The Terminal Man - Crichton Michael - Страница 21

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Someone thrust a cup into her hands, and McPherson put his arm around her in a fatherly way. "I gather we turned Benson on to you today."

"Yes, you did," she said, managing to smile.

"Well, I guess you're used to that."

"Not exactly," she said.

The room got quieter, the festive feeling slid away. She felt bad about that, but not really. There was nothing amusing about shocking a person into sexual arousal. It was physiologically interesting, was frightening and pathetic, but not funny. Why did they all find it so goddamned funny?

Ellis produced a hip flask and poured clear liquid into her coffee. "Makes it Irish," he said, with a wink. "Much better."

She nodded, and glanced across the room at Gerhard.

"Drink up, drink up," Ellis said.

Gerhard was talking to Morris about something. It seemed a very intent conversation; then she heard Morris say, "… you please pass the pussy?" Gerhard laughed; Morris laughed. It was some kind of joke.

"Not bad, considering," Ellis said. "What do you think?"

"Very good," she said, taking a small sip. She managed to get away from Ellis and McPherson and went over to Gerhard. He was momentarily alone; Morris had gone off to refill his cup.

"Listen," she said, "can I talk to you for a second?"

"Sure," Gerhard said. He bent his head closer to hers.

"What is it?"

"I want to know something. Is it possible for you to monitor Benson here, on the main computer?"

"You mean monitor the implanted unit?"

"Yes."

Gerhard shrugged. "I guess so, but why bother? We know the implanted unit is working- "

"I know," she said. "I know. But will you do it anyway, as a precaution?"

Gerhard said nothing. His eyes said: Precaution against what?

"Please?"

"Okay," he said. "I'll punch in a monitoring subroutine as soon as they leave." He nodded to the group. "I'll have the computer check on him twice an hour."

She frowned.

"Four times an hour?"

"How about every ten minutes?" she said.

"Okay," he said. "Every ten minutes."

"Thanks," she said. Then she drained her coffee, feeling the warmth hit her stomach, and she left the room.

Ellis sat in a corner of Room 710 and watched the half-dozen technicians maneuvering around the bed. There were two people from the rad lab doing a radiation check; there was one girl drawing blood for the chem lab, to check steroid levels; there was an EEG technician resetting the monitors; and there were Gerhard and Richards, taking a final look at the interface wiring.

Throughout it all, Benson lay motionless, breathing easily, staring up at the ceiling. He did not seem to notice the people touching him, moving an arm here, shifting a sheet there. He stared straight up at the ceiling.

One of the rad-lab men had hairy hands protruding from the cuffs of his white lab coat. For a moment, the man rested his hairy dark hand on Benson's bandages. Ellis thought about the monkeys he had operated on. There was nothing to that except technical expertise, because you always knew - no matter how hard you pretended - that it was a monkey and not a human being, and if you slipped and cut the monkey from ear to ear, it didn't matter at all. There would be no questions, no relatives, no lawyers, no press, no nothing - not even a nasty note from Requisitions asking what was happening to all those eighty-dollar monkeys. Nobody gave a damn. And neither did he. He wasn't interested in helping monkeys. He was interested in helping human beings.

Benson stirred. "I'm tired," he said. He glanced over at Ellis.

Ellis said, "About ready to wrap it up, boys?"

One by one, the technicians stepped back from the bed, nodding, collected their instruments and their data, and left the room. Gerhard and Richards were the last to go. Finally. Ellis was alone with Benson.

"You feel like sleeping?" Ellis said.

"I feel like a goddamned machine. I feel like an automobile in a complicated service station. I feel like I'm being repaired."

Benson was getting angry. Ellis could feel his own tension building. He was tempted to call for nurses and orderlies to restrain Benson when the attack came. But he remained seated.

"That's a lot of crap," Ellis said.

Benson glared at him, breathing deeply.

Ellis looked at the monitors over the bed. The brain waves were going irregular, moving into an attack configuration.

Benson wrinkled his nose and sniffed. "What's that smell?" he said. "That awful- "

Above the bed, a red monitor light blinked STIMULATION.

The brain waves spun in a distorted tangle of white lines for five seconds. Simultaneously, Benson's pupils dilated. Then the lines were smooth again; the pupils returned to normal size.

Benson turned away, staring out the window at the afternoon sun. "You know," he said, "it's really a very nice day, isn't it?"

For no particular reason, Janet Ross came back to the hospital at 11 p.m. She had gone to see a movie with a pathology resident who had been asking her for weeks; finally she had relented. They had seen a murder mystery, which the resident claimed was the only kind of movie he attended. This one featured five murders before she stopped counting them. In the darkness, she had glanced at the resident, and he was smiling. His reaction was so stereotyped - the pathologist drawn to violence and death - that she found herself thinking of the other stereotypes in medicine: the sadistic surgeons and the childish pediatricians and the woman-hating gynecologists. And the crazy psychiatrists.

Afterward, he had driven her back to the hospital because she had left her car in the hospital parking lot. But instead of driving home she had gone up to the NPS. For no particular reason.

The NPS was deserted, but she expected to find Gerhard and

Richards at work, and they were, poring over computer print-outs in Telecomp. They hardly noticed when she came into the room and got herself some coffee. "Trouble?" she said.

Gerhard scratched his head. "Now it's Martha," he said.

"First George refuses to be a saint. Now Martha is becoming nice. Everything's screwed up."

Richards smiled. "You have your patients, Jan," he said,

"and we have ours."

"Speaking of my patient…"

"Of course," Gerhard said, getting up and walking over to the computer console. "I was wondering why you came in." He smiled. "Or was it just a bad date?"

"Just a bad movie," she said.

Gerhard punched buttons on the console. Letters and numbers began to print out. "Here's all the checks since I started it at one-twelve this afternoon."

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