The Terminal Man

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.

"I guess not." He lay back against the pillow. "After they did it, I looked in the wastebasket, and I was amazed. So much hair. And my head was cold. It was the funniest thing, a cold head. They put a towel around it. I said I wanted to look at my head - see what I looked like bald - but they said it wasn't a good idea. So I waited until after they left, and then I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. But when I got there..."

"Yes?"

"I didn't take the towel off." He laughed. "I couldn't do it. What does that mean?"

"I don't know. What do you think it means?"

He laughed again. "Why is it that psychiatrists never give you a straight answer?" He lit a cigarette and looked at her defiantly. "They told me I shouldn't smoke, but I'm doing it anyway."

"I doubt that it matters," she said. She was watching him closely. He seemed in good spirits, and she didn't want to take that away from him. But on the other hand, it wasn't entirely appropriate to be jovial on the eve of brain surgery.

"Ellis was here a few minutes ago," he said, puffing on the cigarette. "He put some marks on me. Can you see?" He lifted up the right side of his towel slightly. exposing white pale flesh over the skull. Two blue "X" marks were positioned behind the ear. "How do I look?" he asked, grinning.

"You look fine," she said. "How do you feel?"

"Fine. I feel fine."

"Any worries?"

"No. I mean, what is there to worry about? Nothing I can do. For the next few hours, I'm in your hands, and Ellis's hands..."

"I think most people would be a little worried before an operation."

"There you go again, being a reasonable psychiatrist." He smiled, and then frowned. He bit his lip. "Of course I'm worried."

"What worries you?"

"Everything," he said. He sucked on the cigarette.

"Everything. I worry about how I'll sleep. How I'll feel tomorrow. How I'll be when it's all over. What if somebody makes a mistake? What if I get turned into a vegetable? What if it hurts? What if I..."

"Die?"

"Sure. That, too."

"It's really a minor procedure. It's hardly more complicated than an appendectomy."

"I bet you tell that to all your brain-surgery patients."

"No, really. It's a short, simple procedure. It'll take about an hour and a half."

He nodded vaguely. She couldn't tell if she had reassured him. "You know," he said, "I don't really think it will happen. I keep thinking tomorrow morning at the last minute they'll come in and say 'You're cured, Benson, you can go home now.' "

"We hope you'll be cured by the operation." She felt a twinge of guilt saying that, but it came out smoothly enough.

"You're so goddamned reasonable," he said. "There are times when I can't stand it."

"Like now?"

He touched the towel around his head again. "I mean, for Christ's sake, they're going to drill holes in my head, and stick wires in- "

"You've known about that for a long time."

"Sure," he said. "Sure. But this is the night before."

"Do you feel angry now?"

"No. Just scared."

"It's all right to be scared, it's perfectly normal. But don't let it make you angry."

He stubbed out the cigarette, and lit another immediately. Changing the subject, he pointed to the clipboard she carried under her arm. "What's that?"

"Another psychodex test. I want you to go through it."

"Now?"

"Yes. It's just for the record."

He shrugged indifferently. He had taken the psychodex several times before. She handed him the clipboard and he arranged the question card on the board, then began to answer the questions. He read them aloud:

"Would you rather be an elephant or a baboon? Baboon. Elephants live too long."

With the metal probe, he punched out the chosen answer on the card.

"If you were a color, would you rather be green or yellow? Yellow. I'm feeling very yellow right now." He laughed, and punched the answer.

She waited until he had done all thirty questions and punched his answers. He handed the clipboard back to her, and his mood seemed to shift again. "Are you going to be there? Tomorrow?"

"Yes."

"Will I be awake enough to recognize you?"

"I imagine so."

"And when will I come out of it?"

"Tomorrow afternoon or evening."

"That soon?"

"It's really a minor procedure," she said again. He nodded. She asked him if she could get him anything, and he said some ginger ale, and she replied that he was NPO, nothing per ora, for twelve hours before the operation. She said he'd be getting shots to help him sleep, and shots in the morning before he went to surgery. She said she hoped he'd sleep well.

As she left, she heard a hum as the television went back on, and a metallic voice said, "Look, Lieutenant, I've got a murderer out there, somewhere in a city of three million people..."

She closed the door.

Before leaving the floor, she put a brief note in the chart. She drew a red line around it, so that the nurses would be sure to see it:

ADMITTING PSYCHIATRIC SUMMARY:

This 34-year-old man has documented psychomotor epilepsy of 2 years' duration. The etiology is presumably traumatic, following an automobile accident. This patient has already tried to kill two people, and has been involved in fights with several others. Any statement by him to hospital staff that he "feels funny" or "smells something bad" should be respected as indicating the start of a seizure. Under such circumstances, notify the NPS and Hospital Security at once.