I left the taxi waiting at the main gate. The embassy grounds occupied almost ten acres of sculptured gardens, and the slow walk past the military guards and along a cool, shrub-lined pathway did me good. By the time that I was sitting in the inner lobby and accepting the ritual offer of hot tea, the world was regaining some stability.
The little red-haired man who finally wandered out to meet me looked vaguely familiar. He stood in front of me and frowned, one hand fiddling with the side of his scrubby mustache.
“I say. Aren’t you Lionel Salkind?” He shook my hand vigorously. “We didn’t know you were coming here to play this month — looks like somebody slipped up in getting the word out.”
“I’m not here for concerts.” Apparently most of the world hadn’t noticed that I had been smashed to pieces and out of circulation for six months. So much for fame.
“I’m here on other business,” I said.
“Pity. I’m Cyril Meecham. We met a year ago, when you played the Diabelli what-not, and then that thing with Parkinson. You remember it?”
That thing with Parkinson. I remembered all right, and he had put it very well.
Last year I had given a small private concert at the embassy, and the chargé-d’affaires, Parkinson, fancied himself as a violinist. I played the Beethoven Diabelli Variations, then together we tackled the Spring Sonata, Opus 24. The scherzo movement wore him out, and in the final rondo we went slower and slower, limping across the finish line, roughly together, after the longest last movement in musical memory. I remembered it all right.
“Mind you,” Meecham was saying. “I liked the concert we had with that other pianist, Schub, a lot better. Somehow seemed to be a lot more tuneful, if you know what I mean.” He sensed a possible lack of tact in his remarks, and waved an arm towards his office. “But come on in, and tell me what we can do for you. I’m surprised you’re not talking to Draper and the chaps in Culture.”
“I need some information about science.” I followed him into a panelled office with an oar hung prominently along one wall, and we settled down into creaking, leather-covered armchairs. “At least, I think it’s science. Can you tell me what introsomatic chips are?”
“Mm. See what you mean.” He stroked at his mustache again. “Can’t see you getting too much out of old Draper and his culture-vultures on that one. Introsomatic chips, eh? I could find you some papers on them, let you read all you want to. Mind you, some of that stuff’s hard going.”
“I don’t need details — just the general idea. And I’m in rather a hurry for another appointment.” I looked at my watch. One hour since I left the hotel.
He was nodding vaguely. “Of course, of course. Well, the idea’s simple enough. You know what a pacemaker is, don’t you, for heartbeat control? The introsomatic chips take it a step farther. You take a chip with a whole lot of integrated circuits on it, and you preprogram it with stored programs. Then you add a bunch of sensors to it — little ones. And you implant it into the body, bung it in wherever it’s right for that type of chip. Intro-somatic chips, see? — means it’s computing equipment inside the body. The sensors measure various physical stuff — you know, pulse, temperature, ion concentrations, things like that — then the program calculates a signal to be sent to the nervous system. Sort of an override to the natural control signal.”
“And what does it do?” I was getting ideas about the Belur Package, and why there was such interest in it.
“Well. That all depends on what the implant is programmed for.” He was looking at me as though only an idiot would ask such a question. “You see, it’s completely flexible. Any procedure can be programmed in, and so long as the sensors and the output signals are right you could in principle control any body function any way you like. That’s just the theory, you understand. In practice, they’re still fiddling around on the research. Maybe we’ll have something really useful in five or ten years.”
“What can they do with it now?”
“Oh, the easy stuff.” From the look on his face, I sensed that he was at the limits of his real knowledge. “You can get an implant that controls some of the peristaltic actions in the digestive system — for people who have trouble in the small and large intestine. And of course, the heart pacemakers are a lot better now; they respond to adrenaline and hormonal levels in the blood.”
He leaned forward. “Look here, old fellow, d’you mind if I ask why you’re so interested in all this? I mean, it’s a long way from bashing out the old Rachmaninov. What are you up to?”
I hesitated. Danger might come from unlikely places. but I just couldn’t see Cyril Meecham as the instrument of evil.
“I think somebody has made implants a lot more sophisticated than any that have been done before. He was an Indian named Belur, and I’m pretty sure he made a prototype set maybe a year or two ago.”
(The mental image of Dixie , garden fork deep in his chest, blood welling up over stained lower dentures. No signs of a death agony. “Not pain. Got implant. Bloody bastard.")
“The prototypes could be implanted to override pain signals, wherever they came from in the body. But more recently Belur made a new set of introsomatic implants, with different functions. I don’t know what the newer ones do — but my brother was trying to get them from India to America when he was killed in an accident. I’m convinced that he had to leave them here, in Riyadh . And I’m trying to find out where.”
“Hmm. Sorry about your brother.” Now he looked intrigued, and his condolences were no more than a bow to propriety. “Haven’t seen anything about these newer implants in the journals. Mind you, we’re not exactly at the center of scientific action out here. I don’t know how to help you. Do you have any idea at all where your brother was staying when he was here in Riyadh ?”
“I don’t know. If I give you a street address, is there any way that you can tell me who lives there?” I caught his look. “I don’t want to go there myself, in case he shouldn’t have been there — Leo was always one for the ladies.”
His frown disappeared. “Aren’t we all when we get half a chance?” He winked and pushed a memo pad across to me. “Jot down an address, and I’ll pop over to civics and run a check for you. Push the buzzer if you want more tea.”
In the minutes he was away I had time to look at my watch twenty times and to ponder again Big Brother Leo’s activities. The more that I followed his tracks, the more I understood our relationship. The contrasts between my hardworking and well-planned life (concert tours fixed a year in advance) and his wild continent-hopping flights were apparent on the surface — even extreme; but underneath there were deep similarities. The difference was only this: where I dreamed and imagined, he carried thought to action.
We were identical twins, with all the genetic correspondence that implied. If I allowed my thoughts to range unfettered, and forced myself to follow after them, I would arrive close to Leo’s destinations. The thoughts were easy; the hard part was to dare to act them out.
“Aren’t we all when we get half a chance?” We are, but some of us find it difficult to know a chance when it stares us in the face.
The clock on his desk ticked on. If he didn’t hurry, my chances might be reduced to zero. I was at the point of leaving the office to look for him when he hurried back in. His pleasant look had been transformed to one of anger and suspicion.
“Look, I don’t know what your game is here, but I want to tell you that I don’t care for it.”