“Yes, sir,” Peter Bloch managed.
“Yes, sir,” Torres mimicked, his tone icy. “We deliberately induce pain, Mr. Bloch. We induce physical pain, and mental pain, and of the worst sort. The only thing that makes it tolerable at all is that the patient is unconscious. Without the anesthetic, we are at risk of driving a patient insane.”
“He’s … he seems to be all right,” Bloch stammered, but Torres froze him with a look.
“And perhaps he is,” Torres agreed. “But if he is, it is only because the boy has no emotions. Or, as you have so inelegantly put it in the past, because he’s a ‘zombie.’ ”
Bloch flinched, but stood his ground. “I was going to shut it off,” he insisted. “I was watching him carefully, and if it looked like it was getting too bad, I was going to shut it off in spite of your orders.”
“Not good enough,” Torres replied. “If you had any questions about those orders, you should have called me immediately. You didn’t. Well, perhaps you will do this: go to your lab and begin packing anything that is personally yours. Then you will wait there for a security guard to come and escort you out of the building. Your check will be sent to you. Is that clear?”
“Sir—”
“Is that clear?” Torres repeated, his voice rising to drown out the other man.
“Yes, sir,” Bloch whispered. A moment later he was gone, and Raymond Torres seated himself once more, then waited until his breathing had returned to its normal rhythm before picking up the sheaf of test results.
Perhaps, he reflected, it will be all right after all. The boy hadn’t cracked under the battering his brain had absorbed. With any luck at all, Alex’s brain had been so busy dealing with the chaos of stimulation that he hadn’t consciously noticed what else had been happening.
Or had he?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“But he didn’t say what was wrong, did he?” Marsh asked. He folded his napkin precisely — a gesture Ellen immediately recognized as a sign that his mind was irrevocably made up — and placed it on the table next to his coffee cup.
“That’s why he wants Alex back,” Ellen said for the third time. Why, she wondered, couldn’t Marsh understand that there was nothing sinister in Raymond’s wanting Alex to come back to the Institute for a few days? “Besides,” she went on, “if he thought it was anything serious, he wouldn’t have let Alex come home with me this afternoon. He could have just kept him there.”
“And I would have had an injunction by tomorrow morning,” Marsh pointed out. “Which I’m sure he knows. In spite of that release, I’m still his father, and unless he tells us the details of the surgery, and tells us exactly what he thinks has gone wrong, Alex doesn’t go back there again.” He pushed his chair back and stood up, and though Ellen wanted to argue with him further, she knew it was useless. She would just have to do what she knew was best for Alex, and deal with Marsh after she’d done it. As Marsh left the dining room, she began clearing the dishes from the table and loading them into the dishwasher.
Marsh found Alex in his room. He was at his desk, one of Marsh’s medical texts in front of him, opened to the anatomy of the human brain, while one of the white rats poked inquisitively around among the clutter that surrounded the book.
“Anything I can help you with?”
Alex looked up. “I don’t think so.”
“Try me,” Marsh challenged. When Alex still hesitated, he picked up the rat and scratched it around its ears. The little animal wriggled with pleasure. “Mind telling me what you’re going to use to dissect this little fellow’s brain with?”
Alex’s eyes met his father’s. “How did you know?”
“I may not be a genius,” Marsh replied, “but last night you told me that considering the damage that was done to your brain, you ought to be dead. Now I find you studying the anatomy of the brain, and white rats are not exactly unheard of as subjects for dissection.”
“All right,” Alex said. “I want to see what happens to the rat if I cut as far into its brain as Dr. Torres had to cut into mine.”
“You mean you want to see if it dies,” Marsh replied. His son nodded. “Then I think we’d better go down to the Center, and I think you’d better let me help you.”
“You mean you will?” Alex asked.
“If I don’t, your rats won’t survive the first cut.”
When they came downstairs a few minutes later, Ellen glanced at them from her place at the kitchen sink, then, seeing the rat cage, smiled appreciatively. “Well, at least we agree that the house is no place for those things,” she offered, hoping to break the tension that had spoiled dinner.
“We’re taking them down to the lab,” Marsh told her. “And we may hang around awhile, if anything interesting’s going on.”
Ellen frowned. “Interesting? What could be interesting in the lab at this hour? There won’t even be anyone there.”
“Well be there,” Marsh replied. Then, while Ellen wondered what was going on, her husband and son disappeared into the patio. A moment later she heard the gate slam closed.
The fluorescent lamps over the lab table cast a shadowless light, and as Marsh prepared to inject the anesthesia into the rat’s vein, he suddenly wondered if the creature somehow knew what was about to happen. Its little eyes seemed wary, and he could feel it trembling in his hand. He glanced at Alex, who stood at the other side of the table, looking on impassively. “It won’t survive this, you know,” Marsh told his son.
“I know,” Alex replied in the emotionless voice Marsh knew he would never get used to. “Go ahead.”
Marsh slid the needle under the rat’s skin and pressed the plunger. The rat struggled for a few seconds, then gradually went limp, and Marsh began fastening it to the dissecting board. When he was done, he studied the illustration he’d found in one of the lab books, then deftly used a scalpel to cut the skin away from the rat’s skull, starting just behind the left eye and slicing neatly around to the opposite position behind the right eye, then folding the loose flap of skin forward. Then, using a tiny saw, he began removing the top of the skull itself. He worked slowly. When he was done, the rat’s brain lay exposed to the light, but its heartbeat and breathing were still unaffected.
“This probably isn’t going to work,” Marsh said. “We should have much smaller tools, and proportionally, much more of a rat’s brain than a human’s is used to keep its vital functions going.”
“Then let’s just cut away a little bit at a time, and see how deep we can go.”
Marsh hesitated, then nodded. Using the smallest scalpel he had been able to find, he began peeling away the cortex of the rat’s brain.
An hour later, all three of the rats were dead. In none of them had Marsh succeeded in reaching the inner structures of the brain before their heartbeats had ceased.
“But they didn’t have to die,” he pointed out. “I could have gone in with a probe, and destroyed part of the limbic system without doing much damage to anything else.”
Alex shook his head. “It wouldn’t have meant anything, Dad. When you cut away their brains the way Torres had to cut away mine, the rats died. So why didn’t I?”
“I don’t know,” Marsh confessed. “All I know is that you didn’t die.”
Alex was silent for a long time, staring at the three small corpses on the lab table. “Maybe I did,” he said at last. “Maybe I’m really dead.”
Valerie Benson looked up from her knitting. Across the room, Kate Lewis was curled up on the sofa, her eyes on the television set, but Valerie was almost sure she wasn’t watching the program.