A year ago, McPherson had asked her to take a group of newspaper science reporters through the NPS. He chose her, he said, "because she was such a piece of ass." It was funny to hear him say that, and shocking in a way. He was usually so courtly and fatherly.
But her shock was minor compared to the shock the reporters felt. She had planned to show them both Applications and Development, but after the reporters had seen Applications they were so agitated, so clearly overloaded, that she cut the tour short.
She worried a lot about it afterward. The reporters hadn't been naive and they hadn't been inexperienced. They were people who shuttled from one scientific arena to another all their lives. Yet they were rendered speechless by the implications of the work she had shown them. She herself had lost that insight, that perspective - she had been working in the NPS for three years, and she had gradually become accustomed to the things done there. The conjunction of men and machines, human brains and electronic brains, was no longer bizarre and provocative. It was just a way to take steps forward and get things done.
On the other hand, she opposed the stage-three operation on Benson. She had opposed it from the start. She thought
Benson was the wrong human subject, and she had just one last chance to prove it.
At the end of the corridor, she paused by the door to Telecomp, listening to the quiet hiss of the print-out units. She heard voices inside, and opened the door. Telecomp was really the heart of the Neuropsychiatric Research Unit; it was a large room, filled with electronic equipment. The walls and ceilings were soundproofed, a vestige of earlier days when the read-out consoles were clattering teletypes. Now they used either silent CRTs - cathode-ray tubes - or a print-out machine that sprayed the letters with a nozzle, rather than typed them mechanically. The hiss of the sprayer was the loudest sound in the room. McPherson had insisted on the change to quieter units because he felt the clattering disturbed patients who came to the NPS for treatment.
Gerhard was there, and his assistant Richards. The wizard twins, they were called: Gerhard was only twenty-four, and Richards even younger. They were the least professional people attached to the NPS; both men regarded Telecomp as a kind of permanent playground filled with complex toys. They worked long but erratic hours, frequently beginning in the late afternoon, quitting at dawn. They rarely showed up for group conferences and formal meetings, much to McPherson's annoyance. But they were undeniably good. Gerhard, who wore cowboy boots and dungarees and satiny shirts with pearl buttons, had gained some national attention at the age of thirteen when he built a twenty-foot solid-fuel rocket behind his house in Phoenix. The rocket possessed a remarkably sophisticated electronic guidance system and Gerhard felt he could fire it into orbit. His neighbors, who could see the nose of the finished rocket sticking up above the garage in the backyard, were disturbed enough to call the police, and ultimately the Army was notified.
The Army examined Gerhard's rocket and shipped it to White Sands for firing. As it happened, the second stage ignited before disengagement and the rocket exploded two miles up; but by that time Gerhard had four patents on his guidance mechanism and a number of scholarship offers from colleges and industrial firms. He turned them all down, let his uncle invest the patent royalties, and when he was old enough to drive, bought a Maserati. He went to work for Lockheed in Palmdale, California, but quit after a year because he was blocked from advancement by a lack of formal engineering degrees. It was also true that his colleagues resented a seventeen-year-old with a Maserati Ghibli and a propensity for working in the middle of the night; it was felt he had no "team spirit."
Then McPherson hired him to work at the Neuropsychiatric Research Unit, designing electronic components to be synergistic with the human brain. McPherson, as head of the NPS, had interviewed dozens of candidates who thought the job was "a challenge" or "an interesting systems application context." Gerhard said he thought it would be fun, and was hired immediately.
Richards's background was similar. He had finished high school and gone to college for six months before being drafted by the Army. He was about to be sent to Vietnam when he began to suggest improvements in the Army's electronic scanning devices. The improvements worked, and Richards never got closer to combat than a laboratory in Santa Monica. When he was discharged, he also joined the NPS.
The wizard twins: Ross smiled.
"Hi, Jan," Gerhard said.
"How's it going, Jan?" Richards said.
They were both offhand. They were the only people on the Staff who dared refer to McPherson as "Rog." And McPherson put up with it.
"Okay," she said. "We've got our stage three through grand rounds. I'm going to see him now."
"We're just finishing a check on the computer," Gerhard said. "It looks fine." He pointed to a table with a microscope surrounded by a tangle of electronic meters and dials.
"Where is it?"
"Under the stage."
She looked closer. A clear plastic packet the size of a postage stamp lay under the microscope lens. Through the plastic she could see a dense jumble of micro-miniaturized electronic components. Forty contact points protruded from the plastic. With the help of the microscope, the twins were testing the points sequentially, using fine probes.
"The logic circuits are the last to be checked," Richards said. "And we have a backup unit, just in case."
Janet went over to the file-card storage shelves and began looking through the test cards. After a moment, she said, "Haven't you got any more psychodex cards?"
"They're over here," Gerhard said. "You want five-space or n-space?"
"N-space," she said.
Gerhard opened a drawer and took out a cardboard sheet. He also took out a flat plastic clipboard. Attached to the clipboard by a metal chain was a pointed metal probe, something like a pencil.
"This isn't for the stage three, is it?"
"Yes," she said.
"But'you've run so many psychodexes on him before- "
"Just one more, for the records."
Gerhard handed her the card and clipboard. "Does your stage three know what's going on?"
"He knows most of it," she said.
Gerhard shook his head. "He must be out of his mind.
"He is," she said. "That's the problem."
At the seventh floor, she stopped at the nurses' station to ask for Benson's chart. A new nurse was there, who said,
"I'm sorry but relatives aren't allowed to look at medical records."
"I'm Dr. Ross."
The nurse was flustered. "I'm sorry, Doctor, I didn't see a name tag. Your patient is in seven-ohfour."
"What patient?"
"Little Jerry Peters."
Dr. Ross looked blank.
"Aren't you a pediatrician?" the nurse asked, finally.
"No," she said. "I'm a psychiatrist at the NPS." She heard the stridency in her own voice, and it upset her. But all those years growing up with people who said, "You don't really want to be a doctor, you want to be a nurse," or,
"Well, for a woman, pediatrics is best, I mean, the most natural thing..."
"Oh," the nurse said. "Then you want Mr. Benson in seven-ten. He's been prepped."
"Thank you," she said. She took the chart and walked down the hall to Benson's room. She knocked on Benson's door and heard gunshots. She opened the door and saw that the lights were dimmed, except for a small bedside lamp, but the room was bathed in an electric-blue glow from a TV. On the screen, a man was saying, "... dead before he hit the ground. Two bullets right through the heart."
"Hello?" she said, and swung the door wider.
Benson looked over. He smiled and pressed a button beside the bed, turning off the TV. His head was wrapped in a towel.
"How are you feeling?" she asked, coming into the room. She sat on a chair beside the bed.
"Naked," he said, and touched the towel. "It's funny. You don't realize how much hair you have until somebody cuts it all off." He touched the towel again. "It must be worse for a woman." Then he looked at her and became embarrassed.
"It's not much fun for anybody," she said.