Terminal Man (19 page)

“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” he said, smiling cheerfully.

She felt sympathy for him, and sadness for what had happened. “I understand,” she said. “Let’s go back to the hospital.”

“No, no …”

“I’ll go with you. I’ll stay with you all the time. It will be all right.”

“Don’t argue with me!”
He snapped to his feet, fists clenched, and glared down at her. “I will not listen—” He broke off, but did not smile.

Instead, he began to sniff the air.

“What is that smell?” he said. “I hate that smell. What is it? I hate it, do you hear me, I
hate
it!”

He moved toward her, sniffing. He reached his hands out toward her.

“Harry …”

“I hate this feeling,” he said.

She got up off the couch, moving away. He followed her clumsily, his hands still outstretched. “I don’t want this feeling, I don’t want it,” he said. He was no longer sniffing. He was fully in a trance state, coming toward her.

“Harry …”

His face was blank, an automaton mask. His arms were still extended toward her. He almost seemed to be sleep-walking as he advanced on her. His movements were slow and she was able to back away from him, maintaining distance.

Then, suddenly, he picked up a heavy glass ashtray and flung it at her. She dodged; it struck one of the large windows, shattering the glass.

He leaped for her and threw his arms around her, holding her in a clumsy bear hug. He squeezed her with
incredible strength. “Harry,” she gasped, “Harry.” She looked up at his face and saw it was still blank.

She kneed him in the groin.

He grunted and released her, bending at the waist, coughing. She moved away from him and picked up the phone. She dialed the operator. Benson was still bent over, still coughing.

“Operator.”

“Operator, give me the police..”

“Do you want the Beverly Hills police, or the Los Angeles police?”

“I don’t care!”

“Well, which do you—”

She dropped the phone. Benson was stalking her again. She heard the tiny voice of the operator saying, “Hello, hello …”

Benson tore the phone away and flung it behind him across the room. He picked up a floor lamp and held it base outward. He began to swing it in large hissing arcs. She ducked it once and felt the gush of air in the wake of the heavy metal base. If it hit her, it would kill her. It would kill her. The realization pushed her to action.

She ran to the kitchen. Benson dropped the lamp and followed her. She tore open drawers, looking for a knife. She found only a small paring knife. Where the hell were her big knives?

Benson was in the kitchen. She threw a pot at him blindly. It clattered against his knees. He moved forward.

The detached and academic part of her mind was still operating, telling her that she was making a big mistake,
that there was something in the kitchen she could use. But what?

Benson’s hands closed around her neck. The grip was terrifying. She grabbed his wrists and tried to pull them away. She kicked up with her leg, but he twisted his body away from her, then pressed her back against the counter, pinning her down.

She could not move, she could not breathe. She began to see blue spots dancing before her eyes. Her lungs burned for air.

Her fingers scratched along the counter, feeling for something, anything, to strike him with. She touched nothing.

The kitchen …

She flung her hands around wildly. She felt the handle of the dishwasher, the handle to the oven, the machines in her kitchen.

Her vision was greenish. The blue spots were larger. They swam sickeningly before her. She was going to die in the kitchen.

The kitchen, the kitchen,
dangers of the kitchen.
It came to her in a flash, just as she was losing consciousness.

Microwaves.

She no longer had any vision; the world was dull gray, but she could still feel. Her fingers touched the metal of the oven, the glass of the oven door, then up … up to the controls … she twisted the dial.…

Benson screamed.

The pressure around her neck was gone. She slumped to the floor. Benson was screaming, horrible agonized sounds. Her vision came back to her slowly and she
saw him, standing over her, clutching his head in his hands. Screaming.

He paid no attention to her as she lay on the floor, gasping for breath. He twisted and writhed, holding his head and howling like a wounded animal. Then he rushed from the room, still screaming.

And she slid smoothly and easily into unconsciousness.

T
HE BRUISES WERE ALREADY FORMING—LONG
, purplish welts on both sides of her neck. She touched them gently as she looked into the mirror.

“When did he leave?” Anders said. He stood in the doorway to the bathroom, watching her.

“I don’t know. Around the time I passed out.”

He looked back toward the living room. “Quite a mess out there.”

“I imagine so.”

“Why did he attack you?”

“He had a seizure.”

“But you’re his doctor—”

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “When he has a seizure, he’s out of control. Totally. He’d kill his own
child during a seizure. People have been known to do that.”

Anders frowned uncertainly. She could imagine the trouble he was having with the idea. Unless you had seen an ADL seizure, you could not comprehend the unreasonable, brutal violence of an attack. It was completely beyond any normal life experience. Nothing else was like it, analogous to it, similar to it.

“Umm,” Anders said finally. “But he didn’t kill you.”

Not quite, she thought, still touching the bruises. The bruises would get much worse in the next few hours. What could she do about it? Make-up? She didn’t have any. A high-necked sweater?

“No,” she said, “he didn’t kill me. But he would have.”

“What happened?”

“I turned on the microwave.”

Anders looked puzzled. “The microwave?”

“It affected Benson’s electronic machinery. Microwave radiation screws up pacemaking machinery. It’s a big problem for cardiac pacemakers now. Dangers of the kitchen. There have been a lot of recent articles.”

“Oh,” Anders said.

He left the room to make some calls, while she dressed. She chose a black turtleneck sweater and a gray skirt, and stepped back to look at herself in the mirror. The bruises were hidden. Then she noticed the colors, black and gray. That wasn’t like her. Too somber, too dead and cold. She considered changing, but didn’t.

She heard Anders talking on the phone in the living room. She went out to the kitchen to make herself a
drink—no more coffee; she wanted Scotch on the rocks—and as she poured it, she saw the long scratches in the wooden counter that her fingernails had left. She looked at her fingernails. Three of them were broken; she hadn’t noticed before.

She made the drink and went out to sit in the living room.

“Yes,” Anders was saying into the phone. “Yes, I understand. No … no idea. Well, we’re trying.” There was a long pause.

She went to the broken window and looked out at the city. The sun was up, lighting a dark band of brown air that hung above the buildings. It was really a lethal place to live, she thought. She should move to the beach where the air was better.

“Well, listen,” Anders said angrily, “none of this would have happened if you’d kept that fucking guard at his door in the hospital. I think you better keep that in mind.”

She heard the phone slam down, and turned.

“Shit,” he said. “Politics.”

“Even in the police department?”

“Especially in the police department,” he said. “Anything goes wrong, and suddenly there’s a scramble to see who can get stuck with it.”

“They’re trying to stick you?”

“They’re trying me on for size.”

She nodded, and wondered what was happening back at the hospital. Probably the same thing. The hospital had to maintain its image in the community; the chiefs of service would be in a sweat; the director would be worrying about fundraising. Somebody at the hospital would get stuck. McPherson was too big; she and Morris
were too small. It would probably be Ellis—he was an assistant professor. If you fired an assistant professor it had connotations of firing a temporary appointment who had proven himself too aggressive, too reckless, too ambitious. Much better than firing a full professor, which was very messy and reflected badly on the earlier decision that had given him tenure.

It would probably be Ellis. She wondered if he knew. He had just recently bought a new house in Brentwood. He was very proud of it; he had invited everyone in the NPS to a housewarming party next week. She stared out the window, through the shattered glass.

Anders said, “Listen, what do seizures have to do with cardiac pacemakers?”

“Nothing,” she said, “except that Benson has a brain pacemaker, very similar to a cardiac pacemaker.”

Anders flipped open his notebook. “You better start from the beginning,” he said, “and go slowly.”

“All right.” She set down her drink. “Let me make one call first.”

Anders nodded, sat back, and waited while she called McPherson. Then, as calmly as she could, she explained everything she knew to the policeman.

M
C
P
HERSON HUNG UP THE TELEPHONE AND
stared out his office window at the morning sun. It was no longer pale and cold; there was the full warmth of morning. “That was Ross,” he said.

Morris nodded from the corner. “And?”

“Benson came to her apartment. She lost him.”

Morris sighed.

“It doesn’t seem to be our day,” McPherson said. He shook his head, not taking his eyes off the sun. “I don’t believe in luck,” he said. He turned to Morris. “Do you?”

Morris was tired; he hadn’t really been listening. “Do I what?”

“Believe in luck.”

“Sure. All surgeons believe in luck.”

“I don’t believe in luck,” McPherson repeated. “Never did. I always believed in planning.” He gestured to the charts on his wall, then lapsed, staring at them.

The charts were large things, four feet across, and intricately done in many colors. They were really glorified flow charts with timetables for technical advances. He had always been proud of them. For
instance, in 1967 he had examined the state of three areas—diagnostic conceptualization, surgical technology, and microelectronics—and concluded that they would all come together to allow an operation for ADL seizures in July of 1971. They had beaten his estimate by four months, but it was still damned accurate.

“Damned accurate,” he said.

“What?” Morris said.

McPherson shook his head. “Are you tired?”

“Yes.”

“I guess we’re all tired. Where’s Ellis?”

“Making coffee.”

McPherson nodded. Coffee would be good. He rubbed his eyes, wondering when he would be able to sleep. Not for a while—not until they had Benson back. And that could take many hours more, perhaps another day.

He looked again at the charts. Everything had been going so well. Electrode implantation four months ahead of schedule. Computer simulation of behavior almost nine months ahead—but that, too, was having problems. George and Martha programs were behaving erratically. And Form Q?

He shook his head. Form Q might never get off the ground now, although it was his favorite project, and had always been. Form Q on the flow chart for 1979, with human application beginning in 1986. In 1986 he would be seventy-five years old—if he was still alive—but he didn’t worry about that. It was the idea, the simple idea, that intrigued him.

Form Q was the logical outgrowth of all the work at the NPS. It began as a project called Form Quixoticus, because it seemed so impossible. But McPherson felt
certain that it would happen because it was so necessary. For one thing, it was a question of size; for another, a question of expense.

A modern electronic computer—say, a third-generation IBM digital computer—would cost several million dollars. It drew an enormous amount of power. It consumed space voraciously. Yet the largest computer still had the same number of circuits as the brain of an ant. To make a computer with the capacity of a human brain would require a huge skyscraper. Its energy demands would be the equivalent of a city of half a million.

Obviously, nobody would ever try to build such a computer using current technology. New methods would have to be found—and there wasn’t much doubt in McPherson’s mind what the methods would be.

Living tissues.

The theory was simple enough. A computer, like a human brain, was composed of functioning units—little flip-flop cells of one kind or another. The size of those units had shrunk considerably over the years. They would continue to shrink as large-scale integration and other microelectronic techniques improved. Power requirements would also decrease.

But the individual units would never become as small as a nerve cell, a neuron. You could pack a billion nerve cells into one cubic inch. No human miniaturization method would ever achieve that economy of space. Nor would any human method ever produce a unit that operated on so little power as a nerve cell.

Therefore, make your computers from living nerve cells. It was already possible to grow isolated nerve cells in tissue culture. It was possible to alter them artificially
in different ways. In the future, it would be possible to grow them to specification, to make them link up in specified ways.

Once you could do that, you could make a computer that was, say, six cubic feet in volume, but contained thousands of billions of nerve cells. Its energy requirements would not be excessive; its heat production and waste products would be manageable. Yet it would be the most intelligent entity on the planet, by far.

Form Q.

Preliminary work was already being done in a number of laboratories and government research units around the country. Advances were being made.

But for McPherson the most exciting prospect was not a superintelligent organic computer. That was just a side product. What was really interesting was the idea of an organic prosthesis for the human brain.