The Terminal Man

Part one of a new novel

Tuesday, March 9, 1971: Admission

I

They came down to the emergency ward at noon and sat on the bench just behind the swinging doors that led in from the ambulance parking slot. Ellis was nervous, preoccupied, distant. Morris was relaxed, eating a candy bar and crumpling the wrapper into the pocket of his white jacket.

From where they sat, they could look at the sunlight outside, falling across the big sign that read emergency ward and the smaller one that read no parking, ambulances only. In the distance, they heard sirens.

"Is that him?" Morris asked.

Ellis checked his watch. "I doubt it. It's too early."

They sat on the bench and listened to the sirens come closer. Ellis removed his glasses and wiped them with his tie. One of the emergency-ward nurses, a girl Morris did not know by name, came over and said brightly, "Is this the welcoming committee?"

Ellis squinted at her. Morris said, "We'll be taking him straight through. Do you have his chart down here?"

The nurse said, "No, doctor, it's upstairs," and walked off, looking irritated.

Ellis sighed. He replaced his glasses and frowned at the nurse.

Morris said, "She didn't mean anything."

"I suppose the whole damned hospital knows, "Ellis said.

"It's a pretty big secret to keep," Morris said.

The sirens were very close now; through the window they saw an ambulance back into the slot. Two orderlies opened the ambulance door and pulled out the stretcher. A frail elderly woman lay on the stretcher. She was gasping for breath, making wet gurgling sounds. Severe pulmonary edema, Morris thought as he watched her taken into one of the treatment rooms.

"I hope he's in good shape," Ellis said.

"Benson? Why shouldn't he be?"

"They might have roughed him up." Ellis stared morosely out the window. He really was in a bad mood, Morris thought. He knew that meant Ellis was excited; he had scrubbed in on enough cases with Ellis to recognize the pattern. Irascibility under pressure while he waited--and then total, almost bored calm when the operation began. "Where the hell is he?" Ellis said, looking at his watch again.

To change the subject, Morris said, "Are we all set for three-thirty?" At 3:30 that afternoon, Benson would be presented to the hospital staff at a special neurosurgical rounds.

"As far as I know," Ellis said. "Ross is making the presentation. I just hope Benson's in good shape."

Over the loud-speaker, a soft voice said, "Dr. Ellis, Dr. John Ellis, two-two-three-four. Dr. Ellis, two-two-three-four."

Ellis got up to answer the page. "Shit," he said.

Morris knew what he meant. Two-two-three-four was the extension for the animal laboratories. The call probably meant something had gone wrong with the monkeys. Ellis had been doing three monkeys a week for the past month, just to keep himself and his staff ready.

Morris watched as Ellis crossed the room and answered from a wall phone. Ellis walked with a slight limp, the result of a childhood injury that had cut the lateral peroneal nerve in his right leg. Morris always wondered if the injury had had something to do with Ellis' later decision to become a neurosurgeon. Certainly Ellis had the attitude of a man determined to correct defects, to fix things up. That was what he always said to his patients: "We can fix you up." And he seemed to have more than his share of defects himself--the limp, the premature baldness, the weak eyes requiring heavy thick glasses. All these things explained his short temper--and the explanation made him more tolerable.

Or perhaps the irritability was the result of all those years as a surgeon. Morris wasn't sure; he himself hadn't been a surgeon long enough. He stared out the window in the direction of the visitors' parking lot. Afternoon visiting hours were beginning; relatives were driving in, getting out of their cars, glancing up at the high buildings of the hospital. Apprehension was clear on their faces. The hospital was a place people feared.

Morris noticed how many of them had suntans. It was a warm, sunny spring in Los Angeles, yet he was still as pale as the white jacket and white trousers he wore every day. He had to get outside more often, he told himself. He should start eating lunch outside. He played tennis, of course, but that was usually in the evenings.

Ellis came back. "Shit," he said. "Ethel tore out her sutures."

"How did it happen?" Morris said. Ethel was a juvenile rhesus monkey that had undergone brain surgery the day before. The operation had proceeded flawlessly. And Ethel was unusually docile, as rhesus monkeys went.

"I don't know," Ellis said. "Apparently she worked an arm loose from her restraints. Anyway, she's shrieking and the bone's exposed on one side."

"Did she tear out her wires?"

"I don't know. But I've got to go over and resew her now. Can you handle this?"

"I think so." Morris would rather have Ellis here, but he could probably handle it himself.

"Are you all right with the cops?" Ellis said. "I don't think they'll give you any trouble."

"No, I don't think so."

"Just get Benson up to seven as fast as you can," Ellis said. "Then call Ross. I'll be up as soon as possible." He checked his watch. "It'll probably take forty minutes to resew Ethel, if she behaves herself."

When he had gone, the emergency-ward nurse came back. "What's the matter with him?" she asked.

"Just edgy," Morris said.

"He sure is," the nurse said. She paused and looked out the window, lingering.

Morris watched her with a kind of bemused detachment. He'd spent enough years in the hospital to recognize the subtle signs of status. He had begun as an intern, with no status at all. Most of the nurses had known more medicine than he had, and when they were tired, they didn't bother to conceal it. ("I don't think you want to do that, doctor.") As the years went by, he became a surgical resident and the nurses became more deferential. When he was a senior resident, he was sufficiently assured of his work that a few of the nurses called him by his first name. And finally, when he transferred to the Neuropsychiatric Research Unit as a junior staff member, the formality returned as a new mark of status.

But this was something else: a nurse hanging around, just being near him, because he had a special aura of importance. Because everyone in the hospital knew what was going to happen.

Staring out the window, the nurse said, "Here he comes."

Morris got up and looked out. A blue police van drove up toward the emergency ward and turned around, backing into the ambulance slot. "All right," he said. "Notify the seventh floor and tell them we're on our way."

The nurse went off. Two ambulance orderlies opened the hospital doors and watched as the police officer driving the van came around and unlocked its rear door. Two officers seated in the back emerged, blinking in the sunlight. Then Benson came out.

As always, Morris was struck by his appearance. Benson was a meek, pudgy, 34-year-old man with a sort of permanently bewildered air about him. He stood by the van, with his wrists handcuffed in front of him, and looked around. When he saw Morris, he said hello, and then looked away, embarrassed.

One of the cops said, "You in charge here?"

"Yes. I'm Dr. Morris. Would you mind taking his handcuffs off?"

"We don't have any orders about that." The cops exchanged glances. "I guess it's OK."

While they took the cuffs off, the driver brought Morris a form on a clipboard. Morris hardly glanced at it: "Transfer of Suspect to Institutional Care (Medical)." He signed it. Benson stood quietly, rubbing his wrists, staring straight ahead. The impersonality of the transaction, the form and signature, made Morris feel as if he were receiving a package from United Parcel.

Morris led the two other policemen and Benson into the hospital. A nurse came up with a wheelchair and Benson sat down in it. The cops looked confused. "It's hospital policy," Morris said as he led the way to the elevator.

• • •

The elevator arrived and they all got out. Seven was the special surgical floor, where difficult and complex cases were treated. It was essentially a research section. The most severe cardiac, kidney and metabolic patients recuperated here. Morris and the others went down to the nurses' station, a glass-walled area strategically located in the center of the X-shaped floor.

The nurse on duty at the station looked up. She was surprised to see the cops, but she said nothing. Morris said, "This is Mr. Benson. Have we got seven-ten ready?"

"All set for him," the nurse said and gave Benson a cheery smile. Benson smiled bleakly back and glanced from the nurse to the computer console in the corner of the nurses' station.

"You have a time-sharing station up here?" he asked.

"Yes," Morris said.

"Where's the main computer?"

"In the basement."

Benson nodded. Morris was not surprised at the questions. Benson was trying to distract himself from the thought of surgery and he was, after all, a computer expert.

The nurse handed Morris the chart on Benson. It had the usual blue-plastic cover with the seal of University Hospital. But there was also a red tag, which meant neurosurgery, and a yellow tag, which meant intensive care, and a white (continued on page 94)Terminal Man(continued from page 82) tag, which Morris had almost never seen on a patient's chart. The white tag meant security precautions.

"That must be my record. I always wondered what was in it," Benson said as Morris wheeled him down the hall toward 710.

"Lot of unreadable notes, mostly," Morris said. Actually, Benson's chart was thick and very readable, since most of it was computer print-out of different tests.

They came to 710. Before they entered the room, one of the cops went in and closed the door behind him. The second cop remained outside.

Benson glanced up at Morris. "They're very careful about me," he said. "It's almost flattering."

The cop came out. "It's OK," he said.

Morris wheeled Benson into the room; followed by the cops. Seven-ten was a large room, on the south side of the hospital, so that it was sunny in the afternoon. Benson looked around and nodded approvingly. Morris said, "This is one of the best rooms in the hospital."

Benson got out of the wheelchair and sat on the bed. He bounced on the mattress. He pressed the buttons that made the bed move up and down, then bent over to look at the motorized mechanism beneath the bed. Morris went to the window and drew the blinds, reducing the direct light.

"This bed mechanism is remarkably simple," Benson said. "You should really have a feedback unit, so that body movements by the person in the bed are automatically compensated for..." His voice trailed off. He opened the closet doors, looked in, checked the bathroom, came back. Most patients were intimidated by the hospital, Morris reflected, but Benson acted as if he were renting a hotel room.

"I'll take it," Benson said and laughed. He sat on the bed again and looked at Morris, then at the cops. "Do they have to be here?"

"I think they can wait outside," Morris said.

The cops went out, closing the door behind them.

"I meant," Benson said, "do they have to be here at all?"

"Yes. Unless we can get charges dropped against you."

Benson nodded and frowned. "Was it...I mean, did I...was it bad?"

"You gave him a black eye and you fractured one rib."

"But he's all right?"

"Yes. He's all right."

"I don't remember any of it, "Benson said. "All my memory cores are erased." Then he added, "But I'm glad it was no worse."

Morris said, "Did you bring anything with you? Pajamas, anything like that?"

Benson said, "No. But I can arrange for it."

"OK. I'll get you some hospital clothing in the meantime. Are you all right for now?"

"Yes. Sure." And he grinned.

• • •

The cops had brought a chair up to the door. One sat there, the other stood alongside. Morris flipped open his notebook.

"You'll want to know the schedule," he said. "An admitting person will show up in the next half hour with financial waivers for Benson to sign. Then at three-thirty, he goes downstairs to the main amphitheater for surgical rounds. He comes back after about twenty minutes. His head will be shaved tonight. The operation is scheduled for six tomorrow morning. Do you have questions?"

"Can someone get us meals?" one of them asked.

Morris said, "I'll have the nurse order extras. Will there be two of you or just one?"

"Just one. We're working eight-hour shifts."

Morris said, "I'll tell the nurses. It'd help if you checked in and out with them. They like to know who's on the floor."

The cops nodded. There was a moment of silence. Finally, one of them said, "What's wrong with him, anyway?"

"He has a form of epilepsy. When he has a fit, he's violent."

"I saw the guy he beat up," one of the cops said. "Big strong guy, looked like a truck driver. You'd never think a little guy like that"--he jerked his arm toward Benson's room--"could do it."

The cop frowned and asked, "What's this operation he's getting?"

"It's a kind of brain surgery we call a stage-three procedure," Morris said. He didn't bother to explain further. The policemen wouldn't understand. And, he thought, even if they understood, they wouldn't believe it.

II

Neurosurgical grand rounds, where unusual cases were presented and discussed by all the surgeons of the hospital, was normally scheduled for Thursdays at nine A.M. A special rounds was hardly ever called. It was too difficult for the staff to get together. But now the amphitheater was packed, tier after tier of white jackets and pale faces staring down at Ellis, who pushed his glasses up his nose and said, "As many of you know, tomorrow morning the Neuropsychiatric Research Unit will perform a limbic pacing procedure--what we call a stage three--on a human patient."

There was no sound, no movement from the audience. Janet Ross stood in the corner of the amphitheater near the doors and watched. She found it odd that there should be so little reaction. But then it was hardly a surprise. Everyone in the hospital knew that the NPS had been waiting for a good stage-three subject.

"I must ask you," Ellis said, "to restrain your questions when the patient is introduced. He is a sensitive man and his disturbance is quite severe. We thought you should have the psychiatric background before we brought him in. The attending psychiatrist, Dr. Ross, will give you a summary." Ellis nodded to Ross. She came forward to the center of the room.

She stared up at the steeply banked rows of faces and felt a momentary hesitation. Janet Ross was tall and exceptionally good-looking in a lean, tanned, dark-blonde way. She herself felt she was too bony and angular, and she often wished she were more softly feminine. But she knew her appearance was striking, and at 30, after more than a decade of training in a predominantly masculine profession, she had learned to use it.

She clasped her hands behind her back, took a breath and launched into the summary in the rapid, stylized method that was standard for grand rounds.

"Harold Franklin Benson," she said, "is a thirty-four-year-old divorced computer scientist who was healthy until two years ago, when he was involved in an automobile accident on the Santa Monica Freeway. Following the accident, he was unconscious for an unknown period of time. He was taken to a local hospital for overnight observation and discharged the next day in good health. He was fine for six months, until he began to experience what he called blackouts."

The audience was silent, faces staring down at her, listening.

"These blackouts lasted several minutes, and occurred about once a month. They were often preceded by the sensation of peculiar, unpleasant odors. The blackouts frequently occurred after drinking alcohol. The patient consulted his local physician, who told him he was working too hard and recommended he reduce his alcohol intake. Benson did this, but the blackouts continued.

"One year ago--a year after the accident--he realized that the blackouts were becoming more frequent and lasting longer. He often regained consciousness, to find himself in unfamiliar surroundings. On several occasions, he had cuts and bruises or torn clothing, which suggested that he had been fighting. However, (continued on page 180)Terminal Maim(continued from page 94) he never remembered what occurred during the blackout periods."

Heads in the audience nodded. They understood what she was telling them; it was a straightforward history of a temporal-lobe epileptic. The hard part was coming.

"The patient's friends," she continued, "told him that he was acting different, but he discounted their opinion. Gradually, he has lost contact with most of his former friends. Around this time--one year ago--he also made what he called a monumental discovery in his work. Benson is a computer scientist specializing in artificial life, or machine intelligence. In the course of this work, he says he discovered that machines were competing with human beings and that ultimately machines would take over the world."

Now there were whispers in the audience. This interested them, particularly the psychiatrists. Ross could see her old teacher, Manon, sitting in the top row, holding his head in his hands. Manon knew.

"Benson communicated his discovery to his remaining friends. They suggested that he see a psychiatrist, which angered him. In the past year, he has become increasingly certain that machines are conspiring to take over the world.

"Then, six months ago, the patient was arrested by police on suspicion of beating an airplane mechanic to a bloody pulp. Positive identification could not be made and charges were dropped. But the episode unnerved Benson and led him to seek psychiatric help. He had the vague suspicion that, somehow, he had been the man who had beaten the mechanic. That was unthinkable to him, but the nagging suspicion remained.

"He was referred to the University Hospital Neuropsychiatric Research Unit four months ago, in November 1970. On the basis of his history--head injury, episodic violence preceded by strange smells--he was considered a probable psychomotor epileptic. As you know, the NPS now accepts only patients with organically treatable behavioral disturbances.

"A neurological examination was fully normal. An electroencephalogram was fully normal; brain-wave activity showed no pathology. It was repeated after alcohol ingestion and an abnormal tracing was obtained. The EEG showed seizure wave-form activity in the right temporal lobe of the brain. Benson was therefore considered a stage-one patient--firm diagnosis of psychomotor epilepsy."

She paused to get her breath and let the audience absorb what she had told them. "The patient is an intelligent man," she said, "and his illness was explained to him. He was told he had injured his brain in the automobile accident and, as a result, had a form of epilepsy that produced thought seizures--seizures of the mind, not the body, leading frequently to violent acts. He was told that the disease was common and could be controlled. He was started on a series of drug trials.

"Three months ago, Benson was arrested on charges of assault and battery. The victim was a twenty-four-year-old topless dancer, who later dropped charges. The hospital intervened slightly on Benson's behalf.

"One month ago, drug trials of morladone, p-amino benzadone and triamiline were concluded. Benson showed no improvement on any drug or combination of drugs. He was therefore a stage two--drug-resistant psychomotor epileptic. And he was scheduled for a stage-three surgical procedure, which we will discuss today."

She paused. "Before I bring him in," she said, "I think I should add that yesterday afternoon, he attacked a gasstation attendant and beat the man rather badly. His operation is scheduled for tomorrow and we have persuaded the police to release him into our custody. But he is still technically awaiting arraignment on charges of assault and battery."

The amphitheater was silent. She went to the doors to bring Benson in.

• • •

Benson was just outside the amphitheater, sitting in his wheelchair, wearing the blue-and-white-striped bathrobe the hospital issued to its patients. When Janet Ross appeared, he smiled. "Hello, Dr. Ross."

"Hello, Harry." She smiled back. "How do you feel?"

It was a polite question. After years of psychiatric training, she had learned to observe a patient's status and she could intuit how he felt. Benson was nervous and felt threatened; there was sweat on his upper lip, his shoulders were drawn in, his hands clenched in his lap.

"I feel fine," he said. "Just fine."

Behind Benson was Morris, pushing the wheelchair, and a cop. Ross said to Morris, "Does he come in with us?"

Before Morris could answer, Benson said lightly, "He goes everywhere I go." The cop nodded and looked embarrassed.

Ross opened the doors and Morris wheeled Benson into the amphitheater and left him in a position facing the audience. Ross took a seat to one side and glanced at the cop, who stood by a door, trying to look inconspicuous. Ellis stood next to Benson, who was looking at a wall of frosted glass against which a dozen X rays had been clipped. He seemed to realize that they were his own skull films. Ellis noticed and turned off the light behind the frosted glass. The X rays became opaquely black.

"We've asked you to come here," Ellis said, "to answer some questions for these doctors." He gestured to the men sitting in the semicircular tiers. "They don't make you nervous, do they?"

Ellis asked it easily. Ross frowned. She'd attended hundreds of grand rounds in her life and the patients were invariably asked if the doctors peering down at them made them nervous. In answer to a direct question, the patients always denied nervousness.

"Sure they make me nervous," Benson said. "They'd make anybody nervous."

Ross suppressed a smile. Good for you, she thought.

Then Benson said, "What if you were a machine and I brought you in front of a bunch of computer experts who were trying to decide what was wrong with you and how to fix it? How would you feel?"

Ellis was plainly flustered. He ran his hands through his thinning hair and glanced at Ross, and she shook her head fractionally, no. This was the wrong place to explore Benson's psychopathology.

"I'd be nervous, too," Ellis said. "But of course," he added, "I'm not a machine, am I?"

"That depends," Benson said. "Certain of your functions are repetitive and mechanical. From that standpoint, they are easily programmed and relatively straightforward, if you--"

"I think," Ross said, standing up, "that we might take questions from those present now."

Ellis clearly didn't like that, but he was silent, and Benson, mercifully, was quiet. Ross looked up at the audience, and after a moment, a man in the back raised his hand and said, "Mr. Benson, can you tell us more about the smells you have before your blackouts?"

"Not really," Benson said. "They're strange, is all. They smell terrible, but they don't smell like anything, if you get what I mean. I mean, you can't identify the odor. Memory tapes cycle through blankly."

"Can you give us an approximation of the odor?"

Benson shrugged. "Maybe...pig shit in turpentine."

Another hand in the audience went up. "Mr. Benson, these blackouts have been getting more frequent. Have they also been getting longer?"

"Yes," Benson said. "They're several hours now."

"How do you feel when you recover from a blackout?"

"Sick to my stomach."

"Can you be more specific?"

"Sometimes I vomit. Is that specific enough?"

Ross frowned. She could see that Benson was becoming angry. "Are there other questions?" she asked, hoping there would not be. She looked up at the audience. There was a long silence.

"Well, then," Ellis said, "perhaps we can go on to discuss the details of stage-three surgery. Mr. Benson knows all this, so he can stay or leave, whichever he prefers."

Ross didn't approve. Ellis was showing off, the surgeon's instinct for demonstrating to everyone that his patient didn't mind being cut and mutilated. It was unfair to ask--to dare--Benson to stay in the amphitheater.

"I'll stay," Benson said.

"Fine," Ellis said. He went to the blackboard and drew a brain schematically. "Now, our understanding of the disease process," he said, "is that a portion of the brain is damaged in epilepsy and a scar forms. It's like a scar on other body organs--lots of fibrous tissue, lots of contraction and distortion. And it becomes a focus for abnormal electrical discharges. We see spreading waves moving outward from the focus, like ripples from a rock thrown into a pond."

Ellis drew a point on the brain, then sketched in concentric circles.

"These electrical ripples produce a seizure. In some parts of the brain, the discharge focus produces a shaking fit, frothing at the mouth, and so on. In other parts, there are other effects. If the focus is in the temporal lobe, as in Mr. Benson's case, you get what is called psychomotor epilepsy--convulsions of thought, not of body. Strange thoughts and frequently violent behavior, preceded by a characteristic aura that is often an odor.

"Now, then," Ellis said, "we know from the work of many researchers that it is possible to abort a seizure by delivering an electrical shock to the correct portion of the brain substance. These seizures begin slowly. There are a few seconds--sometimes as much as half a minute--before the seizure takes effect. A shock at that moment prevents the seizure."

He drew a large X through the concentric circles. Then he drew a new brain and a head around it and a neck. "We face two problems," he said. "First, to what part of the brain should we deliver the shock? Well, we know roughly that it's in the amygdala, a posterior area of the so-called limbic system. We don't know exactly where, but we solve that problem by implanting several electrodes in the brain. Mr. Benson will have forty electrodes implanted tomorrow morning."

He drew two lines into the brain.

"Now, our second problem is, how do we know when an attack is starting? We must know when to deliver our aborting shock. Well, fortunately, the same electrodes that we use to deliver the shock can also be use to read the electrical activity of the brain. And there is a characteristic electrical pattern that precedes a seizure." Ellis paused, glanced at Benson, then up at the audience.

"So we have a feedback system--the same electrodes are used to detect an attack starting and to deliver the aborting shock. To control the feedback mechanism we have a computer." He drew a small square in the neck of his schematic figure.

"The NPS staff has developed a computer that will monitor electrical activity of the brain, and when it reads an attack starting, it will transmit a shock to the correct brain area. This computer is about the size of a postage stamp and weighs a tenth of an ounce. It will be implanted beneath the skin of the patient's neck." He then drew an oblong shape below the neck and drew lines from it to the computer square.

"We will power the computer with a Handler plutonium power pack, which will be implanted beneath the skin of the shoulder. This makes the patient completely self-sufficient. The power pack supplies energy continuously and reliably, for twenty years."

With his chalk, he tapped the different parts of his diagram. "That's the complete feedback loop--brain to electrodes to computer to power pack, back to brain. A total loop without any externalized portions."

Ellis turned to Benson, who had listened to the discussion with an expression of bland disinterest. "Any comments, Mr. Benson?"

Ross groaned inwardly. Ellis was really letting him have it. He was flagrantly sadistic--even for a surgeon.

"No," Benson said. "I have nothing to say." And he yawned.

• • •

Benson was wheeled out of the amphitheater. Ross walked alongside him toward the elevator. It wasn't really necessary for her to accompany him, but she felt concerned about his condition--and a little guilty about the way Ellis had treated him. She said, "How do you feel?"

"I thought it was interesting," he said.

"In what way?"

"Well, the discussion was entirely medical. I would have preferred a more philosophical approach."

"We're just practical people," she said lightly, "dealing with a practical problem."

Benson smiled. "So was Newton," he said. "What's more practical than the problem of why an apple falls to the ground?"

"Do you really see philosophical implications in all this?"

Benson nodded. His expression turned serious. "Yes," he said, "and so do you. You're just pretending that you don't."

She stopped and stood in the corridor, watching as he was wheeled to the elevator. Then she went back to the amphitheater.

• • •

"...Has been under development for ten years." Ellis was saying. "It was started for cardiac pacemakers, in which changing batteries requires minor surgery every year or so. That's an annoyance to surgeon and patient. The atomic power pack is totally reliable and has a long life span. If Mr. Benson is still alive, we might have to change the pack around 1990, but not before then."

Janet Ross slipped back into the amphitheater just as another question was asked: "How will you determine which of the forty electrodes will prevent a seizure?"

"We will implant them all," Ellis said, "and wire up the computer. But we will not lock in any electrodes for twenty-four hours. One day after surgery, we'll stimulate each of the electrodes by radio control and determine which one is best. Then we will lock that one in by remote control."

High up in the amphitheater, there was a cough and a familiar voice said, "These technical details are interesting, but they seem to me to elude the point." Ross looked up and saw Manon again. It was a little surprising that her old teacher should be here; Manon was nearly 75, an emeritus professor of psychiatry who rarely came to the hospital any longer. When he did, he was usually regarded as a cranky old man, far past his prime, out of touch with modern thinking. "It seems to me," Manon continued, "that the patient is psychotic."

"That's putting it a little strongly," Ellis said.

"Perhaps," Manon said. "But at the very least, he has a severe personality disorder. All his confusion about men and machines is worrisome to me."

"The personality disorder is part of his disease," Ellis said. "In a recent review, Harley and co-workers at Yale reported that fifty percent of temporallobe epileptics had an accompanying personality disorder that was independent of seizure activity per se."

"Quite so," Manon said in a voice that had the slightest edge of impatience to it. "It is part of his disease, independent of seizures. But will your procedure cure it?"

Janet Ross found herself quietly pleased; Manon was reaching exactly her own conclusions. Manon said, "In other words, the operation will stop his seizures, but will it stop his delusions?"

"No," Ellis said, "Probably not."

"If I may make a small speech," Manon said, frowning down from the top row, "this kind of thinking is what I fear most from the NPS. I don't mean to single you out particularly. It's a general problem of the medical profession. For example, if the emergency ward gets a case of attempted suicide or suicide gesture via drug overdose, our approach is to pump the patient's stomach, give him a lecture and send him home. That's a treatment--but it's hardly a cure. The patient will be back sooner or later. Stomach pumping doesn't treat depression. It only treats drug overdose."

"I understand what you're saying, but--"

"I'd also remind you of the hospital's experience with Mr. L. Do you recall that case?"

"I don't think Mr. L applies here," Ellis said. But his voice was stiff, irritable.

"I'm not so sure," Manon said. Since several puzzled faces in the amphitheater were turned toward him, he explained. "Mr. L was a famous case here a few years ago. He was a thirty-nine year-old man with bilateral end-stage kidney disease. Chronic glomerulonephritis. He was in good shape physically and was considered a candidate for renal transplant. Because our facilities for transplantation are limited, a hospital review board selects patients. The psychiatrists on that board strongly opposed Mr. L as a transplantation candidate, because he was psychotic. He believed that the sun ruled the earth and he refused to go outside during the daylight hours. We felt he was too unstable to benefit from kidney surgery, but he ultimately received the operation. Six months later, he committed suicide. That's a tragedy. But the real question is, couldn't someone else have benefited more from the thousands of dollars and many hours of specialized effort that went into the transplant?"

Ellis paced back and forth, his foot scraping along the floor slightly. "I understand your objection," he said, "but I'd like to consider the problem from a somewhat different viewpoint. It is perfectly true that Benson is disturbed and that our operation probably won't change that. But what happens if we don't operate on him? Are we doing him a favor? I don't think so. We know that his seizures are life-threatening to himself and to others and that they're getting worse. The operation will prevent seizures, and we think that is an important benefit to the patient."

High up, Manon gave a little shrug. Ross knew the gesture; it signaled irreconcilable differences, an impasse.

"Well, then," Ellis said, "are there other question?"

There were no other questions.

III

Janet Ross walked with Ellis across the parking lot toward the Langer research building. It was late afternoon; the sunlight was yellowing, turning pale and weak.

"His point was valid," she said mildly.

Ellis sighed. "I keep forgetting you're on his side."

"Why do you keep forgetting?" she asked. She smiled as she said it. As the psychiatrist on the NPS staff, she'd opposed Benson's operation from the beginning.

"Look," Ellis said. "We do what we can. It'd be great to cure him totally. But we can't do that. We can only help him. So we'll help him."

There was nothing more to say. She had told Ellis her opinion many times before. The operation might not help--it might, in fact, make Benson much worse. She was sure Ellis understood that possibility, but he was stubbornly ignoring it. Or so it seemed to her.

Actually, she liked Ellis, as much as she liked any surgeon. She regarded surgeons as flagrantly action-oriented, men (they were almost always men, which fact she found significant) desperate to do something, to take some physical action. In that sense, Ellis was better than most of them. He had wisely turned down several stage-three candidates before Benson, and she knew that was difficult for him to do, because a part of him was terribly eager to perform the new operation.

"I hate all the politics. That's the nice thing about operating on monkeys. No politics at all," Ellis said.

"But you want to do Benson--"

"I'm ready," Ellis said. "We're all ready. We have to take that first big step and now is the time to take it." He glanced at her.

They came to the Langer building. Ellis went off to an early dinner with McPherson--a political dinner, he said irritably--and Ross took the elevator to the fourth floor.

After ten years of steady expansion, the Neuropsychiatric Research Unit encompassed the entire fourth floor of the Langer research building. The other floors were painted a dead, cold white, but the NPS was painted bright primary colors. The intention was to make patients feel optimistic and happy, but it always had the reverse effect on Ross. She found it falsely and artificially cheerful, like a nursery school for retarded children.

She got off the elevator and looked at the reception area, one wall a bright blue, the other red. Like almost everything else about the NPS, the colors had been McPherson's idea. It was strange, she thought, how much an organization reflected the personality of its leader. McPherson himself always seemed to have a bright kindergarten quality about him and a boundless optimism.

The unit was quiet now, most of the staff gone home for the day. She walked down the corridor past the colored doors with the stenciled labels: Sono Encephalography, Cortical Function, EEG, Ras Scoring, Parietal T and, at the far end of the hall, Telecomp. The work done behind those doors was as complex as the labels--and this was just the patientcare wing, what McPherson called "Applications."

Applications was ordinary compared with Development, the research wing with its Chemitrodes and compsims and clad scenarios. To say nothing of the big projects, like George and Martha, or Form Q. Development was ten years ahead of Applications--and Applications was very, very advanced.

A year ago, McPherson had asked Ross to take a group of newspaper science reporters through the NPS. He chose her, he said, "because she was such a piece of ass." It was funny to hear him say that, but shocking in a way. He was usually so courtly and fatherly.

But her shock was minor compared with the shock the reporters felt. She had planned to show them both Applications and Development, but after they had seen Applications they were so agitated, so clearly overloaded, that she cut the tour short.

She worried a lot about it afterward. The reporters hadn't been naive and they hadn't been inexperienced. They were people who shuttled from one scientific arena to another all their working lives. Yet they were rendered speechless by the implications of the work she had shown them. She herself had lost that insight, that perspective--she had been working in the NPS for three years and she had gradually become accustomed to the things done there. The conjunction of men and machines, human brains and electronic brains, was no longer bizarre and provocative. It was just a way to take steps forward and get things done.

On the other hand, she opposed the stage-three operation on Benson. She had opposed it from the start. She thought Benson was the wrong human subject and she had just one last chance to prove it.

At the end of the corridor, she paused at the door to Telecomp, listening to the quiet hiss of the print-out units. She heard voices inside and opened the door. Telecomp was really the heart of the Neuropsychiatric Research Unit; it was a large room, filled with electronic equipment. The walls and ceiling were soundproofed, a vestige of earlier days when the readout consoles were clattering teletypes. Now they used either silent CRTs--cathode-ray tubes--or a print-out machine that sprayed the letters on with a nozzle rather than typed them mechanically. The hiss of the sprayer was the loudest sound in the room. McPherson had insisted on the change to quieter units because he felt the clattering disturbed patients who came to the NPS for treatment.

Gerhard was there with his assistant, Richards. The wizard twins, they were called: Gerhard was only 24 and Richards even younger. They were the least professional people attached to the NPS; both men regarded Telecomp as a kind of permanent playground filled with complex toys. They worked long but erratic hours, frequently beginning in the late afternoon, quitting at dawn.

Gerhard, who wore cowboy boots and dungares and satiny shirts with pearl buttons, had gained some national attention at the age of 13, when he had built a 20-foot-high solid-fuel rocket behind his house in Phoenix. The rocket possessed a remarkably sophisticated electronic guidance system and Gerhard felt he could fire it into orbit. His neighbors, who could see the nose of the finished rocket sticking up above the garage in his back yard, were disturbed enough to call the police, and ultimately the Army was notified.

The Army examined Gerhard's rocket and shipped it to White Sands Proving Grounds for firing. As it happened, the second stage ignited before disengagement and the rocket exploded two miles up; but by that time, Gerhard had four patents on his guidance mechanism and a number of scholarship offers from colleges and industrial firms. He turned them all down, let his uncle invest the patent royalties and, when he was old enough to drive, bought a Maserati. He went to work for Lockheed in Palmdale, California, but quit after a year because he was blocked from advancement by a lack of formal engineering degrees. It was also true that his colleagues resented a 17-year-old with a Maserati Ghibli and a propensity for working in the middle of the night; it was felt he had no team spirit.

Then McPherson hired him to work at the Neuropsychiatric Research Unit, designing electronic components to be synergistic with the human brain. McPherson, as head of the NPS, had interviewed dozens of candidates who thought the job was "a challenge" or "an interesting systems-application context." Gerhard said he thought it would be fun and was hired immediately.

Richard's background was similar. He had finished high school and gone to college for six months before going into the Navy. He was about to be sent to Vietnam as a radar operator on a cruiser when he began to suggest improvements in the scanning devices. The improvements worked and Richards never got closer to combat than a laboratory in San Diego. When he was discharged, he also joined the NPS.

"Hi, Jan,"Gerhard said.

"How's it going, Jan?" Richards said.

"OK," she said. "We've got our stage three through grand rounds. I'm going to see him now."

"We're just finishing a check on the computer," Gerhard said. "It looks fine." He pointed to a microscope surrounded by electronic equipment. Under the lens of the microscope was a clear-plastic packet the size of a postage stamp. Visible through the plastic was a dense jumble of microminiaturized electronic components. Forty contact points stuck out from the plastic. With the help of the microscope, the wizard twins were testing the points sequentially, with fine probes.

"The logic circuits are the last to be checked," Richards said. "And we have a backup unit, just in case."

Ross went over to the storage shelves and began looking through the file cards. After a moment, she said, "Haven't you got any more psychodex cards?"

"They're over here," Gerhard said. "You want five-space or n-space?"

"N-space," she said. Gerhard opened a drawer and took out a cardboard sheet. He also took out a flat plastic clipboard. Attached to the clipboard by a metal chain was a pointed metal probe, something like a pencil.

"I suppose this is for the stage three. Haven't you run enough psychodexes on him?"

"Just one more, for the records."

Gerhard shrugged and handed the card and clipboard to her. "Does your stage three know what's going on?"

"He knows most of it," she said.

Gerhard shook his head. "He must be out of his mind."

"He is," Ross said. "That's the problem."

• • •

On the seventh floor of the other building, she stopped at the nurses' station to ask for Benson's chart. A new nurse on duty there said, "I'm sorry, but relatives aren't allowed to look at medical records."

"I'm Dr. Ross."

The nurse was flustered. "I'm sorry, doctor, I didn't see a name tag. Your patient is in seven-oh-four. Little Jerry Peters."

Dr. Ross looked blank.

"Aren't you a pediatrician?" the nurse asked finally.

"No," she said. "I'm a psychiatrist at the NPS." She heard the stridency in her own voice and it upset her. But all those years, growing up with people who said, "You don't really want to be a doctor, you want to be a nurse," or "Well, for a woman, pediatrics is best, I mean, the most natural thing...."

"Oh," the nurse said. "Then you want Mr. Benson in seven-ten. He's been prepped."

"Thank you," she said. She took the chart and walked down the hall to Benson's room. She nodded to the policeman on duty, knocked on Benson's door and heard gunshots. She opened the door and saw that the room lights were dimmed, except for a small bedside lamp, but the room was bathed in an electric-blue glow from a TV. On the screen, a man was saying, "Dead before he hit the ground. Two bullets right through the heart."

"Hello?" she said and swung the door wider.

Benson looked over. He smiled and pressed a button beside the bed, turning off the TV. His head was wrapped in a towel.

"How are you feeling?" she asked, coming into the room. She sat on a chair beside the bed.

"Naked," he said and touched the towel. "It's funny. You don't realize how much hair you have until somebody cuts it all off." He touched the towel again. "It must be worse for a woman." Then he looked at her and became embarrassed.

"It's not much fun for anybody," she said.

"I guess not." He lay back against the pillow. "After they did it, I looked in the wastebasket and I was amazed. So much hair. And my head was cold. It was the funniest thing, a cold head. They put a towel around it. I said I wanted to look at my head--see what I looked like bald--but they said it wasn't a good idea. So I waited until after they left, and then I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. But when I got in there...."

"Yes?"

"I didn't take the towel off." He laughed. "I couldn't do it. What does that mean?"

"I don't know. What do you think it means?"

He laughed again. "Why is it that psychiatrists never give you a straight answer?" He lit a cigarette and looked at her defiantly. "They told me I shouldn't smoke, but I'm doing it anyway."

"I doubt that it matters," she said. She was watching him closely. He seemed in good spirits and she didn't want to dampen them. But, on the other hand, it wasn't entirely appropriate to be jovial on the eve of brain surgery.

"Ellis was here a few minutes ago," he said, puffing on the cigarette. "He put some marks on me. Can you see?" He lifted the right side of his towel slightly, exposing white, pale flesh over the skull. Two blue X marks were positioned behind the ear. "How do I look?" he asked, grinning.

"You look fine," she said. "Any worries?"

"No. I mean, what is there to worry about? Nothing I can do. For the next few hours, I'm in your hands and Ellis' hands."

"I think most people would be a little worried before an operation."

"There you go again, being a reasonable psychiatrist." He smiled and then frowned. He bit his lip. "Of course I'm worried."

"What worries you?"

"Everything," he said. He sucked on the cigarette. "Everything. I worry about how I'll sleep. How I'll feel tomorrow. How I'll be when it's all over. What if somebody makes a mistake? What if I get turned into a vegetable? What if it hurts? What if I...."

"Die?"

"Sure. That, too."

"It's really a minor procedure. It's hardly more complicated than an appendectomy."

"I bet you tell that to all your brainsurgery patients," he said.

"No, really. It's a short, simple procedure. It'll take about an hour and a half."

He nodded vaguely. She couldn't tell if she had reassured him. "You know," he said, "I don't really think it will happen. I keep thinking, tomorrow morning at the last minute they'll come in and say, 'You're cured, Benson, you can go home now.'"

"We hope you'll be cured by the operation." She felt a twinge of guilt, saying that, but it came out smoothly enough.

He nodded again. "You're so goddamned reasonable," he said. "There are times when I can't stand it." He touched the towel on his head again. "I mean, for Christ's sake, they're going to drill holes in my head and stick wires in--"

"You've known about that for a long time."

"Sure," he said. "Sure. But this is the night before." He puffed on the cigarette.

"Do you feel angry now?"

"No. Just scared."

"It's all right to be scared; it's perfectly normal. But don't let it make you angry."

He stubbed out the cigarette and lit another immediately. Changing the subject, he pointed to the clipboard she carried under her arm. "What's that?"

"Another psychodex test. I want you to go through it."

He shrugged. She handed him the clipboard and he arranged the question card on the board, then began to answer the questions. He read them aloud: "'Would you rather be an elephant or a baboon?' Baboon. Elephants live too long."

With the metal probe, he punched out the chosen answer on the card.

"'If you were a color, would you rather be green or yellow?' Yellow. I'm feeling very yellow right now." He laughed and punched the answer.

She waited until he had done all 30 questions and punched his answers. He handed the clipboard back to her and his mood seemed to shift again. "Are you going to be there? Tomorrow?"

"Yes."

"And when will I come out of it?"

"Tomorrow afternoon or evening."

She asked him if she could get him anything and he said some ginger ale and she replied that he was NPO, nothing per os, for 12 hours before the operation. She said he'd be getting shots to help him sleep and shots in the morning before he went to surgery. She said she hoped he'd sleep well.

As she left, she heard a hum as the television went back on and a metallic voice said, "Look, lieutenant, I've got a murderer out there, somewhere in a city of three million people...." She closed the door.

Before leaving the floor, she put a brief note on Benson's chart. She drew a red line around it, so that the nurses would be sure to see it, since it was important for everyone on the floor to read it:

Admitting Psychiatric Summary

This 34-year-old man has documented psychomotor epilepsy of one and a half years' duration. The etiology is presumably traumatic, following an automobile accident. This patient has already tried to kill two people and has been involved in fights with many others. Any statement by him to hospital staff that he "feels funny" or "smells something bad" should be respected as indicating the start of a seizure. Under such circumstances, notify the NPS and Hospital Security at once.

The patient has an accompanying personality disorder that is part of his disease. He is convinced that machines are conspiring to take over the world. This belief is strongly held and attempts to dissuade him from it will only draw his enmity and suspicion. One should also remember that he is a highly intelligent and sensitive man. The patient can be quite demanding at times, but he should be treated with firmness and respect.

His intelligent and articulate manner may lead one to forget that his attitudes are not willful. Beneath it all, he is frightened and concerned about what is happening to him.

Janet Ross, M. D. NPS

IV

Morris was sitting in the hospital cafeteria finishing some stale apple pie when his pagemaster went off. It produced a high electronic squeal, which persisted until he reached down to his belt and turned it off. He returned to his pie. After a few moments, the squeal came again. He swore, put down his fork and went to the phone to answer his page.

There had been a time when he regarded the little gray box clipped to his belt as a wonderful thing. He relished those moments when he would be having lunch or dinner with a girl and his pagemaster would go off, requiring him to call in. That sound demonstrated that he was a busy, responsible person involved in life-and-death matters. When the pagemaster went off, he would excuse himself abruptly and answer the call, radiating a sense of duty before pleasure. The girls loved it.

But after several years, it was no longer wonderful. The box was inhuman and implacable and it had come to symbolize for him the fact that he was not his own man. He was perpetually on call to some higher authority, however whimsical--a nurse who wanted to confirm a medication order at two A.M.; a relative who was acting up, making trouble about momma's postoperative treatment; a call to tell him a conference was being held when he was already there, attending the damned conference.

Now the finest moments in his life were those when he went home and put the box away for a few hours. He became unreachable and free. And he liked that very much.

He stared across the cafeteria at the remainder of his apple pie as he dialed the switchboard. "Dr. Morris."

"Dr. Morris, two-four-seven-one."

"Thank you." That was the extension for the nurses' station on the seventh floor. It was odd how he had learned all these extensions. The telephone system of University Hospital was more complicated than the human anatomy. But over the years, without any conscious attempt to learn it, he came to know it quite well. He dialed the number. "Dr. Morris."

"Oh, yes," a female voice said. "We have a woman with an overnight bag for patient Harold Benson. She says it contains personal things. Is it all right to give it to him?"

"I'll come up," he said.

"Thank you, doctor."

He went back to his tray, picked it up and carried it to the disposal area.

• • •

The seventh floor was quiet. Most of the other hospital floors were noisy, jammed with relatives and visitors at this hour, but the seventh floor was always quiet. It had a sedate, calm quality that the nurses were careful to preserve.

The nurse at the station said, "There she is, doctor," and nodded to a girl sitting on a couch. Morris went over to her. She was young and very pretty in a flashy, show-business sort of way. Her legs were long.

"I'm Dr. Morris."

"Angela Black." She stood up and shook hands very formally. "I brought this for Harry." She lifted a small blue overnight bag. "He asked me to bring it."

"All right." He took the bag from her. "I'll see that he gets it."

She hesitated, then said, "Can I see him?"

"I don't think it's a good idea." Benson would have been shaved by now; pre-op patients who had been shaved often didn't want to see people.

"Just for a few minutes?"

"He's heavily sedated," he said.

She was clearly disappointed. "Then would you give him a message? Tell him I'm back in my old apartment. He'll understand."

"I'll tell him."

"Thank you." She smiled. It was a rather nice smile, despite the long false eyelashes and the heavy make-up. Why did young girls do that to their faces? "I guess I'll be going now."

And she walked off, short skirt and very long legs, a briskly determined walk. He watched her go, then hefted the bag, which seemed a little heavy. He took it to 710.

The cop outside the door to the room was rolling a wooden matchstick around in his mouth. He took it out and said, "How's it going?"

"Fine," Morris said.

The cop glanced at the overnight bag, but said nothing as Morris took it into the room.

Benson was watching a Western on television. Morris turned down the sound and showed him the bag. "A very pretty girl showed up with this and wants you to know that she's now back in her old apartments."

"Angela?" Benson smiled. "Yes, she has a nice exterior. Not a very complicated internal mechanism, but a nice exterior." He extended his hand; Morris gave him the bag. He watched as Benson opened it, placing the contents on the bed. There were a pair of pajamas, an electric razor, some after-shave lotion, a paperback novel.

Then Benson brought out a black wig. "What's that for?" Morris asked.

Benson shrugged. "I knew I'd need it sooner or later," he said. Then he laughed. "You are letting me out of here, aren't you? Sooner or later?"

Morris laughed with him. Benson dropped the wig back into the bag and removed a plastic packet. With a metallic clink, he unfolded it and Morris saw that it was a set of screwdrivers of various sizes, stored in a plastic package with a pocket for each size.

"What're those for?" Morris asked.

Benson looked puzzled for a moment. Then he said, "I don't know if you'll understand.... I always have them with me. For protection."

Benson put the screwdrivers back into the overnighter. He handled them carefully, almost reverently. Morris knew that patients frequently brought odd things into the hospital, particularly if they were seriously ill. There was a kind of totemic feeling about these objects, as if they might have magical preservative powers. They were often connected with some hobby or favorite activity. He remembered a yachtsman with a metastatic brain tumor who had brought a kit to repair sails, and a woman with advanced heart disease who had brought a can of tennis balls. That kind of thing.

"I understand," Morris said. Benson smiled.

V

Telecomp was empty when Ross went into the room; the consoles and teleprinters stood silently by, the screens blinking up random sequences of numbers. She went to a corner of the room and poured herself a cup of coffee, then fed the test card from Benson's latest psychodex into the computer.

The NPS had developed the psychodex test, along with several other computeranalyzed psychological tests. It was all part of what McPherson called doubleedged thinking. In this case, he meant that the idea of a brain being like a computer worked two ways, in two different directions. On the one hand, you could utilize the computer to probe the brain, to help you analyze its workings. At the same time, you could use your increased knowledge of the brain to help design better and more efficient computers. As McPherson said, "The brain is as much a model for the computer as the computer is a model for the brain."

At the NPS, computer scientists and neurobiologists had worked together for several years. From that association had come Form Q and programs like George and new psychosurgical techniques and psychodex.

Psychodex was relatively simple. It was a test that took straightforward answers to psychological questions and manipulated the answers according to complex mathematical formulations. As the data was fed into the computer, Ross watched the screen glow with row after row of calculations.

She ignored them; the numbers, she knew, were just the computer's scratch-pad, the intermediate steps that it went through before arriving at an answer. She smiled, thinking of how Gerhard would explain it--rotation of 30 by 30 matrices in space, deriving factors, making them orthogonal, then weighting them. It all sounded complicated and scientific and she didn't really understand any of it. All you had to know was which buttons to push to call up programs.

She had discovered long ago that you could use a computer without understanding how it worked. Just as you could drive an automobile., use a vacuum cleaner--or your own brain.

The screen flashed Calculations Ended. Call Display Sequence.

She punched in the display sequence for three-space scoring. The computer informed her that three spaces accounted for 81 percent of variance. On the screen, she saw a three-dimensional image of a mountain with a sharp, jagged peak.

She stared at it a moment, then picked up the telephone and had McPherson paged.

• • •

McPherson stared at the screen. Ellis looked over his shoulder. Janet Ross asked, "Is it clear? It was done today."

McPherson sighed. "You're not going to quit without a battle, are you?"

Instead of answering, she punched buttons and called up a second mountain peak, much lower. "Here's the last one previously."

"On this scoring, the elevation is--"

"Psychotic mentation," she said.

"So he's much more pronounced now," McPherson said. "Much more than even a month ago."

"Yes," she said.

"You think he was screwing around with the test?" McPherson said.

She shook her head. She punched in the four previous tests in succession. The trend was clear: On each test, the mountain peak got higher and sharper.

"Well, then," McPherson said, "he's definitely getting worse. I gather you still think we shouldn't operate."

"More than ever," she said. "He's unquestionably psychotic, and if you start putting wires in his head--"

"I know," McPherson said. He said it gently but definitely. "I know what you're saying."

"He's going to feel that he's been turned into a machine," she said.

McPherson turned to Ellis. "Do you suppose we can knock this elevation down with Thorazine?" Thorazine was a major tranquilizer. With some psychotics, it helped them think more clearly.

"It's worth a try," Ellis said.

McPherson nodded. "I agree. Janet?"

She stared at the screen and didn't reply. It was odd how these tests worked. The mountain peaks were an abstraction, a mathematical representation of an emotional state. They weren't a real characteristic of a person, like fingers or toes, or height or weight.

"I think," she said, "that you're both committed to this operation."

"And you still disapprove?"

"I don't disapprove. I think it's unwise for Benson."

"How do you feel about using Thorazine?" McPherson persisted.

"Maybe it's worth it and maybe it's not. But it's a gamble."

McPherson nodded and turned to Ellis. "Do you still want to do him?"

"Yes," Ellis said, staring at the screen. "I still want to do him."

Wednesday, March 10, 1971: Implantation

I

At six A.M., Janet Ross was on the third surgical floor, dressed in greens, having coffee and a doughnut. The surgeons' lounge was busy at this hour. Although operations were scheduled to begin at six, most didn't get going until 15 or 20 minutes after that. The surgeons sat around, reading the newspaper, discussing the stock market and their golf games. From time to time, one of them would leave, go to the overhead viewing galleries and look down on his OR to see how preparations were coming.

Ross was the only woman in the lounge and her presence changed the masculine atmosphere subtly. It annoyed her that she should be the only woman and it annoyed her that the men should become quieter, more polite, less jovial and raucous. She didn't give a damn if they were raucous and she resented being made to feel like an intruder. It seemed to her that she had been an intruder all her life.

• • •

Morris was in the elevator with a nurse and Benson, who lay on a stretcher, and one of the cops. As they rode down, Morris said to the cop, "You can't get off on the second floor."

"Why not?"

"We're going onto the sterile floor directly."

"What should I do?" The cop was intimidated. He'd been docile and hesitant all morning. The routine of surgery left him feeling as a helpless outsider.

"You can watch from the viewing gallery on the third floor. Tell the desk nurse I said it was all right."

The cop nodded. The elevator stopped at the second floor. The doors opened to reveal a hallway with people, all in surgical greens, walking back and forth. A large sign read Sterile Area. No Admittance Without Authorization. The lettering was red.

Morris and the nurse wheeled Benson out of the elevator. The cop remained behind, looking nervous. He pushed the button and the doors closed.

Morris went with Benson down the corridor. After a moment, Benson said, "I'm still awake."

Morris nodded patiently. Benson had gotten pre-op medications half an hour earlier. They would be taking effect soon, making him drowsy. "How's your mouth?"

"Dry."

That was the atropine beginning to work. "You'll be OK." Benson just stared at him as he was wheeled down the corridor to OR 9.

• • •

OR 9 was the largest operating room in the hospital. It was nearly 30 feet square and packed with electronic equipment. When the full surgical team was in there--all 12 of them--things got pretty crowded. But now just two scrub nurses were working in the cavernous, gray-tiled space. They were setting out sterile tables and drapes around the chair.

Or 9 had no operating table. Instead, there was a softly cushioned upright chair, like a dentist's chair. Janet Ross watched the girls through the window in the door that separated the scrub room from the operating room. Alongside her, Ellis finished his scrub and muttered something about fucking Morris being fucking late. Ellis got profane before operations. He also got very nervous, though he seemed to think nobody noticed that. Ross had scrubbed with him on several animal procedures and had seen the ritual--tension and profanity before the operation and utter bland calmness once things were under way.

Ellis turned off the faucets with his elbows and entered the OR, backing in so that his arms did not touch the door. A nurse handed him a towel. While he dried his hands, he looked back through the door at Ross and then up at the glass-walled viewing gallery overhead. Ross knew there would be a crowd in the gallery watching the operation.

Morris came in and began scrubbing. Ross said, "Ellis wondered where you were."

"Tour guide for the patient," he said.

One of the circulating nurses entered the scrub room and said, "Dr. Ross, there's somebody here from the radiation lab with a unit for Dr. Ellis. Does he want it now?"

"If it's loaded," she said.

"I'll ask," the nurse said. She disappeared and stuck her head in a moment later. "He says it's loaded and ready to go, but unless your equipment is shielded, it could give you trouble."

Ross knew that all the OR equipment had been shielded the week before. The plutonium exchanger didn't put out much radiation--not enough to fog an X-ray plate--but it could confuse more delicate scientific equipment. There was, of course, no danger to people.

"We're shielded," she said. "Have him take it into the OR."

She shook her hands free of excess water and backed into the OR. The first thing she saw was the rad-lab man wheeling in the tray with the charging unit on it. It was contained in a small lead box. On the sides were stenciled: Danger Radiation and the triple-blade magenta symbol for radiation. It was all faintly ridiculous; the charging unit was quite safe.

Ellis stood across the room, being helped into his gown. He plunged his hands into his rubber gloves and flexed his fingers. To the rad-lab man he said, "Has the unit been sterilized?"

"I don't know, sir."

"Then give it to one of the girls and have her autoclave it. It's got to be sterile."

Ross dried her hands and shivered in the cold of the operating room. Like most surgeons. Ellis preferred a cold room--too cold, really, for the patient. But, as Ellis often said, "If I'm happy, the patient's happy."

Ellis was now across the room, standing by the viewing box, while the circulating nurse, who was not scrubbed, put up the patient's X rays. Ellis peered closely at them, though he had seen them a dozen times before. They were perfectly normal skull films. Air had been injected into the ventricles, so that the horns stood out in dark gray.

One by one, the rest of the team began to filter into the room. All together, there were two scrub nurses, two circulating nurses, one orderly, Ellis, two assistant surgeons, including Morris, two electronics technicians and a computer programmer. The anesthetist was outside with Benson.

Without looking up from his console, one of the electronics men said, "Any time you want to begin, doctor."

"We'll wait for the patient," Ellis said dryly, and there were some chuckles from the Nine Group team.

Ross looked around the room at the seven TV screens. They were of different sizes and stationed in different places, depending on how important they were to the surgeon. The smallest screen monitored the closed-circuit taping of the operation. At the moment, it showed an overhead view of the empty chair.

Another screen, nearer the surgeon, monitored the electroencephalogram, or EEG. It was turned off now, the 16 pens tracing straight white lines across the screen. There was also a large TV screen for basic operative parameters: electrocardiogram, blood pressure, respirations, cardiac output, CVP, rectal temperature. Like the EEG screen, it was also tracing a series of straight lines.

Another pair of screens was completely blank. They would display black-and-white image-intensified X-ray views during the operation.

Finally, two color screens displayed the limbic-program output. That program was cycling now, without punched-in coordinates. On the screens, a picture of the brain rotated while random coordinates, generated by computer, flashed below. As always, Ross felt that the computer was an almost-human presence in the room--an impression that was always heightened as the operation proceeded.

Ellis finished looking at the X rays and glanced up at the clock. It was 6:19; Benson was still outside being checked by the anesthetist. Ellis walked around the room, talking briefly to everyone. He was being unusually friendly and Ross wondered why. She looked up at the viewing gallery and saw the director of the hospital, the chief of surgery, the chief of medicine, the chief of research, all looking down through the glass. Then she understood.

It was 6:21 when Benson was wheeled in. He was now heavily premedicated, relaxed, his body limp, his eyelids heavy. His head was wrapped in a green towel.

Ellis supervised Benson's transfer from the stretcher to the chair. As the leather straps were placed across his arms and legs, Benson seemed to wake up, his eyes going wide.

"That's just so you don't fall off," Ellis said easily. "We don't want you to hurt yourself."

"Uh-huh," Benson said softly and closed his eyes again.

Ellis nodded to the nurses, who removed the sterile towel. Benson's shaved head seemed very small and white. The skin was smooth, except for a razor nick on the left frontal. Ellis' blue-ink X marks were clearly visible on the right side.

One of the technicians began to fix the monitor leads to Benson's body, strapping them on with little dabs of electrolyte paste. They were attached quickly; soon his body was a tangle of multicolored wires, running off to the equipment.

Ellis looked at the TV monitor screens. The EEG was now tracing 16 jagged lines; heartbeat was recorded; respirations were gently rising and falling; temperature was steady. The technicians began to punch pre-op parameters into the computer.

Normal lab values had already been fed in. During the operation, the computer would monitor all vital signs at five-second intervals and would signal if anything went wrong.

"Let's have music, please," Ellis said, and one of the nurses slipped a tape cartridge into the portable cassette recorder in a corner of the room. A Bach violin concerto began to play softly. Ellis always operated to Bach; he said he hoped that the precision, if not the genius, might be contagious.

They were approaching the start of the operation. The digital wall clock read 06:29:14. Next to it, an elapsed-time digital clock still read 00:00:00.

With the help of a scrub nurse, Ross put on her sterile gown and gloves. The gloves were always difficult for her. She didn't scrub frequently, and when she plunged her fingers into the gloves, she caught her hand, missing one of the finger slots, putting two fingers in another. It was impossible to read the scrub nurse's reaction; only her eyes were visible above the mask. But Ross was glad that Ellis and the other surgeons were turned away, attending to the patient.

She stepped to the back of the room, being careful not to trip over the thick black power cables that snaked across the floor in all directions. Ross did not participate in the initial stages of the operation. She waited until the stereo tactic mechanism was in place and the coordinates determined. She had time to stand to one side and pluck at her glove until all her fingers were in the right slots.

There was no real purpose for her to attend the operation at all, but McPherson was insistent that one member of the nonsurgical staff scrub in each day that they operated. He felt it kept the unit more cohesive. At least that was what he said.

Ross watched Ellis and his assistants across the room as they draped the patient; then she looked over to the draping as seen on the closed-circuit monitor. The entire operation would be recorded on video tape, for later review.

"I think we can start now." Ellis said easily. "Go ahead with the needle."

The anesthetist, working behind the chair, placed the needle between the second and third lumbar spaces of Benson's spine. Benson moved once and made a slight sound, and then the anesthetist said, "I'm through the dura. How much do you want?"

The computer console flashed operation Begun. The computer automatically started the elapsed-time clock, which ticked off the seconds.

"Give me thirty C.C.S to begin," Ellis said. "Let's have X ray, please."

The X-ray machines were swung into position at the front and side of the patient's head. Film plates were set on, locking in with a click. Ellis stepped on the floor button and the TV screens glowed suddenly, showing black-and-white images of the skull. He watched in two views as air slowly filled the ventricles, outlining the horns in black.

The programmer sat at the computer console, his hands fluttering over the buttons. On his TV display screen, the letters Pneumograph Initiated appeared.

"All right, let's fix his hat," Ellis said. The tubular boxlike stereotactic frame was placed over the patient's head. Burhole locations were fixed and checked. When Ellis was satisfied, he injected local anesthetic into the scalp points. Then he cut the skin and reflected it back, exposing the white surface of the skull.

"Drill, please." With the two-millimeter drill, he made the first of the two holes on the right side of the skull. He placed the stereotactic frame--the "hat"--over the head and screwed it down securely.

Ross looked over at the computer display. Values for heart rate and blood pressure flashed on the screen and faded; everything was normal. Soon the computer, like the surgeons, would begin to deal with more complex matters.

"Let's have a position check." Ellis said. stepping away from the patient, frowning critically at Benson's shaved head and the metal frame screwed on top of it. The X-ray technician came forward and snapped the pictures.

In the old days, Ross remembered, they actually took X-ray plates and determined the position by visual inspection of the plates. It was a slow process. Using a compass, protractor and ruler, lines were drawn across the X ray, measured, rechecked. Now the data was fed directly to the computer, which did the analysis more rapidly and more accurately.

All of the team turned to look at the computer print-out screen. The X-ray views appeared briefly and were replaced by schematic drawings. The ideal location of the stereotactic apparatus was calculated; the actual location was then merged with it. A set of coordinates flashed up, followed by the notation Placement Correct. Ellis nodded. "Thank you for your consultation," he said humorlessly and went over to the tray that held the electrodes.

The team was now using Briggs stainless-steel Teflon-coated electrode arrays. In the past, they had tried almost everything else: gold, platinum alloy and even flexible steel strands, in the days when the electrodes were placed by inspection.

The old inspection operations were bloody, messy affairs. It was necessary to remove a large portion of the skull and expose the surface of the brain. The surgeon found his landmark points on the surface itself and then placed his electrodes in the substance of the brain. If he had to place them in deep structures, he would occasionally cut through the brain to the ventricles with a knife and then place them. There were serious complications; the operations were lengthy; the patients never did very well.

The computer had changed all that. It allowed you to fix a point precisely in three-dimensional space. Initially, along with other researchers in the field, the NPS group had tried to relate deep brain points to skull architecture. They measured their landmark points from the orbit of the eye, from the meatus of the ear, from the sagittal suture. That, of course, didn't work--people's brains did not fit inside their skulls with any consistency. The only way to determine deep brain points was in relation to other brain points--and the logical landmarks were the ventricles, the fluidfilled spaces within the brain. According to the new system, everything was determined in relation to the ventricles.

With the help of the computer, it was no longer necessary to expose the brain surface. Instead, a few small holes were drilled in the skull and the electrodes inserted, while the computer watched by X ray to make sure they were being placed correctly.

Ellis picked up the first electrode array. From where Ross stood, it looked like a single slender wire. Actually, it was a bundle of 20 wires, with staggered contact points. Each wire was coated with Teflon except for the last millimeter, which was exposed. Each wire was a different length, so that under a magnifying glass, the staggered electrode tips looked like a miniature staircase.

Ellis checked the array under a large glass. He called for more light and turned the array, peering at all contact points. Then he had a scrub nurse plug it into a testing unit and test every contact. This had been done dozens of times before, but Ellis always checked again before insertion. And he always had four arrays sterilized, though he would need only two. Ellis was careful.

At length he was satisfied. "Are we ready to wire?" he asked the team. They nodded., He stepped up to the patient and said, "Let's go through the dura."

Up to this point in the operation, they had drilled through the skull but had left intact the right membrane of dura mater that covered the brain and held in the spinal fluid. Ellis' assistant used a probe to puncture the dura.

"I have fluid," he said, and a thin trickle of clear liquid slid down the side of the shaved skull from the hole. A nurse sponged it away.

Ross always found it a source of wonder, the way the brain was protected. The entire central nervous system was encased in thick bone, but inside the bone there were saclike membranes that held cerebrospinal fluid. The fluid was under pressure, so that the brain sat in the middle of a pressurized liquid system that afforded it superb protection.

McPherson always compared it to a fetus in a water-filled womb. "The baby comes out of the womb," McPherson said, "but the brain never comes out of its own special womb."

"We will place now," Ellis said.

Ross moved forward, joining the surgical team gathered around the head. She watched as Ellis slid the tip of the electrode into the bur hole and then pressed slightly, entering the substance of the brain. The technician punched buttons on the computer console. The display screen read Entry Point Localized.

The patient did not move, made no sound. The brain could not feel pain; it lacked pain sensors. It was one of the freaks of evolution that the organ that sensed pain throughout the body could feel nothing itself.

Ross looked away from Ellis toward the X-ray screens. There, in harsh black and white, she saw the crisply outlined white electrode begin its slow, steady movement into the brain. She looked from the anterior view to the lateral and then to the computer-generated images.

The computer was interpreting the X-ray images by drawing a simplified brain, with the temporal-lobe target area in red and a flickering blue track showing the line the electrode must traverse from entry point to the target area. So far, Ellis was following the track perfectly.

"Very pretty," Ross said.

The computer flashed up triple coordinates in rapid succession, as the electrode went deeper.

"Practice makes perfect," Ellis said sourly. He was now using the scale-down apparatus attached to the stereotactic hat. The scaler reduced his crude finger movements to very small changes in electrode movements. If he moved his finger half an inch, the scaler converted that to half a millimeter. Very slowly the electrode penetrated deeper into the brain.

From the screens, Ross could lift her eyes and watch the closed-circuit TV monitor, showing Ellis at work. It was easier to watch on TV than to turn around and see the real thing. She glanced back at the computer screen.

The computer had now presented an inverted view of the brain, as seen from below, near the neck. The electrode track was visible end on, as a single blue point surrounded by concentric circles. Ellis was supposed to keep within one millimeter, one 25th of an inch, of the assigned track. He deviated half a millimeter.

50 Track Error, warned the computer. Ross said, "You're slipping off."

The electrode stopped in its path. Ellis glanced up at the screens. "Too high on beta plane?"

"Wide on gamma."

"OK."

After a moment, the electrode continued along the path. 40 Track Error, the computer flashed. It rotated its brain image slowly, bringing up an anterolateral view. 20 Track Error, it read.

"You're correcting nicely," Ross said.

Ellis hummed along with the Bach and nodded.

Zero Track Error, the computer indicated and swung the brain view around to a full lateral. The second screen showed a full frontal view. A few seconds later, the screen blinked Approaching Target. Ross conveyed the message.

Seconds later, the flashing work Strike.

"You're on," Ross said.

Ellis stepped back and folded his hands across his chest.

"Let's have a coordinate check," he said. The elapsed-time clock showed that 27 minutes had passed in the operation.

The programmer flicked the console buttons rapidly. On the TV screens, the placement of the electrode was simulated by the computer. The simulation ended, like the actual placement, with the word Strike.

"Now match it," Ellis said.

The computer held its simulation on one screen and matched it to the X-ray image of the patient. The overlap was perfect; the computer reported Matched Within Established Limits.

"That's it," Ellis said. He screwed on the little plastic button cap that held the electrode tightly against the skull. Then he applied dental cement to fix it. He untangled the 20 fine wire leads that came off the electrode and pushed them to one side.

"We can do the next one now," he said.

• • •

At the end of the second placement, a thin, arcing cut was made with a knife along the scalp. To avoid important superficial vessels and nerves, the cut ran from the electrode entry points down the side of the ear to the base of the neck. There it deviated to the right shoulder. Using blunt dissection, Ellis opened a small pocket beneath the skin of the right chest.

"Have we got the charging unit?" he asked.

The charger was brought to him. It was smaller than a pack of cigarettes and contained 37 grams of the radioactive isotope plutonium-238 oxide. The radiation produced heat, which was converted directly by a thermionic unit to electrical power. A Kenbeck solid-state D.C./D.C. circuit transformed the output to the necessary voltage.

Ellis plugged the charger into the test pack and did a last-minute check of its power before implantation. As he held it in his hand, he said. "It's cold. I can't get used to that." Ross knew layers of vacuum-foil insulation kept the exterior cool and that inside the packet the radiation capsule was producing heat at 500 degrees Fahrenheit--more than enough to cook a roast.

Ellis checked radiation, to be sure there would be no real leakage. The meters all read in the low-normal range. There was a certain amount of leakage, naturally, but it was no more than that produced by a commercial color-television set.

Ellis inserted the charging unit into the small subdermal pocket he had made in the chest wall. He sewed tissue layers around it to fix it in place. Then he turned his attention to the postage-stamp-sized electronic computer.

Ross looked up at the viewing gallery and saw the wizard twins, Gerhard and Richards, watching intently. Ellis checked the packet under the magnifying glass, then gave it to a scrubbed technician, who hooked the little computer into the main hospital computer.

To Ross, the computer was the most remarkable part of the entire system. Since she had joined the NPS three years before, she had seen the computer size shrink from a prototype as large as a briefcase to the present tiny model, which looked small in the palm of a hand yet contained all the elements of the original bulky unit.

This tiny size made subdermal implantation possible. The patient was free to move about, take showers, do anything he wanted. Much better than the old units where the charger was clipped to a patient's belt and wires dangled.

She looked at the computer screens, which flashed Operative Monitors Interrupted for Electronics Check. On the screen, a blown-up circuit diagram appeared. The computer checked each pathway and component independently. It took four millionths of a second for each check; the entire process was completed in two seconds. The computer flashed Electronics Check Negative. A moment later, brain views reappeared. The computer had gone back to monitoring the operation.

"Well," Ellis said, "let's hook him up." He painstakingly attached the 40 line wire leads from the two electrode arrays to the plastic unit. Then he fitted the wires down along the neck, tucked the plastic under the skin and called for sutures. The elapsed-time clock read one hour, 12 minutes.

Finally, he called for the dog tag. Benson would have to wear this dog tag as long as he had the atomic charging unit in his body. The dog tag warned that the person had an atomic pacemaker and gave a telephone number. Ross knew that the number was a listing that played a recorded message 24 hours a day. The recording gave detailed technical information about the charging unit and warned that bullet wounds, automobile warned that bullet wounds, automobile accidents, fires and other damage could release the plutonium, which was a powerful alpha-particle emitter. The recording also gave special instructions to physicians, coroners and morticians and warned particularly against cremation of the body, unless the charger were first removed.

II

Morris wheeled Benson into the recovery room, a long, low-ceilinged room where patients were brought immediately after operation. The NPS had a special section of the rec room, as did cardiac patients and burn patients. But the NPS section, with its cluster of electronic equipment, had never been used before. Benson was the first case.

Benson looked pale but otherwise fine; his head, neck, right shoulder and chest were heavily bandaged. Morris supervised his transfer from the rolling stretcher to the permanent bed. Across the room, Ellis was telephoning in his operative note. If you dialed extension 1104, you got a transcribing machine. The dictated message would later be typed up by a secretary and inserted in Benson's record.

Ellis' voice droned on in the background. "Centimeter incisions were made over the right temporal region and two two-millimeter bur holes drilled with a K-seven drill. Implantation of Briggs electrodes carried out with computer assistance on the limbic program. X-ray placement of electrodes determined with computer matching within established limits. Electrodes sealed with Tyler fixation caps and seven-oh-grade dental sealer. Transmission wires--"

"What do you want on him?" the rec-room nurse asked.

"Vital signs Q five minutes for the first hour, Q fifteen for the second, Q thirty for the third, hourly thereafter. If he's stable, you can move him up to his room in six hours."

The nurse nodded, making notes. Morris sat down at the bedside to write the short operative note:

Short operative note on Harold F. Benson

Pre-op dx: psychomotor (temporal lobe) epilepsy

Post-op dx: same

Procedure: implantation of twin Briggs electrode arrays into right temporal lobe with subdermal placing of computer and plutonium charging unit.

Pre-op meds: phenobarbital 500 mg atropine 60 mg one hr prior to procedure

Anesthesia: lidocaine (1/1000) epinephrine locally

Estimated blood loss:250 cc, Fluid replacement: 200cc D5/W, Operative duration: 1 hr 12 min, Post-op condition: good

As he finished the note, he heard Ross say to the nurse, "Start him on phenobarb as soon as he's awake." She sounded angry.

He looked up at her and said, "Something the matter?"

"No," she said.

"You seem angry."

"Are you picking a fight with me?"

"No," he said, "of course--"

"Just make sure he gets his phenobarb. We want to keep him sedated until we can interface him."

And she stormed out of the room. Morris watched her go, then glanced over at Ellis, who was still dictating but had been watching. Ellis shrugged.

"What's the matter with her?" the nurse asked.

"Probably just tired," Morris said. He adjusted the monitoring equipment on the shelf above Benson's head. He turned it on and waited until it warmed up. Then he placed the temporary induction unit around Benson's taped shoulder.

During the operation, all the wires had been hooked up, but they were not working now. Before that happened. Benson had to be "interfaced." This meant determining which of the 40 electrodes would stop an epileptic seizure and locking in the appropriate switches on the subdermal computer. Because the computer was under the skin, the locking in would be accomplished by an induction unit, which worked through the skin. But the interfacing couldn't be done until tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the equipment monitored Benson's brain-wave activity. The screens above the bed glowed a bright green and showed the white tracing of his EEG. The pattern was normal for alpha rhythms slowing from sedation.

Benson opened his eyes and looked at Morris.

"How do you feel?" Morris asked.

"Sleepy," he said. "Is it beginning soon?"

"It's over," Morris said.

Benson looked, not at all surprised, and closed his eyes. A rad-lab technician came in and checked for leakage from the plutonium with a Gelger counter. There was none. Morris made sure that the dog tag was still around Benson's neck. The nurse picked it up curiously, read it and frowned.

Ellis came over. "Time for breakfast?"

"Yes," Morris said. "Time for breakfast."

They left the room together.

III

The trouble was he didn't really like the sound of his voice. His voice was rough and grating and his enunciation was poor. McPherson preferred to see the words in his mind, as if they had been written. He pressed the microphone button on the dictation machine. "Roman numeral three period philosophical implications period."

He paused and looked around his office. A large model of the brain sat at the corner of his desk. Shelves of journals along one wall. And the TV monitor. On the screen now, he was watching the playback of the morning's operation. The sound was turned off. He looked at the silent, milky images. Ellis was drilling holes in Benson's head. McPherson began to dictate.

This procedure represents the first direct link between a human brain and a computer. The link is permanent....

Too stuffy, he thought. He ran the tape back and made changes. Now, a man sitting at a computer console and interacting with the computer by pressing buttons is linked to the computer. But that link is not direct. And the link is not permanent.

This operative procedure represents something rather different. How is one to think about it?

A good question, he thought. He stared at the TV image of the operation, then continued to dictate.

One might think of the computer in this case as a prosthetic device. Just as a man who has his arm amputated can receive a mechanical equivalent of the lost arm, so a brain-damaged man can receive a mechanical aid to overcome the effects of brain damage. This is a comfortable way to think about the operation. It makes the computer into a high-class wooden leg. Yet the implications go much further than that.

He paused to look at the screen. Somebody at the main tape station had changed reels. He was no longer seeing the operation but a psychiatric interview with Benson before surgery. Benson was excited, smoking a cigarette, making stabbing gestures with the lighted tip as he spoke.

Curious, McPherson turned the sound up slightly. "Know what they're doing. The machines are everywhere. They used to be the servants of man, but now they're taking over. Subtly, subtly taking over."

Benson continued, "Know I'm a traitor to the human race, because I'm helping to make machines more intelligent. That's my job, programming artificial intelligence, and--"

McPherson turned the sound down until it was almost inaudible. Then he went back to his dictation.

In thinking about computer hardware, we distinguish between central and peripheral equipment. That is, the main computer is central but, in human terms, located in some out-of-the-way place--like the basement of a building, for example. The computer's readout equipment, display consoles and so on, are peripheral. They are located at the edges of the computer system, on different floors of the building.

He looked at the TV screen. Benson seemed particularly excited. McPherson turned up the sound and heard "...Getting more intelligent. First steam engines, then automobiles and airplanes, then adding machines. Now computers, feedback loops--"

He turned the sound off.

For the human brain, the analogy is a central brain and peripheral terminals, such as mouth, arms and legs. They carry out the instructions--the output--of the brain. By and large, we judge the workings of the brain by the activity of these peripheral functions. We notice what a person says and how his he acts and from that deduce how his brain works. This idea is familiar to everyone.

He looked at Benson on the TV screen. What would Benson say about this? Would he agree or disagree? But then, did it matter?

Now, however, in this operation we have created a man with not one brain but two. He has his biological brain, which is damaged, and he has a new computer brain, which is designed to correct the damage. This new brain is intended to control the biological brain. Therefore, a new situation arises. The patient's biological brain is the peripheral terminal--the only peripheral terminal--for the new computer. In one area, the new computer brain has total control. And therefore, the patient's biological brain and, indeed, his whole body, has become a terminal for the new computer. We have created a man who is one single, large, complex computer terminal. The patient is a readout device for the new computer and he is as helpless to control the readout as a TV screen is helpless to control the information presented on it.

Perhaps that was a bit strong, he thought. He pressed the button again. "Harriet, type that last paragraph, but I want to look at it, OK? Roman numeral four period summary and conclusions period."

He paused again and turned on the sound. Benson was saying "...Hate them, particularly the prostitutes. Airplane mechanics, dancers, translators, gas-station attendants, the people who are machines or who service machines. The prostitutes. I hate them all."

As he spoke, Benson continued to stab with his cigarette.

This is the first of three installments of a condensed version of "The Terminal Man." The second installment of the novel will appear in the April issue.