGRAPH INITIATED" appeared.

"All right, let's fix his hat," Ellis said. The boxlike tubular stereotactic frame was placed over the patient's head. Burr-hole locations were fixed and checked. When Ellis was satisfied, he injected local anaesthetic into the scalp points. Then he cut the skin and reflected it back, exposing the white surface of the skull.

"Drill, please."

With the 2-mm drill, he made the first of the two holes on the right side of the skull. He placed the stereotactic frame - the "hat" - over the head, and screwed it down securely. Ross looked over at the computer display. Values for heart rate and blood pressure flashed on the screen and faded; everything was normal. Soon the computer, like the surgeons, would begin to deal with more complex matters.

"Let's have a position check," Ellis said, stepping away from the patient, frowning critically at Benson's shaved head and the metal frame screwed on top of it. The X-ray technician came forward and snapped the pictures.

In the old days, Ross remembered, they actually took X-ray plates and determined position by visual inspection of the plates. It was a slow process. Using a compass, protractor, and ruler, they drew lines across the X-ray, measured them, rechecked them. Now the data were fed directly to the computer, which did the analysis more rapidly and more accurately.

All the team turned to look at the computer print-out screen. The X-ray views appeared briefly, and were replaced by schematic drawings. The maxfield location of the stereotactic apparatus was calculated; the actual location was then merged with it. A set of coordinates flashed up, followed by the notation "PLACEMENT CORRECT."

Ellis nodded. "Thank you for your consultation," he said humorlessly, and went over to the tray which held the electrodes.

The team was now using Briggs stainless-steel

Teflon-coated electrode arrays. In the past, they had tried almost everything else: gold, platinum alloy, and even flexible steel strands in the days when the electrodes were placed by inspection. The old inspection operations were bloody, messy affairs. It was necessary to remove a large portion of the skull and expose the surface of the brain. The surgeon found his landmark points on the surface itself, and then placed his electrodes in the substance of the brain. If he had to place them in deep structures, he would occasionally cut through the brain to the ventricles with a knife, and then place them. There were serious complications; the operations were lengthy; the patients never did very well.

Now the computer had changed all that. The computer allowed you to fix a point precisely in three-dimensional space. Initially, along with other researchers in the field, the NPS group had tried to relate deep brain points to skull architecture. They measured their landmark points from the orbit of the eye, from the meatus of the ear, from the sagittal suture. That, of course, didn't work - people's brains did not fit inside their skulls with any consistency. The only way to determine deep brain points was in relation to other brain points - and the logical landmarks were the ventricles, the fluid-filled spaces within the brain. According to the new system, everything was determined in relation to the ventricles.

With the help of the computer, it was no longer necessary to expose the brain surface. Instead, a few small holes were drilled in the skull and the electrodes inserted, while the computer watched by X-ray to make sure they were being placed correctly.

Ellis picked up the first electrode array. From where Ross stood, it looked like a single slender wire. Actually, it was a bundle of twenty wires, with staggered contact points. Each wire was coated with Teflon except for the last millimeter, which was exposed. Each wire was a different length, so that under a magnifying glass, the staggered electrode tips looked like a miniature staircase.

Ellis checked the array under a large glass. He called for more light and turned the array, peering at all contact points. Then he had a scrub nurse plug it into a testing unit and test every contact. This had been done dozens of times before, but Ellis always checked again before insertion. And he always had four arrays sterilized, though he would need only two. Ellis was careful.

At length he was satisfied. "Are we ready to wire?" he asked the team. They nodded. He stepped up to the patient and said, "Let's go through the dura."

Up to this point in the operation, they had drilled through the skull, but had left intact the membrane of dura mater which covered the brain and enclosed the spinal fluid. Ellis's assistant used a probe to puncture the dura.

"I have fluid," he said, and a thin trickle of clear liquid slid down the side of the shaved skull from the hole. A nurse sponged it away.

Ross always found it a source of wonder the way the brain was protected. Other vital body organs were well-protected, of course: the lungs and heart inside the bony cage of the ribs, the liver and spleen under the edge of the ribs, the kidneys packed in fat and secure against thick muscles of the lower back. Good protection, but nothing compared to the central nervous system, which was encased entirely in thick bone. Yet even this was not enough; inside the bone there were sac-like membranes which held cerebrospinal fluid. The fluid was under pressure, so that the brain sat in the middle of a pressurized liquid system that afforded its superb protection.

McPherson had compared it to a fetus in a water-filled womb. "The baby comes out of the womb," McPherson said, "but the brain never comes out of its own special womb."

"We will place now," Ellis said.

Ross moved forward, joining the surgical team gathered around the head. She watched as Ellis slid the tip of the electrode array into the burr hole and then pressed slightly, entering the substance of the brain. The technician punched buttons on the computer console. The display screen read:

The patient did not move, made no sound. The brain could not feel pain; it lacked pain sensors. It was one of the freaks of evolution that the organ which sensed pain throughout the body could feel nothing itself.

Ross looked away from Ellis toward the X-ray screens.

There, in harsh black and white, she saw the crisply outlined white electrode array begin its slow, steady movement into the brain. She looked from the anterior view to the lateral, and then to the computer-generated images.

The computer was interpreting the X-ray images by drawing a simplified brain, with the temporal-lobe target area in red and a flickering blue track showing the line the electrode must traverse from entry point to the target area. So far, Ellis was following the track perfectly.

"Very pretty," Ross said.

The computer flashed up triple coordinates in rapid succession as the electrodes went deeper.

"Practice makes perfect," Ellis said sourly. He was now using the scale-down apparatus attached to the stereotactic hat. The scaler reduced his crude finger movements to very small changes in electrode movements. If he moved his finger half an inch, the scaler converted that to half a millimeter. Very slowly the electrodes penetrated deeper into the brain.

From the screens, Ross could lift her eyes and watch the closed-circuit TV monitor showing Ellis at work. It was easier to watch on TV than to turn around and see the real thing. But she turned around when she heard Benson say, very distinctly, "Uh."

Ellis stopped. "What was that?"

"Patient," the anaesthetist said, gesturing toward Benson.

Ellis paused, bent over, to look at Benson's face. "You all right, Mr. Benson?" He spoke loudly, distinctly.

"Yuh. Fine," Benson said. His voice was deeply drugged.

"Any pain?"

"No."

"Good. Just relax now." And he returned to his work.

Ross sighed in relief. Somehow, all that had made her tense, even though she knew there was no reason for alarm.

Benson could feel no pain, and she had known all along that his sedation was only that - a kind of deep, drugged semi-sleep, and not unconsciousness. There was no reason for him to be unconscious, no reason to risk general anaesthesia.

She turned back to the computer screen. The computer had now presented an inverted view of the brain, as seen from below, near the neck. The electrode track was visible end on, as a single blue point surrounded by concentric circles.

Ellis was supposed to keep within one millimeter, one twenty-fifth of an inch, of the assigned track. He deviated half a millimeter.

"50 TRACK ERROR," warned the computer. Ross said, "You're slipping off."

The electrode array stopped in its path. Ellis glanced up at the screens. "Too high on beta plane?"

"Wide on gamma."

"Okay."

After a moment, the electrodes continued along the path.

"40 TRACK ERROR," the computer flashed. It rotated its brain image slowly, bringing up an anterolateral view. "20 TRACK

ERROR," it said.

"You're correcting nicely," Ross said.

Ellis hummed along with the Bach and nodded.

"ZERO TRACK ERROR," the computer indicated, and swung the brain view around to a full lateral. The second screen showed a full frontal view. After a few moments, the screen blinked

"APPROACHING TARGET." Ross conveyed the message.

Seconds later, the flashing word "STRIKE."

"You're on," Ross said.

Ellis stepped back and folded his hands across his chest.

"Let's have a coordinate check," he said. The elapsed-time clock showed that twenty-seven minutes had passed in the operation.

The programmer flicked the console buttons rapidly. On the TV screens, the placement of the electrode was simulated by the computer. The simulation ended, like the actual placement, with the word "STRIKE."

"Now match it," Ellis said.

The computer held its simulation on one screen and matched it to the X-ray image of the patient. The overlap was perfect; the computer reported "MATCHED WITHIN ESTABLISHED LIMITS."

"That's it," Ellis said. He screwed on the little plastic button cap which held the electrodes tightly against the skull. Then he applied dental cement to fix it. He untangled the twenty fine wire leads that came off the electrode array and pushed them to one side.

"We can do the next one now," he said.

At the end of the second placement, a thin, arcing cut was made with a knife along the scalp. To avoid important superficial vessels and nerves, the cut ran from the electrode entry points down the side of the ear to the base of the neck. There it deviated to the right shoulder. Using blunt dissection, Ellis opened a small pocket beneath the skin of the right lateral chest, near the armpit.

"Have we got the charging unit?" he asked.

The charger was brought to him. It was smaller than a pack of cigarettes, and contained thirty-seven grams of the radioactive isotope plutonium-239 oxide. The radiation produced heat, which was converted directly by a thermionic unit to electric power. A Kenbeck solid-state DC/DC circuit transformed the output to the necessary voltage.

Ellis plugged the charger into the test pack and did a last-minute check of its power before implantation. As he held it in his hand, he said, "It's cold. I can't get used to that." Ross knew layers of vacuum-foil insulation kept the exterior cool and that inside the packet the radiation capsule was producing heat at 500 degrees Fahrenheit - hot enough to cook a roast.

He checked radiation to be sure there would be no leakage. The meters all read in the low-normal range. There was a certain amount of leakage, naturally, but it was no more than that produced by a commercial color television set.

Finally he called for the dog tag. Benson would have to wear this dog tag for as long as he had the atomic charging unit in his body. The tag warned that the person had an atomic pacemaker, and gave a telephone number. Ross knew that the number was a listing which played a recorded message twenty-four hours a day. The recording gave detailed technical information about the charging unit, and warned that bullet wounds, automobile accidents, fires, and other damage could release the plutonium, which was a powerful alpha-particle emitter. It gave special instructions to physicians, coroners, and morticians, and warned particularly against cremation of the body, unless the charger was first removed.

Ellis inserted the charging unit into the small subdermal pocket he had made in the chest wall. He sewed tissue layers around it to fix it in place. Then he turned his attention to the postage-stamp-sized electronic computer.

Ross looked up at the viewing gallery and saw the wizard twins, Gerhard and Richards, watching intently. Ellis checked the packet under the magnifying glass, then gave it to a scrubbed technician, who hooked the little computer into the main hospital computer.

To Ross, the computer was the most remarkable part of the entire system. Since she had joined the NPS three years before, she had seen the computer shrink from a prototype as large as a briefcase to the present tiny model, which looked small in the palm of a hand yet contained all the elements of the original bulky unit.

This tiny size made subdermal implantation possible. The patient was free to move about, take showers, do anything he wanted. Much better than the old units, where the charger was clipped to a patient's belt and wires dangled down all over.

She looked at the computer screens which flashed

"OPERATIVE MONITORS INTERRUPTED FOR ELECTRONICS CHECK." On one screen, a blown-up circuit diagram appeared. The computer checked each pathway and component independently. It took four-millionths of a second for each check; the entire process was completed in two seconds. The computer flashed

"ELECTRONIC CHECK NEGATIVE." A moment later, brain views reappeared. The computer had gone back to monitoring the operation.

"Well," Ellis said, "let's hook him up." He painstakingly attached the forty fine wire leads from the two electrode arrays to the plastic unit. Then he fitted the wires down along the neck, tucked the plastic under the skin, and called for sutures. The elapsed-time clock read one hour and twelve minutes.

Morris wheeled Benson into the recovery room, a long, low-ceilinged room where patients were brought immediately after operation. The NPS had a special section of the rec room, as did cardiac patients and burns patients. But the NPS section, with its cluster of electronic equipment, had never been used before. Benson was the first case.

Benson looked pale but otherwise fine; his head and neck were heavily bandaged. Morris supervised his transfer from the rolling stretcher to the permanent bed. Across the room, Ellis was telephoning in his operative note. If you dialed extension 1104, you got a transcribing machine. The dictated message would later be typed up by a secretary and inserted in Benson's record.

Ellis's voice droned on in the background. "… centimeter incisions were made over the right temporal region, and 2-millimeter burr holes drilled with a K-7 drill. Implantation of Briggs electrodes carried out with computer assistance on the LIMBIC Program. Honey, that's spelled in capital letter, L-I-M-B-I-C. Program. X-ray placement of electrodes determined with computer review as within established limits. Electrodes sealed with Tyler fivation caps and seven-oh-grade dental sealer. Transmission wires- "

"What do you want on him?" the rec-room nurse asked.

"Vital signs Q five minutes for the first hour, Q fifteen for the second, Q thirty for the third, hourly thereafter. If he's stable, you can move him up to the floor in six hours."

The nurse nodded, making notes. Morris sat down by the bedside to write a short operative note:

Short operative note on Harold F. Benson

Pre-op dx: psychomotor (temporal lobe) epilepsy

Post-op dx: same

Procedure: implantation of twin Briggs electrode arrays into right temporal lobe with subdermal placing of computer and plutonium charging unit.

Pre-op meds:

phenobarbital 500 mg

one hr. prior to

atropine 60 mg procedure

Anaesthesia: lidocaine (1/1000) epinephrine locally

Estimated blood loss: 250 cc

Fluid replacement: 200 cc D5/W Operative duration: 1 hr. 12 min. Post-op condition: good

As he finished the note, he heard Ross say to the nurse,

"Start him on phenobarb as soon as he's awake." She sounded angry.

He looked up at her. "Something the matter?"

"No," she said.

"You seem angry."

"Are you picking a fight with me?"

"No," he said, "of course- "

"Just make sure he gets his phenobarb. We want to keep him sedated until we can interface him."

And she stormed out of the room. Morris watched her go, then glanced over at Ellis, who was still dictating but had been watching. Ellis shrugged.

"What's the matter with her?" the nurse asked.

"Probably just tired," Morris said. He adjusted the monitoring equipment on the shelf above Benson's head. He turned it on and waited until it warmed up. Then he placed the temporary induction unit around Benson's taped shoulder.

During the operation, all the wires had been hooked up, but they were not working now. Before that happened, Benson had to be "interfaced." This meant determining which of the forty electrodes would stop an epileptic seizure, and locking in the appropriate switches on the subdermal computer.

Because the computer was under the skin, the locking in would be accomplished by an induction unit, which worked through the skin. But the interfacing couldn't be done until tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the equipment monitored Benson's brainwave activity. The screens above the bed glowed a bright green, and showed the white tracing of his EEG. The pattern was normal for alpha rhythms slowing from sedation.

Benson opened his eyes and looked at Morris.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

"Sleepy," he said. "Is it beginning soon?"

"It's over," Morris said.

Benson nodded, not at all surprised, and closed his eyes.

A rad-lab technician came in and checked for leakage from the plutonium with a Geiger counter. There was none. Morris slipped the dog tag around Benson's neck. The nurse picked it up curiously, read it, and frowned.

Ellis came over. "Time for breakfast?"

"Yes," Morris said. "Time for breakfast."

They left the room together.

The trouble was he didn't really like the sound of his voice. His voice was rough and grating, and his enunciation was poor. McPherson preferred to see the words in his mind, as if they had been written. He pressed the microphone button on the dictation machine. "Roman numeral three. Philosophical Implications."

III. Philosophical Implications.

He paused and looked around his office. The large model of the brain sat at the corner of his desk. Shelves of journals along one wall. And the TV monitor. On the screen now he was watching the playback of the morning's operation. The sound was turned off, the milky images silent. Ellis was drilling holes in Benson's head. McPherson watched and began to dictate.

This procedure represents the first direct link between a human brain and a computer. The link is permanent. Now of course, any man sitting at a computer console and interacting with the computer by pressing buttons can be said to be linked.

Too stuffy, he thought. He ran the tape back and made changes. Now, a man sitting at a computer console and interacting with the computer by pressing buttons is linked to the computer. But that link is not direct. And the link is not permanent. Therefore, this operative procedure represents something rather different. How is one to think about it?

A good question, he thought. He stared at the TV image of the operation, then continued.

One might think of the computer in this case as a prosthetic device. Just as a man who has his arm amputated can receive a mechanical equivalent of the lost arm, so a brain-damaged man can receive a mechanical aid to overcome the effects of brain damage. This is a comfortable way to think about the operation. It makes the computer into a high-class wooden leg. Yet the implications go much further than that.

He paused to look at the screen. Somebody at the main tape station had changed reels. He was no longer seeing the operation, but a psychiatric interview with Benson before the surgery. Benson was excited, smoking a cigarette, making stabbing gestures with the lighted tip as he spoke.

Curious, McPherson turned the sound up slightly. "… know what they're doing. The machines are everywhere. They used to be the servants of man, but now they're taking over. Subtly, subtly taking over."

Ellis stuck his head into the office, saw the TV screen, and smiled. "Looking at the 'before' pictures?"

"Trying to get a little work done," McPherson said, and pointed to the dictation machine.

Ellis nodded, ducked out, closing the door behind him.

Benson was saying, "… know I'm a traitor to the human race, because I'm helping to make machines more intelligent. That's my job, programming artificial intelligence, and- "

McPherson turned the sound down until it was almost inaudible. Then he went back to his dictation.

In thinking about computer hardware, we distinguish between central and peripheral equipment. That is, the main computer is considered central even though, in human terms, it may be located in some out-of-the-way place - like the basement of a building, for example. The computer's read-out equipment, display consoles, and so on, are peripheral. They are located at the edges of the computer system, on different floors of the building.

He looked at the TV screen. Benson was particularly excited. He turned up the sound and heard, "… getting more intelligent. First steam engines, then automobiles, and airplanes, then adding machines. Now computers, feedback loops- "

McPherson turned the sound off.

For the human brain, the analogy is a central brain and peripheral terminals, such as mouth, arms, and legs. They carry out the instructions - the output - of the brain. By and large, we judge the workings of the brain by the activity of these peripheral functions. We notice what a person says, and how he acts, and from that deduce how his brain works. This idea is familiar to everyone.

He looked at Benson on the TV screen. What would Benson say? Would he agree or disagree? But then did it matter?

Now, however, in this operation we have created a man with not one brain but two. He has his biological brain, which is damaged, and he has a new computer brain, which is designed to correct the damage. This new brain is intended to control the biological brain. Therefore a new situation arises. The patient's biological brain is the peripheral terminal - the only peripheral terminal - for the new computer. In one area, the new computer brain has total control. And therefore the patient's biological brain, and indeed his whole body, has become a terminal for the new computer. We have created a man who is one single, large, complex computer terminal. The patient is a read-out device for the new computer, and he is as helpless to control the read-out as a TV screen is helpless to control the information presented on it.

Perhaps that was a bit strong, he thought. He pressed the button and said, "Harriet, type that last paragraph but I want to look at it, okay? Roman numeral four. Summary and Conclusions."

IV. Summary and Conclusions.

He paused again, and turned up the sound on Benson. Benson was saying, "… hate them, particularly the prostitutes. Airplane mechanics, dancers, translators, gas-station attendants, the people who are machines, or who service machines. The prostitutes. I hate them all."

As he spoke, Benson continued to stab with his cigarette.

"And how did you feel?" Dr. Ramos said.

"Angry," Janet Ross said. "Angry as hell. I mean, that nurse was standing there, watching it all. She pretended she didn't understand what was happening, but she did."

"You felt angry about…" Dr. Ramos let his voice trail off.

"About the operation. About Benson. They went ahead and did it. I told them from the beginning - from the goddamned very beginning - that it was a bad idea, but Ellis and Morris and McPherson all wanted to do it. They're so cocky. Particularly Morris. When I saw him in the recovery room, gloating over Benson - who was all taped up and pale as a ghost - I just got mad."

"Why is that?"

"Because he was so pale, because he, uh- "

She stopped. She fumbled for an answer, but couldn't think of a logical response.

"I gather the operation was successful," Dr. Ramos said.

"And most people are pale after surgery. What got you mad?"

She said nothing. Finally, she said, "I don't know."

She heard Dr. Ramos shift in his chair. She could not see him; she was lying on the couch, and Dr. Ramos was behind her head. There was a long silence while she stared at the ceiling and tried to think what to say. Her thoughts seemed to be churning, not making any sense. Finally Dr. Ramos said,

"The presence of the nurse seems important to you."

"It does?"

"Well, you mentioned it."

"I wasn't aware I had."

"You said the nurse was there and knew what was going on.

… What, exactly, was going on?"

"I was mad."

"But you don't know why?…"

"Yes, I do," she said. "It was Morris. He's so cocky."

"Cocky," Dr. Ramos repeated.

"Overly self-assured."

"You said cocky."

"Look, I didn't mean anything by that; it was just a word-

" She broke off. She was very angry. She could hear it in her voice.

"You are angry now," Dr. Ramos said.

"Very."

"Why?"

After a long pause, she sad, "They didn't listen to me."

"Who didn't listen to you?"

"Any of them. Not McPherson, not Ellis, not Morris. Nobody listened to me."

"Did you tell Dr. Ellis or Dr. McPherson you were angry?"

"No."

"But you vented your anger on Dr. Morris."

"Yes." He was leading her someplace and she couldn't see where. Normally at this point she could jump ahead and understand. But this time-

"How old is Dr. Morris?"

"I don't know. About my age. Thirty, thirtyone - something in there."

"About your age."

That pissed her off, his way of repeating things. "Yes, God damn it, about my age."

"And a surgeon."

"Yes…"

"Is it easier to express anger toward someone you regard as a contemporary?"

"I never thought about it."

"Your father was also a surgeon, but he wasn't your contemporary."

"You don't have to draw me a picture," she said.

"You're still angry."

She sighed. "Let's change the subject."

"All right," he said, in that easy voice that she sometimes liked, and sometimes hated.

Morris hated to do Initial Interviews. The Initial Interview staff consisted mostly of clinical psychologists; the work was lengthy and boring. A recent tabulation had shown that only one in forty new patients to the NPS received further work; and only one in eighty-three was accepted as having some variety of organic brain disease with behavioral manifestations. That meant most Initial Interviews were a waste of time.

And it was particularly true of off-the-street patients. A year ago McPherson had decided, for political reasons, that anyone who heard of the NPS and presented himself directly would be seen. Most patients were still referrals, of course, but McPherson felt the image of the Unit depended upon prompt treatment of self-referrals as well.

McPherson also felt that everyone on the staff should do some Initial Interviews from time to time. Morris worked two days a month in the little interview rooms with the one-way glass mirrors. This was one of his days, but he didn't want to be here; he was still exhilarated from the morning's operation, and he resented returning to this kind of mundane routine.

He looked up unhappily as the next patient came into the room. He was a young man in his twenties, wearing dungarees and a sweatshirt. He had long hair. Morris stood to greet him.

"I'm Dr. Morris."

"Craig Beckerman." The handshake was soft and tentative.

"Please sit down." He waved Beckerman to a chair which faced Morris's desk, and the one-way mirror behind. "What brings you to us?"

"I, uh… I'm curious. I read about you," Beckerman said, "in a magazine. You do brain surgery here."

"That's true."

"Well, I uh… I was curious about it."

"In what sense?"

"Well, this magazine article- Can I smoke here?"

"Of course," Morris said. He pushed an ashtray across the desk to Beckerman. Beckerman brought out a pack of Camels, tapped one on the desk, then lit it.

"The magazine article…"

"Right. The magazine article said that you put wires in the brain. Is that true?"

"Yes, we sometimes perform that kind of surgery."

Beckerman nodded. He smoked the cigarette. "Yeah, well, is it true that you can put wires in so that you feel pleasure? Intense pleasure?"

"Yes," Morris said. He tried to say it blandly.

"That's really true?"

"It's really true," Morris said. And then he shook his pen, indicating that it was out of ink. He opened the desk drawer to take out another pen, and as he reached into the drawer, he pressed a sequence on the buttons hidden inside.

Immediately his telephone rang.

"Dr. Morris."

At the other end, the secretary said, "You rang?"

"Yes. Would you hold all calls, please, and transfer them to Development section?"

"Right away," the secretary said.

"Thank you." Morris hung up. He knew that the Development people would arrive soon, to watch on the other side of the one-way mirror. "I'm sorry for the interruption. You were sayg…"

"About the wires in the brain."

"Yes. We do that operation, Mr. Beckerman, under special circumstances, but it's still pretty experimental."

"That's all right," Beckerman said. He puffed on his cigarette. "That's fine with me."

"If you want information, we can arrange for you to have some reprints and magazine tear sheets explaining our work here."

Beckerman smiled and shook his head. "No, no," he said. "I don't want information. I want the operation. I'm volunteering."

Morris pretended to be surprised. He paused a moment and said, "I see."

"Listen," Beckerman said, "in the article it said that one jolt of electricity was like a dozen orgasms. It sounded really terrific."

"And you want this operation performed on you?"

"Yeah," Beckerman said, nodding vigorously. "Right."

"Why?"

"Are you kidding? Wouldn't everybody want it? Pleasure like that?"

"Perhaps," Morris said, "but you're the first person to ask for it."

"What's the matter?" Beckerman said. "Is it really expensive or something?"

"No. But we don't perform brain surgery for trivial reasons."

"Oh, wow," Beckerman said. "So that's where you are. Jesus."

And he got up and left the room, shaking his head.

The three Development guys looked stupefied. They sat in the adjoining room and stared through the one-way glass. Beckerman had long since departed.

"Fascinating," Morris said.

The Development guys didn't reply. Finally one of them cleared his throat and said, "To say the least."

Morris knew what was going through their heads. For years, they had been doing feasibility studies, potential application studies, ramification studies, industrial operations studies, input-output studies. They were geared to think in the future - and now they were suddenly confronted with the present.

"That man is an elad," one of them said. And sighed.

The elad concept had caused a lot of interest and some detached academic concern. The notion of an electrical addict - a man who needed his jolts of electricity just as some men needed doses of drugs - had seemed almost fancifully speculative. But now they had a patient who was clearly a potential addict.

"Electricity is the biggest kick of all," one of them said, and laughed. But the laugh was nervous, edged with tension.

Morris wondered what McPherson would say. Probably something philosophical. McPherson was mostly interested in philosophy these days.

The idea of an electrical addict was predicated on an astonishing discovery made by James Olds in the 1950s. Olds found that there were areas in the brain where electrical stimulation produced intense pleasure - strips of brain tissue he called "rivers of reward." If an electrode was placed in such an area, a rat would press a self-stimulation lever to receive a shock as often as five thousand times an hour. In its quest for pleasure, it would ignore food and water. It would stop pressing the lever only when it was prostrate with exhaustion.

This remarkable experiment had been repeated with goldfish, guinea pigs, dolphins, cats, and goats. There was no longer any question that the pleasure terminals in the brain were a universal phenomenon. They had also been located in humans.

Out of these considerations had come the notion of the electrical addict, the man who needed pleasurable shocks. At first glance, it seemed impossible for a person to become an addict. But it actually wasn't.

For instance, the technological hardware was now expensive, but it needn't be. One could envision clever Japanese firms manufacturing electrodes for as little as two or three dollars and exporting them.

Nor was the idea of an illegal operation so farfetched. At one time a million American women underwent illegal abortions each year. The implantation brain surgery was somewhat more complex, but not forbiddingly so. And the surgical techniques would become more standardized in the future. It was easy to imagine clinics springing up in Mexico and the Bahamas.

Nor was there a problem finding surgeons to do the job. A single busy, well-organized neurosurgeon could perform ten or fifteen operations a day. He could certainly charge a thousand dollars for each - and with that kind of incentive, unscrupulous surgeons could be found. A hundred thousand dollars a week in cash was a strong inducement to break the law - if indeed a law were ever passed.

That did not seem very likely. A year before, the hospital had organized a seminar with legal scholars on "Biomedical Technology and the Law." Elads were among the subjects discussed, but the lawyers were not responsive. The elad concept did not fit neatly into the already existing pattern of laws governing drug addiction. All those laws recognized that a person could become a drug addict innocently or involuntarily - quite a different proposition from a person coldly seeking a surgical procedure that would make him an addict. Most of the lawyers felt that the public would not seek such an operation; there would be no legal problem because there would be no public demand. Now Beckerman had provided evidence for such a demand.

"I'll be goddamned," another of the Development people said.

Morris found that comment hardly adequate. He himself felt something he had felt once or twice before since joining the NPS. It was the sensation that things were moving too fast, without enough caution and control, and that it could all get out of control, suddenly, and without warng.

At 6 p.m., Roger McPherson, head of the Neuropsychiatric

Research Unit, went up to the seventh floor to check on his patient. At least, that was how he thought of Benson - as his patient. A proprietary feeling, but not entirely incorrect. Without McPherson, there would be no NPS, and without an NPS, there would be no surgery, no Benson. That was how he thought of it.

Room 710 was quiet and bathed in reddish light from the setting sun. Benson appeared to be asleep, but his eyes opened when McPherson closed the door.

"How are you feeling?" McPherson asked, moving close to the bed.

Benson smiled. "Everyone wants to know that," he said.

McPherson smiled back. "It's a natural question."

"I'm tired, that's all. Very tired… Sometimes I think I'm a ticking time bomb, and you're wondering when I'll explode."

"Is that what you think?" McPherson asked. Automatically, he adjusted Benson's covers so he could look at the I.V. line. It was flowing nicely.

"Ticktick," Benson said, closing his eyes again.

"Ticktick."

McPherson frowned. He was accustomed to mechanical metaphors from Benson - the man was preoccupied, after all, with the idea of men as machines. But to have them appear so soon after operation…

"Any pain?"

"None. A little ache behind my ears, like I'd fallen. That's all."

That, McPherson knew, was the bone pain from the drilling.

"Fallen?"

"I'm a fallen man," Benson said. "I've succumbed."

"To what?"

"To the process of being turned into a machine." He opened his eyes and smiled again. "Or a time bomb."

"Any smells? Strange sensations?" As he asked, McPherson looked at the EEG scanner above the bed. It was still reading normal alpha patterns, without any suggestion of seizure activity.

"No. Nothing like that."

"But you feel as if you might explode?" He thought: Ross should really be asking these questions.

"Sort of," Benson said. "In the coming war, we may all explode."

"How do you mean?"

"You look annoyed," Benson said.

"I'm not, just puzzled. How do you mean, in the coming war?"

"In the coming war between men and machines. The human brain is obsolete, you see."

That was a new thought. McPherson hadn't heard it from

Benson before. He stared at him, lying in the bed, his head and shoulders heavily bandaged. It made the upper part of his body and his head appear thick, gross, oversized.

"Yes," Benson said. "The human brain has gone as far as it is going to go. It's exhausted, so it spawned the next generation of intelligent forms. They will- Why am I so tired?" He closed his eyes again.

"You're exhausted from the operation."

"A minor procedure," he said, and smiled with his eyes closed. A moment later he was snoring.

McPherson remained by the bed for a moment, then turned to the window and watched the sun set over the Pacific. Benson had a nice room; you could see a bit of the ocean between the high-rise apartments in Santa Monica. He remained there for several minutes. Benson did not wake. Finally, McPherson went out to the nurses' station to write his note in the chart.

"Patient alert, responsive, oriented times three." He paused after writing that. He didn't really know if Benson was oriented to person, place, and time; he hadn't checked specifically. But he was clear and responsive, and McPherson let it go. "Flow of ideas orderly and clear, but patient retains machine imagery of pre-operative state. It is too early to be certain, but it appears that early predictions were correct that the operation would not alter his mentation between seizures."

Signed, "Roger A. McPherson, M.D."

He stared at it for a moment, then closed the chart and replaced it on the shelf. It was a good note, cool, direct, holding out no false anticipations. The chart was a legal document, after all, and it could be called into court. McPherson didn't expect to see Benson's chart in court, but you couldn't be too careful. He believed very strongly in appearances - and he felt it was his job to do so.

The head of any large scientific laboratory performed a political function. You might deny it; you might dislike it. But it was nonetheless true, a necessary part of the job.

You had to keep all the people in the lab happy as they worked together. The more prima donnas you had, the tougher the job was, as pure politics.

You had to get your lab funded from outside sources, and that was also pure politics. Particularly if you were working in a delicate area, as the NPS was. McPherson had long since evolved the horseradish-peroxidase principle of grant applications. It was simple enough: when you applied for money, you announced that the money would be spent to find the enzyme horseradish peroxidase, which could lead to a cure for cancer. You would easily get sixty thousand dollars for that project - although you couldn't get sixty cents for mind control.

He looked at the row of charts on the shelf, a row of unfamiliar names, into which BENSON, H. F. 710 merged indistinguishably. In one sense, he thought, Benson was correct - he was a walking time bomb. A man treated with mind-control technology was subject to all sorts of irrational public prejudice. "Heart control" in the form of cardiac pacemakers was considered a wonderful invention; "kidney control" through drugs was a blessing. But "mind control" was evil, a disaster- even though the NPS control work was directly analogous to control work with other organs. Even the technology was similar: the atomic pacemaker they were using had been developed first for heart work.

But the prejudice remained. And Benson thought of himself as a ticking time bomb. McPherson sighed, took out the chart again, and flipped to the section containing doctors' orders. Both Ellis and Morris had written post-op care orders. McPherson added: "After interfacing tomorrow a.m., begin thorazine."

He looked at the note, then decided the nurses wouldn't understand interfacing. He scratched it out and wrote: "After noon tomorrow, begin thorazine."

As he left the floor, he thought that he would rest more easily once Benson was on thorazine. Perhaps they couldn't defuse the time bomb - but they could certainly drop it into a bucket of cold water.

Late at night, in Telecomp, Gerhard stared anxiously at the computer console. He typed in more instructions, then walked to a print-out typewriter and began reviewing the long sheaf of green-striped sheets. He scanned them quickly, looking for the error he knew was there in the programmed instructions.

The computer itself never made a mistake. Gerhard had used computers for nearly ten years - different computers, different places - and he had never seen one make a mistake. Of course, mistakes occurred all the time, but they were always in the program, not in the machine. Sometimes that infallibility was hard to accept. For one thing, it didn't fit with one's view of the rest of the world, where machines were always making mistakes - fuses blowing, stereos breaking down, ovens overheating, cars refusing to start. Modern man expected machines to make their fair share of errors.

But computers were different, and working with them could be a humiliating experience. They were never wrong. It was as simple as that. Even when it took weeks to find the source of some problem, even when the program was checked a dozen times by as many different people, even when the whole staff was slowly coming to the conclusion that for once, the computer circuitry had fouled up - it always turned out, in the end, to be a human error of some kind. Always.

Richards came in, shrugging off a sport coat, and poured himself a cup of coffee. "How's it going?"

Gerhard shook his head. "I'm having trouble with George."

"Again? Shit." Richards looked at the console. "How's

Martha?"

"Martha's fine, I think. It's just George."

"Which George is it?"

"Saint George," Gerhard said. "Really a bitch."

Richards sipped his coffee and sat down at the console.

"Mind if I try it?"

"Sure," Gerhard said.

Richards began flicking buttons. He called up the program for Saint George. Then he called up the program for Martha. Then he pushed the interaction button.

Richards and Gerhard hadn't devised these programs; they were modified from several existing computer programs developed at other universities. But the basic idea was the same - to create a computer program that would make the computer act emotionally, like people. It was logical to designate the programs with names like George and Martha. There was a precedent for that: Eliza in Boston, and Aldous in England.

George and Martha were essentially the same program with slight differences. The original George was programmed to be neutral in his response to stimuli. Then Martha was created. Martha was a little bitchy; Martha disliked most things. Finally, another George was formulated, a very loving George, who was referred to as Saint George.

Each program could respond with three emotional states - love, fear, and anger. Each could produce three actions - approach, withdrawal, and attack. All this was, of course, highly abstract. It was carried out in terms of numbers. For example, the original George was neutral to most numbers, but he disliked the number 751. He was programmed to dislike it. And by extension he disliked similar numbers - 743, 772, and so on. He much preferred numbers such as 404, 133, and 918. If you punched in one of these numbers, George responded with numbers signifying love and approach. If you punched in 707, George withdrew. If you punched in 750, George angrily attacked - according to the numbers he printed out.

The NPS staff had played with the programs in this way for a long time. Then they had incorporated program modifications to allow for "talk" from the computer. The numbers were translated into sentences. This was amusing, and revealing. The actual interaction was referred to as "the Christmas game" because most of it was conducted as giving and receiving gifts - objects that had an assigned or learned emotional value, just as the numbers did.

Normal George interacting with Martha would eventually win her over, and her bitchiness would recede into the background.

But Saint George had a much worse effect on her. His loving acceptance drove her up the wall. That is, if things were working normally. Richards watched as the print-out flashed across the screen.

"It isn't printing periods consistently," Richards said.

"When did that start?"

"That's nothing," Gerhard said. "Just keep watching."

Richards winced. Cats were programmed to be something that both George and Martha disliked. Giving George a cat was a very hostile move.

"Really nasty," Richards said. "What are the other interactions like?"

"'Pretty much the same," Gerhard said.

"As bad as this?"

"Pretty much."

They were accustomed now to the idea that when the computers interacted, the results were unpredictable. The general form of interaction could be guessed, but the specific results were uncertain. It was like a computer playing checkers - it was probably going to win, but it would win a different way each time, depending on what the opponent did.

I DON'T WANT A GORILLA. DON'T YOU LIKE GORILLAS? NO THANK YOU.

Richards watched with interest. Saint George had no background for eggplants. But he disliked cucumbers and bananas.

"What's happened to Saint George?" Richards asked. "His responses are too much the same."

"That's what's bothering me."

"What's he cycling through on the program?"

"I was looking for it when you came in."

"George!" Richards said, almost without thinking.

"George is breaking down," Richards said. "He's not a saint any more."

GO TO HELL I WILL KILL YOU:::::::::

:::::::::::::::::::::::

:::::::::::::::::::::::

The screen was filled with white dots. "What does that mean, unprintable response?" Richards said.

"I don't know. I've never seen it before tonight."

"How many times has this program been run?" Richards asked.

"One hundred and ten, against Martha."

"Any learning erasures?"

"No."

"I'll be goddamned," Richards said. "He's getting to be a short-tempered saint." He grinned. "We can write this one up."

Gerhard nodded and went back to the print-out. In theory, what was happening was not puzzling. Both George and Martha were programmed to learn from experience. Like the checkers-playing programs - where the machine got better each time it played a game - this program was established so that the machine would "learn" new responses to things. After one hundred and ten sets of experience, Saint George had abruptly stopped being a saint. He was learning not to be a saint around Martha - even though he had been programmed for saintliness.

"I know just how he feels," Richards said, and switched the machine off. Then he joined Gerhard, looking for the programming error that had made it all possible.