High up, Manon gave a little shrug. Janet Ross knew the gesture; it signaled irreconcilable differences, an impasse.
"Well, then," Ellis said, "are there other questions?"
There were no other questions.
"Jesus fucking Christ," Ellis said, wiping his forehead.
"He didn't let up, did he?"
Janet Ross walked with him across the parking lot toward the Langer research building. It was late afternoon; the sunlight was yellowing, turning pale and weak.
"His point was valid," she said mildly.
Ellis sighed. "I keep forgetting you're on his side."
"Why do you keep forgetting?" she asked. She smiled as she said it. As the psychiatrist on the NPS staff, she'd opposed Benson's operation from the beginning.
"Look," Ellis said. "We do what we can. It'd be great to cure him totally. But we can't do that. We can only help him. So we'll help him."
She walked alongside him in silence. There was nothing to say. She had told Ellis her opinion many times before. The operation might not help - it might, in fact, make Benson much worse. She was sure Ellis understood that possibility, but he was stubbornly ignoring it. Or so it seemed to her.
Actually, she liked Ellis, as much as she liked any surgeon. She regarded surgeons as flagrantly action-oriented, men (they were almost always men, which she found significant) desperate to do something, to take some physical action. In that sense, Ellis was better than most of them. He had wisely turned down several stage-three candidates before Benson, and she knew that was difficult for him to do, because a part of him was terribly eager to perform the new operation.
"I hate all this," Ellis said.
"Hate what?"
"The politics. That's the nice thing about operating on monkeys. No politics at all."
"But you want to do Benson…"
"I'm ready," Ellis said. "We're all ready. We have to take that first big step, and now is the time to take it." He glanced at her. "Why do you look so uncertain?"
"Because I am," she said.
They came to the Langer building. Ellis went off to an early dinner with McPherson - a political dinner, he said irritably - and she took the elevator to the fourth floor.
After ten years of steady expansion, the Neuropsychiatric Research Unit encompassed the entire fourth floor of the Langer research building. The other floors were painted a dead, cold white, but the NPS was bright with primary colors. The intention was to make patients feel optimistic and happy, but it always had the reverse effect on Ross. She found it falsely and artificially cheerful, like a nursery school for retarded children.
She got off the elevator and looked at the reception area, one wall a bright blue, the other red. Like almost everything else about the NPS, the colors had been McPherson's idea. It was strange, she thought, how much an organization reflected the personality of its leader. McPherson himself always seemed to have a bright kindergarten quality about him, and a boundless optimism.
Certainly you had to be optimistic if you planned to operate on Harry Benson.
The Unit was quiet now, most of the staff gone home for the night. She walked down the corridor past the colored doors with the stenciled labels: SONOENCEPHALOGRAPHY,
CORTICAL FUNCTION, EEG, RAS SCORING, PARIETAL T, and, at the far end of the hall, TELECOMP. The work done behind those doors was as complex as the labels - and this was just the patient-care wing, what McPherson called "Applications."
Applications was ordinary compared to Development, the research wing with its chemitrodes and compsims and elad scenarios. To say nothing of the big projects, like George and Martha, or Form Q. Development was ten years ahead of Applications - and Applications was very, very advanced.
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.