Before he even veered into the parking lot of the Coover biotechnology pavilion, blood balloons began to detonate on the windshield of his full-sized, one-ton, six-wheel-drive Chevy pickup truck. He kept driving even though he could no longer see through the windshield. If he was lucky, he might run over an animal rights activist and then claim it was an accident. The truck was not in a mood to slow down; it was heavily laden with fifty-pound sacks of Purina Monkey Chow. He had just paid for the monkey chow himself, with his own money, down at the grain elevator - the closest thing there was to a skyscraper in Elton, a white tubular obelisk sticking up above the railroad tracks on the edge of town. He had talked to the grinning windburned Nazis, given them his money, endured their snickering at his accent and their remarks about his heavy winter coat.
"So what do you do with this stuff? Fry it up or just eat it cold?" one of them had said, as they were piling the monkey chow into his truck.
"I feed it to brain-damaged lower primates," Dr. Radhakrishnan had said. "Would you like a sample?"
The one thing they valued him for - that gave him potential status as a human being in their eyes - was his monster truck: 454 cubic inches of V-8 power, double wheels on the rear axle, a thick black roll bar brandishing great mesh-covered Stalag 17 searchlights that could pick out a shrew on a rock in a midnight windstorm across two miles of chaparral. He had traded in a BMW for this coarse and ungainly machine halfway through his first winter here, almost two years ago, when he found out that the ultimate driving machine simply did not go in a six-foot snowdrift.
The double-edged windshield wipers smeared blood across the windshield in gory arcs, giving him a partial view of the loading dock. It wasn't real blood, of course. After the first few attacks, they had decided it was politically incorrect to use the real stuff and they had switched to Karo syrup with red dye in it. In the cold February air, it congealed on contact. Dr. Radhakrishnan preferred the real blood; it was easier to wash off.
A dozen of his grad students and lab techs were waiting for him around back at the loading dock. Dr. Radhakrishnan pulled up to it and left the motor running. They jumped into the back like a commando team and formed a human chain, passing the fifty-pound sacks of monkey chow up across the dock and into the freight elevator. Radhakrishnan had a total of fifteen grad students: four Japanese, two Chinese, three Korean, one Indonesian, three Indian, one Pakistani, and one American. They had learned to work together well at times such as this, even the American.
He pulled his empty truck around into the parking lot. Dr. Radhakrishnan had a reserved parking space near the entrance. Right now half a dozen activists were occupying it with their bodies, staging a die-in. Most of them were just doing it in their Levi's and Timberland's, but the star of the show was a person in a gorilla suit with a big steel colander over his head with a pair of jumper cables clamped on to it. The gorilla spazzed out and died grandly as Dr. Radhakrishnan's blood-soaked four-by-four cruised past in low gear, a shattered balloon fluttering from the radio antenna, and parked in an unreserved spot farther from the door.
They thought they were going to force Dr. Radhakrishnan to change his ways by making him feel bad. They thought that the way to make him feel bad was to make him feel unliked. They were desperately wrong on both counts.
He shoved a magnetically coded ID card into a slot, punched in a secret code, and the door opened for him. This new facility had been built securely, because they knew that the animal rights people would try to find a way in. They didn't have a chance; they were like raccoons trying to break into a missile silo.
The top floor belonged to Radhakrishnan and his crew. He had to punch in more numbers to get out of the elevator lobby. Then he smelled home. It had the sharp disinfectant smell of a doctor's office with a low undertone of barnyard.
A baboon was sitting in a stainless steel chair in the Procedure Room, wrists and ankles loosely taped in place. The baboon was anesthetized and did not need to be restrained; otherwise, the tape wouldn't have held him. All it did was fix him in a convenient position.
The entire top of the baboon's skull had been removed to expose the brain. Park and Toyoda were under the hood, as it were, working on the baboon's electrical system. Toyoda had his hands in there, maneuvering a narrow probe with a miniature video camera on the end of it. The output of the video camera was splashed up on a big-screen Trinitron. Nearly inaudible high-pitched ticking and whistling sounds emerged from the headphones of his Walkman; he was listening to some particularly noxious form of American music.
Park held a retractor with one hand and a mug of coffee in the other. Both of them ignored the baboon and kept their eyes on the TV set. It was providing live coverage of the interior spaces of the baboon's brain: a murkey universe of gray mush with the occasional branching network of blood vessels.
"A little bit left," Park suggested. The camera swung in that direction and suddenly there was something different, something with hard, straight edges, embedded in the brain tissue. It did not seem to have been dropped into a hole, though; it seemed as though the brain had grown around it, like a tree growing around a fence post. The object was a neutral, milky white, with a serial number stamped into the top. Any layman coming in off the street would have identified the substance as teflon. It was just translucent enough that one could make out, inside the teflon shell, a sort of squared-off sunburst pattern, like the rising sun flag of the Imperial Japanese Navy, etched in silver against a neutral gray background. At the center of that sunburst was a tiny square region that contained several hundred thousand microscopic transistors.
But neither Park nor Toyoda nor Dr. Radhakrishnan looked at that part of it. They were all looking at the interface - the boundary between the sharp edge of the teflon casing and the brain tissue, with its infinite, organic watershed system of capillaries. It looked good: no swelling, no necrosis, no gap between the baboon and the microchip.
"A keeper," Toyoda said, grinning, pronouncing this newly acquired bit of American slang with great precision.
"Bingo," Park said.
"Which baboon is this?" Dr. Radhakrishnan said.
"Number twenty-three," Toyoda said. "We implanted three weeks ago."
"How long has he been off the antirejection meds?"
"One week."
"Looks like he'll do well," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "I suppose we should go ahead and give him a name."
"Okay," Park said as he slurped uncertainly at his lukewarm java. "What do you want to call him?"
"Let's call him Mr. President," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.
Two men were waiting for Dr. Radhakrishnan in front of his office. It was unusual, this early in the morning; Dr. Radhakrishnan's secretary wouldn't even be here for another half hour. One of the men was Dr. Artaxerxes Jackman, of all people, looking somewhat grumpy and astonished. The other man was a stranger, a man in his forties with sandy blond hair. He was wearing the best suit that Dr. Radhakrishnan had ever seen west of the Mississippi, a charcoal-gray number with widely spaced stripes, sort of a City of London number. Both men stood up as Dr. Radhakrishnan entered the room.
"Dr. Radhakrishnan," Jackman said, "no one was here so we just figured we'd set up and wait for you. I want you to meet Mr. Salvador here."
"Dr. Radhakrishnan, it's a pleasure and an honor," Salvador said, extending his hand. He wore no jewelry except for cufflinks; when he extended his arm, just the right amount of cuff - plain, basic white - protruded from the sleeve of his jacket. He did not go in for the crushing American style of handshake. His accident was definitely not American either, but beyond that, it was as untraceable as a ransom note.