The reality, of course, was that most autistics had no such abilities. And those who did display savant characteristics were severely handicapped in other ways. They might be able to do startling mathematical tricks, but most of them couldn’t navigate their way around a city block without getting lost.
“The sheer variety was what intrigued us at first,” Kline said. “We wondered why savants came in so many different flavors. It wasn’t just the human calculators. You had the mnemonic savants with their perfect memories. And the creative ones, with their wild inventions. And of course the language prodigies; not that they could communicate with anyone on any normal level, but if you happened to be searching for a word in Spanish – or Hindi, for that matter – there was nothing they couldn’t tell you.”
“Yes, interesting,” Levoir said, sounding not at all interested. “Still, it takes on a bit of a side-show flavor after a while. I’m surprised the Dartmouth administrators let you pursue that sort of research.”
Kline shrugged. “We wrote the abstract with broad language: ‘Where do these abilities come from? What can they teach us about our own mental function?’ Stuff like that. It was enough to keep our grant going.”
“Okay, but then what?”
Kline smiled. “Then we hit the jackpot.”
“A new drug?”
“Not at all. We were doing the background research, and one subheading in the case reports caught our attention: injuries. We had assumed going in that autism and savantism were inseparable, that there was something unique about an autistic’s cerebral development that created these special abilities. But in the cases we were reading, perfectly normal adults would develop savant-like behavior as a result of head trauma. A guy would get into a car accident, and he’d wake up spouting Latin.”
“You’re talking about some very rare cases,” Levoir said. “Cracking open someone’s skull doesn’t turn them into a polyglot.”
“Of course not. But don’t you see the larger point? Savantism doesn’t have to be a part of you from birth. It can be induced.”
Levoir sat back and considered this. He stayed silent, waiting for Kline to continue.
“Have you ever heard of TMS?”
Levoir grunted. “Transcranial magnetic stimulation? Of course. Some clinics use it to help schizophrenics, or for controlling depression. I’m not a believer, personally.”
“You will be. Do you know what it was originally designed for?”
“Brain operations, right?”
“Exactly. Induced stimulation in real-time, to help surgeons keep track of how the patient’s mind was holding up. But it did more than just assist with the surgery. Some patients experienced savant episodes in recovery.”
Levoir raised his eyebrows. “You’ve been working with TMS?”
“At first, yes. We did some low-level trials with Dartmouth students, just to get an understanding of the concept. We got promising results, so we decided to design a brand-new device. A more powerful, more focused device, unlike anything that’s commercially available. By the time it was ready, we knew it would work. From our research. Because when you get right down to it, the brain is infinitely malleable. It can change.”
“But it couldn’t have been that simple,” Levoir said. “Let’s face it, Nathan. You apparently tested that new device on yourself, and your brain wasn’t malleable. It got damaged, in fact.”
Kline waved a hand dismissively. “We made mistakes, that’s all. There was a neurotoxin issue, and the device construction wasn’t up to par. Not to mention that we had things all flipped around.”
“Flipped around how?” Levoir leaned forward, suddenly very attentive. “This is important, Nathan. What exactly do you mean?”
“I mean that hyperactivity isn’t the answer,” Kline said. “We were trying to create savantism through TMS stimulation, but that’s backwards. Look at an infant’s ability to learn language; do they learn quickly because they’re geniuses? Of course not. Infants absorb information and new skills like sponges, but it’s precisely because they aren’t geniuses that they succeed so well. Their minds are simple and unsullied. A young child isn’t yet distracted by the thousands of neuro-synaptic connections that every adult has to wade through during every second of every day of his life.” Kline put his hands over his ears to illustrate, as if trying to drown out the noise from the distractions all around him. “We’re victims of over-stimulation,” he continued. “Savants aren’t smarter than you are – they’re just more focused. And their abilities are inside every one of us. Literally buried inside our crowded minds.” He tapped his head and grinned. “I didn’t see it at the time, but it seems obvious in retrospect. And the basic concept is still viable, even if I didn’t figure it out until recently. We can all be savants.”
Levoir took a long slow breath, and he put down the pen and pad he had been using to take careful notes. “That’s a good story, Nathan. And an interesting idea.”
Kline awoke with a start. He didn’t bother with diagnostics, because he could smell the fake-leather steering wheel of the old Buick as if it had been rammed up his nose.
Dog phase, simple as that.
His relief at waking – and at realizing that it had been a dream, since he would never have willingly given up such information to Levoir – was immense. He grabbed his backpack and stepped out of the car, into the brisk New Hampshire morning. Besides scaring him, the dream had served as another reminder.
I should give Carlisle a call, he thought.
He would go back into town for a minute, and use his credit card at a payphone. Then he would be on his way to the Patton brothers. He was looking forward to having a talk with those two. They were next on his list.
The man with the glasses and the tweed coat waited until Kline had walked a short distance away from the parked Buick before keying the ignition on his little Ford Escort. Then he put the car in gear and pulled out slowly, following.
Melissa’s Professor
1
“What do you think, Frederick?”
Professor Carlisle paused with his fork halfway to his mouth. He glanced at the people sitting around him at the dinner table and tried to let his mind catch up. Perhaps the topic of conversation would occur to him. These department dinners were always filled with the same blather every time anyway.
It was a technique his old partner, Dr. Nathan Kline, would have recognized immediately. “I’m sorry,” Carlisle said, tugging at the sleeves of his yellow sweater. “What do I think about what?”
Jeff Gooding piped up, as Carlisle had known he would. “Dr. Lerner brought up the topic of modifying intelligence,” he said slowly, as though Carlisle might have trouble understanding the words.
And you couldn’t call him ‘Sydney,’ Carlisle thought. It had to be ‘Dr. Lerner.’ You think that’s going to get your tenure track moving a little faster, Jeffy-Jeff?
“The brain’s just a machine,” Carlisle said. He took another bite of the steak, which was quite good for a change. Sheila loved hosting these dinners – probably because she liked showing off the work she put into her house every year – but she seldom did anything impressive with the menu.
The department head sniffed. “Our atheist declares that brains are machines,” Lerner said. “And so the mystery of the mind has ended.”
“It’s a complicated machine, Sydney.” He glanced at Gooding. See, Jeff? I called him Sydney. Not so hard. And my head didn’t split open. “When something is sufficiently complicated, it’s difficult to modify,” Carlisle added.
Jeff Gooding thrust his mouth forward eagerly, like a fish gulping at a line. “I’m sure Dr. Kline would agree with you there.”
Carlisle closed his eyes.
The other professors at the table froze. Bringing up Kline was taboo in the department. Especially with Carlisle around. “Yes, thank you for that observation, Jeff,” he said quietly.
Gooding bristled at Carlisle’s patronizing tone. “It’s true, isn’t it? Yo
u both thought it would work. That you could just throw a switch and treat Dr. Kline’s mind like a piece of stereo equipment.”
“You’re vastly oversimplifying…”
“Am I? The goal of the project was to ‘amplify’ certain mental capabilities, yes? I’ve read your paper, you know.”
“Congratulations on being able to read – ”
“But I don’t remember this department approving any human trials. So tell me, Dr. Carlisle, whose idea was it to subject Kline to that special device of yours? Carlisle glanced around the table. He could feel the rest of them waiting breathlessly for an answer. “We covered all of this in the departmental hearing,” he said slowly.
“That’s nothing but smokescreen,” Gooding said. “Especially since you never included any of the details on how your custom machine was put together. So don’t you think – ”
“No, Jeff. I don’t.” Carlisle wiped his mouth and pushed back from the table. “I’m too tired for thinking tonight. And thinking about thinking? No.” He put on a smile. “Sheila, this was delicious. As always.” Part truth, part lie. Close enough. “I look forward to seeing you all at the department meeting tomorrow morning.” Pure lie. He would have preferred to stay in the lab all year long, but there were classes to teach.
So many bothersome college students.
He walked quickly across the campus, heading for the lab. His heart rate was way up, but just thinking about his little white office was already helping to calm him. When he arrived, he walked straight to the wall-safe in the corner. He spun the combination wheel quickly, expertly, and opened the heavy metal door on the first try.
And there it was, just where it was supposed to be.
The TMS device, safe and sound. It was polished and beautiful, an elegant configuration of capacitors and spun copper, and it made him smile to see it.
In a way, he wished Kline could be here with him.
The accident last year had been a huge setback. And so much time had been wasted in the hearings afterwards that he worried he would never get back on track. Even several months later, when he had been officially cleared of wrongdoing by both the College and the State, he was still too shaken to do any real work. But then, standing in the shower one morning three weeks ago, something had come to him.
Something wonderfully simple.
Now he reached into the safe and picked up the newly redesigned machine. “TMS device” was the name he still used in his head – the name both he and Kline had always used – though of course this machine took the concept of TMS to brand new heights. Transcranial magnetic stimulation was a technique commonly used to treat patients in psychiatric wards all over the world, but he and Kline had made several fundamental changes in their design. There were three figure-eight loops of copper on this unit, instead of the more common single-mobius; also, it had an array of independently wired capacitors, for precise discharge control; finally, there was a small iron disc in the center of each copper loop. The iron was key: it helped the unit create a magnetic field that was twice the strength of regular TMS devices.
But even with all that, it was still a very simple machine. You could tell just by looking at it; nothing but a handle, a small housing for the capacitors, and the copper loops with their iron centers. The device looked like a strange, old-style television antenna.
Simple changes, yes. But with significant results.
And now he had made another change. A vital change.
I’m a visionary, he thought. An absolute wunderkind. And I’m going to be the richest man alive.
That tenure-track fool, Jeff Gooding, had actually been fairly close to the mark at dinner. The original plan had been to treat the brain like a stereo amplifier. But what Gooding didn’t understand – and what he and Kline had understood only too late – was that turning up the volume on a mind could only take you so far.
The real trick was turning the volume down.
He reached farther back into the wall-safe and brought out a small stack of papers. They contained the latest data from his diagnostic tests. He had hooked up pigs, dogs, and even a small monkey – the department had access to several primate facilities through a grant from the Parker Foundation – and all of the experiments had confirmed his intuition.
If you could shut down sections of an animal’s brain – not subdue them, but actually shut them down – then the other sections of that brain would compensate with new behavior.
Extraordinary behavior.
That’s the key. That’s what we missed.
In a Rhesus monkey, “extraordinary” meant only that the animal could recognize patterns and signals too complex for an average member of the species. But in a human, of course, it could mean far more.
He sat looking at the data, still nodding his head. All of it was good, but the next step was a problem. He jotted down a note in the margin: More complex test subjects?
Leaning back in the office chair, his eyes drifted up to the ceiling. He closed his eyes and enjoyed the feeling of his chest rising and falling with the rhythm of several deep breaths.
And then he knew.
It wasn’t a problem. Not really. He had all the test subjects he needed, right here at the Hanover psych clinic. There were so many of them, all ready and willing.
They’re willing in the legal sense, anyway, he thought.
Trying to experiment with human subjects was always tricky. You needed something called “informed consent,” and that meant convincing people to sign lots of scary-looking forms. But the term “informed” wasn’t relevant in this case. A paranoid schizophrenic wasn’t capable of giving informed consent for anything. Neither was a convicted sociopath. Because who was to say what those people did or didn’t understand? He admitted to himself that such a claim wouldn’t necessarily hold up in court, but he didn’t care. It would never come to that. No one would believe the word of an asylum inmate against that of a Dartmouth professor.
Too bad Kline won’t be here to share in the glory, he thought.
2
It was easy to round up a few patients from the ward under the pretense of administering extra treatments. No one questioned him about it.
Two days later, Professor Carlisle walked slowly around the large, restraint-equipped chairs in Examination Room B, taking his time. Three of the four chairs were occupied, and the professor’s clipboard was out. His pen moved rapidly across the page. Carlisle liked writing notes, especially when an experiment was going well. The room smelled strongly of vomit, but he barely noticed. He watched the man in the first chair carefully, waiting for more.
No?
Carlisle stood at a safe distance, took a deep breath, and then exhaled strongly in the direction of the man in chair number one.
The man’s eyes bulged. His body lurched against the chair’s thick canvas straps. From his mouth came a desperate, choking rasp. Then, finally, a thin stream of yellow-brown fluid.
“That’s it?” Carlisle said.
The patient stared at him with large, vacant eyes. The eyes of an animal that has endured unspeakable things.
Hour 59, Carlisle wrote on his clipboard. Sensitivity remains high.
He turned to the second chair. “How are you feeling?” he asked sweetly.
A thin, trembling man looked up at him. He seemed surprised to hear Carlisle’s voice. “Please,” he said. “Take me out of here. We can go together.”
Carlisle appeared to consider this. “Where would we go?”
“It doesn’t matter.” The man became excited. “Away. Not here. Outside.”
“But what do you mean?”
The man hesitated.
“Outside?” Carlisle said, as if trying to understand. “What is outside?”
The thin man’s lips moved silently. He seemed as though he were trying to say something, but no words came. He looked at the door of the examination room, then looked away. “I… I just want to…”
“But what is outside? What are you talking abo
ut?”
The man suddenly broke into tears. “I don’t know,” he said miserably. “I don’t remember. It’s gone.”
Carlisle smiled and nodded. Preliminary adaptation, he wrote. But hippocampus deficit is unaffected.
The man in the third chair spoke up suddenly: “I’m going to cut your tongue out.”
Carlisle turned to him. The man was small, with a pointy nose. “Are you?” said Carlisle pleasantly.
“And then those hands of yours. I’m going to slice them off and chop them into little pieces.”
“And then?”
“I’ll grind everything together, tongue and hands and fingers, into a special Carlisle paste.”
“It sounds wonderful,” Carlisle said. “Who’s this for?”
“For?”
“Yes, the Carlisle paste. I assume someone will be eating it?”
The man in the third chair looked briefly amused. His pointy nose crinkled. “It’s a sealant, you idiot,” he said. “There are some cracks in my wall that need fixing.”
Carlisle grinned. “Of course.” He returned his attention to his clipboard.
Aggressive. Sociopathic. Coherent and precise.
He pressed a button by the wall. “Eddie. Come in here and clean this mess up. And get these men back to their rooms. I’m done with them.”
“I’m done with you, ass-face,” said the pointy-nosed man in the third chair. “You’re nothing but wall-grout to me.”
“Yes, yes. That’s fine, Peter.”
Before leaving the building, Carlisle took a minute to prepare four fresh doses of oxytocin. He used an eyedropper to mix exactly two milligrams with five milliliters of water, and then he poured each solution into one of the little bottles he had bought at CVS. The bottles had originally contained antihistamine solutions for treating clogged sinuses.
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