Unless you help us prove it. For what it’s worth, I think it will work. But no one can be sure.”
Margaret had left the kitchen, but Vladek knew where she was from the scratchy click in the earpiece: in the bedroom, listening on the extension phone. He said at last, “I can’t say now, Dr. Nicholson. I’ll call you back in—in half an hour. I can’t do any more than that right now.”
“That’s a great deal, Mr. Vladek. I’ll be waiting right here for your call.”
Harry sat down and drank the rest of his coffee. You had to be an expert in a lot of things to get along, he was thinking. What did he know about brain transplants? In one way, a lot. He knew that the surgery part was supposed to be straightforward, but the tissue rejection was the problem, but Dr. Nicholson thought he had that licked. He knew that every doctor he had talked to, and he had now talked to seven of them, had agreed that medically it was probably sound enough, and that every one of them had carefully clammed up when he got the conversation around to whether it was right. It was his decision, not theirs, they all said, sometimes just by their silence. But who was he to decide?
Margaret appeared in the doorway. “Harry. Let’s go upstairs and look at Tommy.”
He said harshly, “Is that supposed to make it easier for me to murder my son?”
She said, “We talked that out, Harry, and we agreed it isn’t murder. Whatever it is. I only think that Tommy ought to be with us when we decide, even if he doesn’t know what we’re deciding.”
The two of them stood next to the outsize crib that held their son, looking in the night light at the long fair lashes against the chubby cheeks and the pouted lips around the thumb. Reading. Model airplanes. Riding a bike. Against a quick sketch of a face and the occasional, cherished, tempestuous, bruising flurry of kisses.
Vladek stayed there the full half hour and then, as he had promised, went back to the kitchen, picked up the phone and began to dial.