They watched Jones’s remarkably steady hands work their way into the crucial area of the test brain. “You guys keeping up in there?” he called.
Lara reached to the control panel in front of the lead tech and hit the talkback button. “We’re hanging on. And there’s no need for you to shout. We can hear you just fine.”
“I was just trying to wake Roscoe up; he seems a little unenthusiastic to me.” Jones paused to look at the replica brain, then at the scans of the real brain that Roscoe was made from, displayed in high definition on a huge monitor placed at the foot of the surgical table so that Jones could see it with the slightest shift of his eyes. “Well,” Jones said, “here’s where we separate the men from the boys. Or the girls. That’s a joke.”
“Just get on with it, please. Our instruments are recording, and I’m the one who has to pay our electric bill this month.”
“I’m entering the cortex.”
Now all the playfulness disappeared. Jones’s eyes settled into a trancelike stare and he began to work the probe in minuscule movements.
On the control room’s monitors the movements showed in massive magnification. One of the assistant lab techs noticed something, and wondered aloud, “He’s moving like… in pulses.”
“He moves between heartbeats,” Lara said, her voice stronger than she felt.
The lead tech read his monitors, then checked them again to be sure. “He’s reached the failure point of our best attempt,” he said.
Jones kept moving… kept moving… and then paused. Holding the handle of his probe absolutely motionless and moving only his lips, he said, “Show me your last trial at this section.”
The techs stabbed buttons; flashing onto the screens in front of Jones were three views of Lara’s last attempt—a wider view of her, a closer external view of her instruments on Roscoe, and the view of the optical fiber cameras in the simulated brain. Jones watched the replay, watched Lara’s instruments trying to negotiate a turn through the same passage of synthetic blood and bone as his instruments were about to attempt. On that recording the failure lights suddenly flashed, and in the recorded replay Lara turned in frustration to glare at the camera.
“Okay,” Jones said, “give me real time again.”
They switched his monitors back to displaying his current attempt, and Jones drew in another long, slow breath and then continued, resuming his rhythmic, trancelike state.
In the control room they watched him breathlessly, as their monitors showed his probes working ever deeper into the replica brain.
The lead tech glanced up at Lara’s back; she was motionless, staring through the glass at Jones. “We’ve never been this far before,” the tech said.
“What’s the threshold level on the death sensors?” Malcolm asked.
“Ninety-five percent of fatality level,” the tech answered.
“Make it a hundred five! We’re talking a human life here!” Malcolm snapped.
“I have no ego in this, Malcolm,” Lara said evenly. “He’s not competing with me.” She turned back to the glass, stared through it for a moment and added, “It’s more like he’s competing with God.”
Jones had reached the most critical area. Lara had never made it that far before—no surgeon ever had cut that deep, except on an autopsy. In the history of brain science it had been thought impossible for any doctor to thread surgical instruments through such critical areas of a living brain and have that brain survive. Lara Blair’s father had tried for decades to do it and had failed; Lara had spent years in the same quest and had built on her father’s work to go even further, but ultimately she too had reached the point where all her knowledge, all her skill, and all her hopes could not take her beyond those limits. Now Jones was standing almost within reach of what had become for Lara the Holy Grail.
Jones inserted a second tiny instrument—a wire of gold so fine that most surgeons could not even lift it without breaking it—into the channel of the first probe he had pushed into place; he paused for the space of a heartbeat and then made a move…
A sudden noise exploded the silence. But it was not the alarm: it was a bell, and with it, a steady green light burning above the control panel.
“What is that?” Brenda said, angry that everyone else seemed to know but she didn’t.
Jones pulled down his mask and looked at Lara.
Lara began to walk, very slowly at first, across the control room, through the door into the surgical lab.
Malcolm, watching Lara, said to Brenda, “He’s done it.”
Lara moved into the lab, faster and faster until she was running into Jones’s arms, laughing and shouting: “Yes! Yes!!!!!”
16
One of the techs had an old boom box in his locker, and he had placed it top of the control panel; it was blaring “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones. Champagne corks were popping and researchers from other parts of the company as well as executives and secretaries were joining the excitement as the celebration spilled through the rear doors of the control room and out into the hallways. Only the surgical lab itself, where Roscoe now lay with a new smile drawn on his face in Magic Marker, was off-limits. This was a day for the whole company to taste victory.
On the monitors of the control room the techs were replaying Jones’s work for their fellow geeks, marveling at what he had accomplished. “Look at this margin!” one of the techs said, over the music and the laughter. “You know how close that is to the death sensor?!”
“Two micrometers,” his fellow geek said.
“Two micrometers! That’s like one tenth of a human hair!” The control room was full of people hugging each other, pounding Jones on the back, congratulating Lara. She found Jones with her eyes and raised her champagne glass in toast to him; he smiled and returned the gesture.
Malcolm was in a flurry of activity, giving instructions to his aides. “I want twenty video copies of this trial overnighted to the top neurosurgeons on our list.”
“The stock’ll go through the roof,” the aide said.
“Tell them to block out training time and give us an estimate on when they could attempt the surgery!”
As Malcolm rattled on, Brenda moved up beside Jones. “Not bad,” she said. “For a poet.”
“You’re the corporate shrink—right?” Jones asked Brenda.
“Yeah,” Brenda said. “You wanna see my couch?”
The company lawyer appeared beside Jones and said, “We have some paperwork you’ll need your attorneys to look over.” Lara stepped out of her crowd of well-wishers and moved toward Jones, reaching him as the lawyer was adding, “We’ll have preliminary drafts delivered to your hotel. Once your attorneys get back to us and we’ve sorted the details—”
“We don’t need to sort,” Lara said. “Dr. Jones can name his price.” She said it loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear.
“That’s right, Dr. Jones!” one of the techs said. “Who da man? You da man!”
Jones grinned and told the tech, “Hey, good job with those monitor references.”
As the tech held up his hands to the applause of his friend, Lara asked Jones, “What were you looking at there, when you paused?”
“The route you tried through the nerve bundle in the center of the cortex. The aneurism wasn’t the same on my Roscoe as on yours.”
Malcolm, who seemed to hear everything everybody ever said within the walls of Blair Bio-Medical, stepped closer and said, “Both replicas are made from the same patient. And we made them identical to the scans. Didn’t we?”
“Absolutely,” the lead tech answered. “I checked them myself.”
“Then the scans were made at different times,” Jones said. “Flash ’em up.”