Instead, glial cells proliferate in the damaged region, producing a tangle that blocks neurons as they seek to regenerate axons. The solution to this problem, developed first by Madrill in his groundbreaking work at the turn of the century, is via the Schwann cells — the nonneuronal cells that are present and which can serve to direct axon regrowth in peripheral nerves.
The Madrill treatment inhibits the growth of glial cells in the damaged area, and stimulates the growth of Schwann cells that normally will not be present in the brain. It is the later atrophy and disappearance of the Schwann cells that causes the patient considerable early discomfort, though later possible side effects of the tissue regeneration process are in fact far more serious in their potential consequences…
I rubbed at my tired eyes and leaned back in my seat. This was supposed to be an air-conditioned first-class carriage, but I was sweltering, perspiration running down my forehead. The countryside outside was flying by at more than a hundred and fifty miles an hour, a dizzying blur of green in the long cutting; but the more substantial dizziness was inside my head.
And what I was going through, if the paper in front of me was to be believed, was a mild foretaste of what I had coming in another week or two. That was a depressing thought. Already I seemed to be absorbing words from the page one at a time, poked into my head through a small hole using a rusty nail end. I forced myself to read on — hard going as it was, this was the first paper from Sir Westcott where I could understand even a fraction of what the author was trying to say.
Following the full growth of the axons, and their attachment to the target cells within the brain, the final and most sensitive phase of the Madrill treatment begins. With the mechanical connection complete, it is now necessary for the brain to resume its information processing functions. Although these might appear to be routine, it has been observed that in over thirty percent of the cases where the Madrill treatment has been used, an unstable feedback in the regrown area leads to a variety of psychoses, many of them leading to terminal dysfunctions…
Very nice. The bad bit was still to come, and there was a one in three chance that I wouldn’t come out of the other side. “Terminal dysfunction” — pleasant medical double-talk for madness and death. The odds were a lot worse than Sir Westcott had led me to believe.
So what could I do about it?
Not a thing.
I gave up my efforts to understand the next section of the paper, which was a long discussion of methods used with enzyme injections by the Armenian Academy of Sciences. Instead I looked across the carriage table.
Ameera was painting her nails there, calmly and contentedly. The heat in the compartment didn’t seem to trouble her at all. I couldn’t see how she could fix her nails without being able to see what she was up to, but the purple-red lacquer went on steadily and smoothly. Her sense of the position of one hand relative to the other was almost beyond belief.
Somehow — perhaps I moved in my seat — she knew that my eyes were on her.
“How much longer, Lee-yo-nel?”
“Half an hour, if the train is on time.”
She nodded happily. To Ameera, this whole trip was nothing but pleasure and excitement, an extended school picnic. For the tenth time in two days, I wondered just what sort of friend Chandra thought he was. Instead of agreeing with me that Ameera’s presence in Cuttack would be a total disaster, he had sided with her from the beginning.
“How will you talk to people if you are alone there?” he asked. ” Cuttack is not like Calcutta , where many people speak English.”
(As I later discovered, Chandra was not telling the truth — many people spoke English in each place. But he was being at his most Indian, helping Ameera to get her way from pure perversity.)
I had argued the point with them, insisting that I would do much better to hire an interpreter when I needed one. Verbal persuasion by Chandra during the day, and more powerful arguments by Ameera at night, had beaten me. I sat and looked at her, at the gorgeous dusky skin and midnight hair, and wondered how I had held out for so long. The odds against me had been overwhelming.
My original plan, to head for Cuttack the day I learned of its existence, had fallen apart as soon as I tried to act. I had made no allowance for the Indian sense of pace. Even the train tickets took twenty-four hours to arrive at the house.
While Chandra and Chatterji made arrangements for our trip I spent long impatient hours in the little pantry, pitting my wits against the vagaries of the Indian telephone system.
The telephone number that I was asking about for someone in Cuttack ? No, sir. It did not exist. A difficult operator insisted that it could not exist, had never existed — perhaps I was reading it wrongly to him? An hour of argument and re-calling to Cuttack revealed the existence of a second exchange, in the same province but not within the town.
I called the new exchange.
Triumph! The number had been listed for a Mr. Belur. But it had been taken out of use four months ago, and there was no new listing for that Belur. Computer companies in the same area where Mr. Belur had lived? Of course, sir, they would try to check it for me, but I had to remember that this was not the way that the directory was organized… the chance of success was small… the difficulty was very great…
I longed for an outstretched hand into which I could drop a little silver, but that time-tested method would have to wait until we got to Cuttack . All I could do from a distance was establish the names of half a dozen candidate companies that might possibly be connected with the vanished Belur. Unless they, like he, had disappeared in the past few months.
Patience, Chandra told me. Patience is all in India .
Patience. I had to learn my own limitations. When we finally reached Cuttack and could begin our search, I was forced to revise my ideas about Ameera’s usefulness. She could wheedle cooperation and information out of the least obliging public servants. I could get nothing from them at all.
Cuttack was one of the Indian government’s new development areas. In the past ten years there had been a huge effort to set up advanced technology there — fiber optics, microprocessors, vapor deposition methods, and hyper-bubble memories. The plants were scattered like white rectangular play-blocks over the brown and green hillocks that lay west of the main city.
Taxis were hard to come by. Ameera snagged one at the railway station while a horde of noisy travellers shouted at the porters and each other, and we set off on our search. Since we looked at Leo’s notes together I had been through every emotion, but now that we had reached Cuttack my spirits had plummeted. The chances of tracking down Belur had to be low. Only Ameera’s bubbling enthusiasm kept me going.
Computek was our first stop (all the companies we visited had shunned Indian names in favor of pseudo-American ones). The taxi waited while Ameera and I went in through the paint-peeling door.
Nothing there — not even evidence of technology development. The staff were suspicious. Were we perhaps inspectors from the Government over in New Delhi ? Ameera soothed their fears, but we gained no useful information. The pattern was repeated at Info-systems Design, Electro-mesh, 4-D Systems, Compu-controls, and Autodyne. I was ready to give up when we came to the shabby grey building on top of a hill eight miles outside the town, and I read the frayed wooden sign that announced the presence of Bio-Electronic Systems.