“What?”
“Pam.”
“You’re too old for that.”
“Have you ever heard of Charlie Chaplin?”
We arrived at the Golden Years Geriatric Center, a collection of bland two-story buildings in front of a cemetery, before nine. Smith, dressed in a suit ten years out of date and a necktie, got out, stooped. I gestured at the cemetery.
“Convenient.”
“Yep.” His voice cracked, dry and old. His face, normally taut, had gone slack. He peered slowly around at the cemetery, getting into his part. “But I’m still here, buddy boy.” He laughed a cackling sort of laugh. “Wherever here is.”
For an instant, I believed him. “Glendale.”
His voice momentarily became normal. “You sounded good. Keep doing that. Just react to me. Don’t think about it.”
I helped Smith along the walkway to the main building. We passed several old people in wheel chairs, who watched us, comparing their infirmity to Smith’s. They seemed consoled by the comparison.
Inside, the receptionist, a matronly woman in a white dress, told us to take a seat. Smith glowered at her.
“I don’t want to sit down!” he cackled, swatting at my supporting hands.
“Gran’pa, please, sit down.”
“I don’t want to!”
I shrugged. “So stand.”
I walked over to a chair and sat down, picking up a magazine viewer. Even though. I knew Smith was acting, I still felt embarrassed at the scene. Smith did nothing to alleviate the feeling. He pointed a trembling index finger at me, cackling. “I got-cha, Freddy! I gotcha!”
He continued cackling and pointing. It struck me as overdone.
The receptionist came around the desk and took Smith’s outstretched arm. He looked at her, his expression quizzical, then amazed.
“Louise?”
“No, Mr. Smith. I’m not Louise. Why don’t we sit over here and wait for Dr. Perkov?”
“Who?”
“Dr. Perkov.”
She led him to the chair next to mine and seated him.
“Who’s Perky?” asked Smith; then cackled, delighted.
“Dr. Perkov will be free in a few minutes,” she told me.
I thanked her and turned on the magazine. I became engrossed in an article on Martian blight. When I looked up, Smith was gone.
“Gran’pa?”
The receptionist, glancing up from some papers, looked around the waiting area. Her eyes stopped on the hallway. She dropped the papers and dashed down the hall. I followed.
Smith, his voice echoing hollowly in the corridor, had some other oh man up against the wall, throttling him. The man’s eyes were terror-stricken. Smith kept shouting, “Give it here, Jeb!” “Jeb,” or whoever he was, made raspy noises.
The receptionist and I freed “Jeb,” who scurried off down the corridor at full shuffle.
“Mr. Smith,” cautioned the receptionist, “we mustn’t attack people, must we?”
“Who?” He saw me. “Jimmy! What are you doing here?”
“Robert,” I corrected.
We led him back to the reception area. Seated, leaned over to him, whispering.
“You’re putting it on a bit thick.”
He cackled and pointed at me.
Fortunately, Dr. Perkov appeared before Smith could think of any more antics. Perkov, a long-faced man with a Van Dyke, shook hands with us. Smith kept calling him Father Perky, evolving it into Father Pesky and Father Porky. Perkov ignored him, discussing commitment with me. I followed the instructions Smith had given to me the night before.
“It is better,” I said, after Dr. Perkov explained the excellent facilities at the center, “to keep them at home, if possible.”
“Yes, yes. We encourage it. Family environment is always helpful, but in his case—”
“He’s not usually violent, Doctor,” I said, deciding to repay Smith for jeering at me. “The incident with the little girl was, well, an oversight on our part.”
“Little girl?”
Smith, momentarily out of Dr. Perkov’s view, raised one eyebrow.
“It’s not worth mentioning. We do have a place for him. Our problem is his memory. He recognizes none of us. I mentioned the problem to a friend of mine and he said Golden Years might be able to help.”
“We do have certain treatments to retard the effects of”—he glanced at Smith, then lowered his voice— “s-e-n-i-l-i-t-y.”
“I heard you two!” roared Smith. “I didn’t do it! Go ahead! Beat me again! I never touched that sweet little girl!”
“Beat him,” said Dr. Perkov, giving me a sidelong glance.
“Frankly, Dr. Perkov, my grandfather is quite a serious case. Perhaps if we had brought him boner—”
“What are you getting at, Mr. Collins?”
“He needs something stronger than simply retarding what is, after all, a fait accompli.”
“I see.” Dr. Perkov eyed Smith, scratching his beard, considering. “Perhaps—”
“Perhaps what?”
“There is a treatment. I developed it.”
“What sort of treatment?”
He shook his head, vigorously negating his “perhaps.” “No, I can’t do it.”
“Doctor, we’re desperate. You can see what shape he’s in.”
“The name’s Smith,” shouted Smith. “Doctor Smith to you birds.”
“A doctor?” said Doctor Perkov. “He was a doctor before … this?”
“Yes.”
Perkov pondered, debating with himself. Finally, he looked at me. “Mr. Collins, I have a problem. On the one hand, my work is highly experimental. The main office forbids me using it in therapy for commercial reasons. They want to insure its complete safety and also our exclusive use of it. On the other hand, a man like Dr. Smith, a colleague who has helped so many, should enjoy the twilight years. Perhaps, if you told no one—” He let the sentence dangle, waiting for my response.
“I won’t tell a soul.”
“Follow me.”
Dr. Perkov led us down the corridor to a room marked “Private.” The old man Smith had attacked passed us in the hall, veering away from Smith. Smith shook his fist in the air, shouting, “I’ll get you, Jeb!”
“Such a shame,” muttered Dr. Perkov, unlocking the door.
We followed him into his laboratory. Long tables displayed chemist’s glassware, test tubes, glass coils, beakers. We stopped at a temperature-controlled locker. Dr. Perkov punched in the combination. The locker door slid open. He removed a vial, holding it aloft. He looked at it, transfixed, marveling at his own discovery.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“What is it’?”
“A catalyst, more or less.”
“For what?”
“Ultimately, for increasing engram definition in the brain, Mr. Collins.”
“What does it do?”
I shouldn’t have asked. Dr. Perkov started on a lecture that would have boggled Watson and Crick. His catalyst, he informed me, affected each building block in the subject’s cortical DNA molecules, deoxyribose sugar, the phosphate unit and especially the nucleotides.
“Them, too.”
“Indeed.”
The purines, adenine and guanine, as well as the pyrimidines, cytosine and thymine—all were affected. I nodded, trying to keep my eyes from glazing over. I had pushed Dr. Perkov’s button. He didn’t come equipped with an off-switch.
The quantity of adenine, I learned, was increased above the other nucleotides, hence more adenosine triphosphate and hence higher energy conversion in the phosphate group.
“You do see that, don’t you?”
“Hm-m-m.”
“Most people don’t.”
“Hm-m-m.”
He rummaged in a drawer and pulled out a wooden box, opening it and removing a microscope slide. He slipped the slide into a microscope, stooped and adjusted it.
“Look at this.”
>
I looked. The slide, stained purple, showed several irregular black blobs with spidery tendrils spreading from them at random.
“What is it?”
It was a Golgi stain of a section of occipital cortex showing dendrites of large cortical cells, he explained, annoyed at the question.
I asked why I was looking at it. Another mistake. Dr. Perkov broke out in analogies. Nerve cells like these were the printed circuits of the brain, the well-trodden paths through the jungle of the mind, if not the very foundation of civilization itself.
Vitamem, Dr. Perkov’s discovery, revitalized the DNA in those circuits, enhancing the engrams like a photographer enhances faint photographic negatives. More particularly—I winced at the phrase; I had thought he was being particular—the spines of the basal dendrites in the;, synaptic contacts between nerve cells in the cortex were stimulated.
“Stimulated,” I repeated.
“Yes, let me show you.”
He dug in the drawer again, coming up with two pictures that reminded me of abstract photography. He seemed to have them upside down.
“These electron micrographs,” he said, “will clear things up.”
“I doubt it.”
“The one on your left”—he jiggled the photograph in his right hand—“shows cortical dendrite spines of the senile brain. You see the shriveled effect.”
“Not exactly.”
“This one on your right”—he jiggled it— “is after Vitamem. You see the alert, vigorous posture of the spines.”
“Puts backbone in them.”
“Exactly.”
“A doctor once said my grandfather has dead tissue in his brain. The stroke, I believe. Will Vitamem help that?” I began to feel like a commercial.
“You do realize, Mr. Collins,” he said, replacing the photographs in the drawer, “that death, whether on the small scale of a cell or the large scale of an entire organism, is a relatively permanent condition. Is there some particular reason—” The clause hung in air, a question.
“The money,” I improvised. “He’s forgotten where it is.”
“I see. Very sad. What were you planning to do with … the money?”
“Pay for his treatments.”
“Ah, yes. But you must understand, extracting engrams from brain tissue is a delicate process. The tissue must be fresh.”
“How fresh?”
“Not more than two weeks old. Your grandfather’s stroke must have been some time ago.”
“It was.”
“Too bad. I just had an interesting case recently, however.”
I could see I was in for another fascinating barrage of biology and tried to look interested. “Really?”
“Yes. The man worked for our drone ship division. He died accidentally. They say he kept everything in his head. You can imagine how upset they were to lose him. They brought the brain to me—fresh, mind you, or nearly so—and asked my help. It was a challenge, Mr. Collins, a challenge.” He pointed across the laboratory to one corner. “That’s it, over there.”
I looked across the tables. Only a computer display occupied the corner. “The brain?”
“No, no. The information in it—the engrams—safely stored in our company computer.”
“You succeeded.”
“Partially, yes. They didn’t seem too happy about it, however. The tissue had been damaged in removal, you see. Not my fault at all. The man who removed it seemed to know more about karate than surgery. It was a rather small organ, runty actually. But the cortical cells themselves—” He whistled.
“Big?”
“Gigantic!”
“But they weren’t happy with your results?” I coaxed.
“No. A rather grizzly little man kept saying, ‘What about the tachyon?’ Except it wasn’t just tachyon. The man cursed. It was the damn tachyon, as I remember. ‘We know about phase-shift! What about the damn tachyon?’ He must have repeated it ten times. It was absolute nonsense as far as I was concerned. I told Mr. Spieler I did not want that man around here in the future.”
Dr. Perkov’s upper lip quivered, remembering the grizzly little man. He sighed deeply and looked at me. “But, this has very little to do with your grandfather. When would you like to submit him to treatment?”
Smith, who had listened to the discussion, suddenly became active, knocking over beakers and coiled glass tubes, shouting about how the revenuers were coming and we had to get rid of the still.
“Next week,” I answered. “I’d better take him home now. It’s time for his nap.” I led Smith toward the door.
“Good. Make an appointment at the desk. I’m sure we can help Dr Smith.”
“He needs it.”
IX
“What do you think?” I asked Smith in the car.
“I think they drained old Norton like a swamp. Did you understand any of that?”
“Not much.” I told Smith about tachyons, faster-than-light particles, identified at the end of the Twentieth Century. I was into a simple comparison between mesons, neutrinos and tachyons when Smith interrupted. People always interrupt during the interesting parts.
“OK, I believe you. You’re starting to sound as incomprehensible as Father Perky back there.”
Smith drove me to the Corona del Mar Gate. I thought about Norton and tachyons and the grizzly little man who deposited Norton’s brain with Dr. Perkov.
“It doesn’t make sense, Smith.”
“What doesn’t?”
“Norton didn’t have anything to do with tachyons, at least that I know of. Mesons, yes. That’s part of Gate physics, and neutrinos, not tachyons.”
“Keep gnawing on it. You’ll come up with something.”
He dropped me outside the Gate blockhouse. Wheels spinning and rubber squealing, he disappeared down the access road, shrinking to a red dot. Still puzzled, I suited up and walked aboard the Merryweather Enterprize. Captain Wilkins passed me in a corridor, glancing at his watch and frowning, but saying nothing.
In my office, I called Burgess and asked for a copy of Norton’s integration computer program.
“All of it?” He asked, incredulous.
“Yes. And a mathematician.”
“You’ll need one.”
The mathematician, a cadaverous-looking man named Webber, came into the office smelling of garlic. He looked about nineteen. No worries, staring at numbers all day—it kept him innocent. He seemed anxious about being in my office.
“Is there some problem, Dr. Webber?” I asked.
“Hm-m-m? No, no.”
“You don’t look well.”
He stood there a moment, looking at everything but me. He reminded me of a child about to be scolded. Finally, he stopped fidgeting and looked at me, mustering shaky indignation.
“I haven’t done anything,” he protested.
“Who said you had?”
His indignation disappeared, replaced by blank incomprehension. “I thought—being called here—I, naturally—”
“You thought what?”
“I heard about Captain Wilkins, and—” He broke off, his face asking for sympathy and understanding. It took me several seconds to realize what Webber’s “and” meant. He had heard about my fray with Captain Wilkins, that I was somehow the reincarnation of Norton. He assumed I wanted to chew him out. My reputation as an ogre was spreading. As a patrol leader in the Boy Scouts, they laughed at my orders. Here, nobody laughed. It was a strange feeling.
“You understand, Dr. Webber. I need some help deciphering Norton’s program.”
We worked through most of the afternoon. I spent half my time saying, “Oh, yes. You’re right. I see it now.” By four o’clock, Webber’s talents awed me. He could compress a whole section of the program into a single simple equation or expand a minor phrase into a ream of paper. He seemed to do it at will, grasping the answer and only retracing his steps to explain how he got there to his dumb-dumb boss. When he finished, I had what I wanted. Webber, still timid, retrac
ted the lead into his mechanical pencil and stood up, rubbing his eyes. I noticed his suit. Threadbare.
“Will that be all, sir?”
“Yes. Thank you, Jim. You can go home if you like.”
“Home?” He pronounced the word as though it were new to him.
“You do have one?”
“Yes, sir. But Dr. Norton—I mean, there’s still an hour and a half to work and he never let us—”
I shrugged. “What can you get done in an hour and a half?”
He started to tell me. With a mind like Webber’s, an hour and a half was a long time.
“Take the time off. You deserve it.”
“I do?”
He left, bewildered. I checked with personnel. Webber made fifteen thousand a year.
“You’re kidding,” I said to the girl on the screen.
“No, sir.”
“Double it.”
“But, Mr. Duff will—”
“If you have any problems, refer Mr. Duff to me.”
My good deed done, I called Smith. No one answered. Either Smith had forgotten to redirect his phone calls or he was away from a phone. I called Mr. Merryweather.
“Ah, Robert. How are things up there?”
“Fine. Have you heard from Smith?”
“He called at noon. He said the two of you had been trying to get him committed.”
“The way he drives, he should be committed. Do you know where he is now?”
“I’m not his secretary, you know.” He chuckled at the idea. “Is it important?”
“Yes. I think I’ve figured out what happened to Norton and why.”
Mr. Merryweather knew about Dr. Perkov and Norton. He listened patiently while I recounted my version of the events, the body removal, the brain removal, the memory removal. When I mentioned tachyons, he stopped me. “Just a minute, please.”
I waited. The screen flickered and settled.
“Go on.”
“What was that?”
“Scrambler.”
I told him about Norton’s program, splicing in as much physics as I could. His attention never wavered. He never asked for an explanation. Norton’s program called for anything fed through the matter transmitter to be accelerated to near-light-speed. According to Einstein, that meant near-infinite-mass. To do it, Norton needed the controlled-laser fusion reactor I was supposed to build. So far, so good.
Stargate Page 10
