“So what’s he like?”
Lara shot her an impatient look. “I wasn’t there to find out what he was like. I was there to recruit him for our surgical development program.”
“You were there a long time.” Brenda waited, but got no response. “You look tired. Was the hotel bad? Because I tried to call you several times through the night, and they said you weren’t there.”
“We were in a car.”
“In a car.”
“On a drive. Out in the country…”
“Out in the country! Sounds like a wonderful time! Sounds romantic. Sounds like a date!”
“No, it—he can’t do it, Brenda. He can’t. Now if you’ll excuse me, we have experiments to set up.” Lara strode out of the room.
THE GIFT
11
Two weeks after Lara Blair came to Virginia and drove up into the mountains to visit the Blue Ridge clinic with Jones, old Sam finally came down from the mountains and showed up at the Charlottesville hospital.
Sam had lived for the last fifty years in an Appalachian valley—the locals called it a holler—so isolated that he had no electricity and no running water; in all that time he had not journeyed to what he call the flatlands. Jones welcomed him and arranged for him to be admitted, though the paperwork was an issue since Sam had never filed for anything from the government and their only records of his life were a driver’s license and the records he had filled out when he joined the Army in World War II. Jones found a place for Allen to stay—Allen said he would be content with the couch in Jones’s office, since he planned to spend every moment making sure his oldest and only friend was not poisoned or poked to death by a nurse—and the hospital staff immediately began running tests on Sam.
It was the MRI that scared Sam the most; to be strapped to a moving slab and slid into a coffinlike space that rattled and screamed like the mouth of hell did not comfort Sam; when Jones dropped in to see him just before the procedure, Sam told him, “I don’t want to see the Immer Eye.”
Jones realized Sam thought the doctors had been talking about something monstrous and tried to reassure him, saying, “Sam, I know the Immer Eye… the MRI… it sounds bad but there’s not a thing this machine can do that will hurt you.”
“The feller that wheeled me down here from the room told me to leave my watch cause the Immer Eye would jerk it right outer my pocket and even if it didn’t my watch wouldn’t never work again if it even got in the same room with the Immer Eye.”
“It won’t hurt you, Sam. I promise.” When Jones saw Sam’s eyes, watery and blue like a mountain sky on a foggy morning, look up into his, Jones patted the old man’s boney shoulder and said, “Trust me, Sam. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
Jones stood and watched as they wheeled Sam into the scanning room. As the door closed Jones was left alone, and his thoughts drifted. To Lara.
At the moment that Sam was being slid into the Immer Eye and was yelling out to Allen, waiting for him in the control room, that to him it looked more an Immer Anus, Lara was working at her lab.
Since returning from Virginia she had been even more driven than before—and less patient. No one, least of all Lara herself, doubted that the discovery of the microscopic figurines had given them all reasons to hope that the techniques they had spent so much time and money and effort trying to develop might be more than theoretically possible, but were actually within their grasp. The frustration of that hope had left Lara angry and sensitive to the shortcomings of her staff. The researchers around her—most of them with medical or engineering degrees, or both—had begun to strike her as absorbed, uncaring, even selfish. It did not help her mood when she realized that it was she herself whom she most suspected of such failings.
This afternoon, finding herself unable to concentrate, she shooed everyone away from her; then, left alone, she looked down at a medical journal on her desk. The picture on the cover was of a baby. Lara stared at its eyes, then walked to the window and looked out the window at the clouds, high above her.
Jones stood beside the printers in the scanner’s photo annex and studied Sam’s scans. He waved the radiologist over and pointed to a place on the scan. As the radiologist left him, Jones stared at the scans, and the areas of light and dark on the film were like clouds.
Lara worked late at her lab, long after she had told everyone else to quit and go home. She had spent the last several days studying replays of all her failed attempts with the replica brain, and as if that weren’t depressing enough she gathered all the Roscoe brains and began taking them apart in order to try to see the problem from the inside out. At least that’s what she told everybody; the truth was, she did not know what else to do. It was past midnight when she finally shoved back from her desk, pressed her palms into the sockets of her eyes, stood and moved to the door, shut out the lights, and stepped into the hallway.
She was too tired to take the stairs. She rode the elevator to the top floor, then moved down an empty corridor to the door past her office, where her office apartment lay tucked away. She walked inside, passed directly through the sitting room without turning on the lights, walked into the bedroom, and lay down on the bed. All alone, she stared at the ceiling.
In Lara’s lifetime she had studied many topics: biology, mathematics, chemistry, engineering; but she had read poetry too, had learned about art, and some history. She had done a good deal of thinking about ideas and the internal processes of invention, but her investigations of how to open the mind to new thoughts left her feeling as blank and empty as she had felt in disassembling the replica brains in her laboratory. She did not deny the existence of ideas, even now, when she had no new ones; but even when she had fresh inspirations she had never been able to tell where they had come from.
She did feel sure—and thought this plainly as she lay on the bed of her office apartment and gazed at the acoustic tiles on the ceiling—that one crucial ingredient in having an idea was the belief that some better way of thinking, some truer way of seeing the world, existed. It seemed to Lara that no one could even recognize a good idea if they already believed that no improvement, no positive change, no breakthrough innovation was even possible. She realized for the thousandth time since she had visited Virginia how much her encounter with Jones and his different approach to living had affected her. She could almost see his face in the ceiling above her bed, could almost hear him say, Believe is a stronger word than know.
Lara asked herself what she believed. And the answer seemed to be: nothing.
For years she had hoped—hoped without truly believing—that she would solve the great riddle of brain surgery that had stumped the great researchers who had come before her, that had even stumped her father. She did not examine her hope because it was impossible to keep going without it.
But now, here in the darkness, she asked herself how she could live, hoping for nothing and believing in nothing.
And then she began to think about what Jones had told her that Faith believed.
Jones walked alone through the park where he played rugby. He looked up; the stars were shining overhead… and the moon was full above the mountains. He stared up at it.
He took a scrap of paper from his pocket and began to write something down.
12
After his shift in the Emergency Room—it was a quiet night and he got to nap on his cot there—Jones began the morning in his makeshift carving room, supervising three young surgical residents as they worked on their microscopic technique. He sensed trouble when Stafford entered and moved up to him quietly. “Dr. Jones…?” Stafford began, then hesitated.