“Yes, ma’am!” Malcolm said and hurried out happily.
Brenda stayed behind, staring at Lara and smiling. “Tell me about it,” Brenda said. “What’s changed?”
And in that moment, Lara faced the most subtle and yet most dangerous temptation; she wanted to tell Brenda about the gift. And what would be the harm if she did tell her? Brenda was a generous and loving friend; she oversaw all of Blair Bio-Med’s charitable activities. Wouldn’t she be the perfect person to tell? Wouldn’t she benefit from knowing the secret of giving in secret? Why not tell her?
But Lara knew immediately why not. If she told, she would be violating something: not the rule, but the spirit of the rule, the power of keeping her pride inside a prison of integrity. That’s how Lara had come to think of it alclass="underline" the secret of secret giving is that it keeps your pride in prison.
Lara just shook her head, smiled, and said, “Everything.”
They set up a new trial with the replica brain in the laboratory, and once Lara was in the hot seat, braced in a new chair of her own design, one she had fitted with fluid dampeners—shock absorbers, essentially—to try to minimize the beating of her own heart as she attempted to thread her surgical probes through the impossible passages of the practice brain, she was ready to try again. “Motion recorders ready?” she asked.
“Ready.” The lead technician’s voice came from the systems monitoring room, separated from the trial lab by a glass wall that insulated the surgical team from the heat and sound of the computers and tracking screens. The setup had always reminded visitors of a NASA launch, and in fact in their previous setup Blair Bio-Med utilized ten thousand times more computing power than had served the original astronauts who had walked on the moon. Now they had more than doubled that capacity; Malcolm and his teams of technicians had been busy since Lara’s last attempt.
“Visual and ambient monitors ready?”
“All in sync, Dr. Blair.”
“Alarms?”
“Set to 90 percent sensitivity.”
“Go to a hundred.”
Malcolm and Brenda stood in the systems monitoring room, watching through the glass wall. Stools waited there for them, but they did not sit. When Lara called for maximum sensitivity in the trial—eliminating all possible margin of error in her attempt before the sensors screamed FAILURE—they glanced at each other.
After a moment, the lead tech’s voice came back to Lara: “We are go.”
Lara reached for her instruments, only this time she was not using the same tools she had worked with before; she had ordered the exact tools she had seen at Jones’s bench, the ones he used for carving his figurines. She lifted the smallest of them and began.
Sensors in Lara’s instruments, lasers in the replica brain cavity, and even a grid of monitors within Roscoe, the dummy itself, measured every microscopic movement, and the bank of equipment behind Malcolm and Brenda recorded it all. Both of them found it hard to breathe. Even the technicians seemed tense, and the joke around the building had always been that the technicians would make good Roscoes because none of them had a discernible pulse.
Lara reached a critical area, the spot where she had failed in her last three attempts, and she paused. Hesitation was unlike Lara, and in the monitoring room, Malcolm whispered to Brenda, “What’s she doing?”
Brenda watched Lara for a moment and whispered back, “Jones, the guy in Virginia? He told her about feeling her heartbeat. I think she’s doing that.”
Brenda was right. Lara was withdrawing into herself. She listened for her own heartbeat… became attuned to its rhythm… and began to move again…
Flanking the lead tech were four other scan specialists—it took that many to watch over the vast streams of data flooding into their computers during a lab trial, and their concentration was legendary. They could recall the readouts—numbers up to five digits—from trials they had monitored from five years before; but they never spoke, never seemed to carry any emotional investment in what was happening in the lab. Or so Malcolm believed—until he heard one of them say, “We’ve never been this far before.”
That’s when Malcolm began to hold his breath.
Lara kept going… deeper and deeper into the replica brain. And she too could feel the breakthrough coming…
Then the alarms shrieked.
The sound of the Klaxon and the flashing of the lights were even more jarring and disappointing now. They had failed again. Malcolm and Brenda felt it, the technicians felt it.
But nobody felt it as intensely as Lara. She threw down her instruments and walked out of the lab.
She entered her office, struggling not to yell, struggling not to cry. Emotions she had contained for many years were boiling up inside her. Lara could smother an employee’s despair with a single look, but her own tears were not afraid of her; as they started to come, she buried her face in her hands, then stiffened and acted as if nothing was wrong when Malcolm and Brenda arrived at her door. They entered slowly, and Malcolm said in a low voice, “We went further than ever. We won’t give up. We won’t ever give up.”
When Lara didn’t respond, he turned and walked out of the room, with as much purpose and optimism as he could manage. Brenda sat down and, with a gesture, invited Lara to talk; instead Lara stared out the window. Brenda said, “Lara, as both your corporate advisor and your personal friend, I have to ask if you’re being as ruthless as you need to be here.”
“Ruthless, Brenda?”
“I know you see me as a bleeding heart, but I can be quite ruthless, especially in male-female dynamics.”
“Is that why you’ve been married four times?”
“Now that was ruthless. What I’m talking about is this surgeon friend of yours, in Virginia.”
“He’s not a friend.”
“Exactly.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You want him to be more than a friend! And because you do, you won’t push him, you won’t go at him like you do anyone else who gets in the way of what you want to accomplish!”
“That’s bull!”
Their voices were carrying to the secretaries in the outer office. Juliet cocked her head toward the door; two more of her secretary friends moved up to try to eavesdrop. They heard Brenda’s voice rise to match Lara’s: “Is it?! The big boys come at you—corporate heads, Wall Street cannibals—and sweet little Lara gets everything she wants and leaves their greedy carcasses bleeding on the floor! Now Mr. Sensitive poet-sculptor-surgeon down in Virginia says naw to you one time and you fly back home like a little bird. Since when did you take no for an answer?!”
“I saw he was a waste of time!” Lara responded, only slightly less loudly.
In the outer office a FedEx worker dropped off a package at Juliet’s desk; she waved for him to leave it; then she noticed the package’s return address.
In Lara’s inner office, Brenda was exploding. “A waste of time?! Personally? Or professionally?!”
“‘Personally’ has got nothing to do with it!”
Brenda would not be cowed. “You’ve been staring out windows ever since you came back!”
Lara lowered her voice, and the secretaries in the outer office could not hear her when she said, “Brenda. You’re a friend. And I know you mean well. But nothing happened in Virginia. Nothing… significant. To him or to—”