Dr. Radhakrishnan smiled conspiratorially. "You liked her, eh?" he said.
"Well, she didn't have a lot going for her intellectually," Zeldo said, frowning, "and I'm involved in a monogamous relationship at home."
They did not converse much more until they arrived at the Defence Colony, whose gate was guarded by heavy machine guns in sandbag nests, manned by eagle-eyed Sikhs. The Sikhs let them through without opening fire; a minute or two later they were at the Barracks.
They had obviously been constructed to house troops assigned to guard duty and other low-level work in the Defence Colony. Because this was Delhi, and the Defence Colony was prestigious, they were actually quite nice, for barracks. Each building was thirty or forty meters long, wide enough for a row of beds down either side with a broad aisle down the middle. They were all concrete and concrete block, with tin roofs, and it was clear that they had been hastily painted and retrofitted with better electrical service and air-conditioning. The Radhakrishnan Institute now occupied two of these buildings. Building 1 was filled with offices and laboratories. Building 2 was filled with beds. The beds were filled with brain damage cases.
Strokes were generally not a major health problem in India. The classic stroke patient was a fat old smoker and though may people smoked in India, few people were fat and many did not have the opportunity to get old. Fortunately, from the point of view of research, any time you got nearly a billion people living and working in conditions not notable for safety, you did not have to rely on strokes in order to see a broad and deep spectrum of brain damage.
On his initial inspection of Building 2, Dr. Radhakrishnan saw a fascinating assortment of unfortunates who had been combed from the slums. It seemed that Mr. Salvador had some sort of connection with the Lady Wilburdon Foundation, a British charity group that operated free clinics and hospitals all over India. Mr. Salvador had exploited this connection, recruiting medical students from all over the country as brain damage talent scouts who would scan incoming cases and let him know of any promising prospects. In addition to the two whose brains had already been sampled, Dr. Radhakrishnan saw a man who had had a brick dropped on his head in a construction site. A soldier shot through the brain during ethnic violence in Srinagar. A lunch delivery boy from Delhi who had been thrown off his motorcycle rickshaw in a collision with a lorry. A street kid from Bombay who, in trying to do a second-story job on an old colonial structure, had slipped and fallen twelve feet; a spike on the wrought-iron fence had entered his open mouth, passed up through his palate, and impaled his brain.
Even by Western standards, the care these patients were receiving was fairly generous. The building was no architectural gem, but it was clean and well maintained. It was not lavishly appointed with high-tech equipment, but it was well-staffed with attentive nurses and nursing students who were clearly doing all they could to see to the patients' individual needs. And none of these patients was paying a single rupee. Most of them had no rupees to begin with.
Building 1 had its own generators, a pair of brand-new Honda portable units delivering a hundred and twenty volts of all-American sixty-cycle power. The juice was filtered and conditioned through an uninterruptible power supply and then routed through shiny, freshly installed conduit to be a generous number of galvanized steel junction boxes, bolted to the barracks walls every couple of meters, studded with American-style three-prong outlets. All of this had been setup so that Zeldo and his ilk could fly straight in from California, drop their whores off at the Imperial, and plug their computer and other more arcane devices straight into the wall without having to deal with the awful culture shock of incompatible plugs and voltages. More to the point, the Honda generators would not flicker, spike, brown out, and back out as the Delhi grid was apt to. No precious data would be lost to unpredictable Third World influences.
Zeldo and a couple of other slangy pizza-eating beards from America had laid claim to one end of Building 1 and set up their own little outpost of heavy metal music and novelty foam-rubber sledgehammers for pounding on their workstations when they got frustrated. They had even erected a sign: PACIFIC NETWARE-ASIAN HEADQUARTERS. On his way in, Dr. Radhakrishnan had noted the presence of a freshly installed satellite dish, and he could not help but suppose that they were connected to that.
Mr. Salvador had his own little nook at the other end of the building, as far away from the foam rubber sledgehammers as he could get. He was not in at the moment, but Dr. Radhakrishnan knew Mr. Salvador's style when he saw it: a heavy antique desk, comfortably scuffed, an electric shoe polisher, and every communications device known to science.
The intervening space was all at Dr. Radhakrishnan's disposal. At this point it was all new, empty desks and new, empty filing cabinets. A few people had already moved in. Supposedly, Toyoda was on his way in from Elton and might have already arrived. There were also a few promising Indian graduate students whom Mr. Salvador had managed to recruit away from their positions in America and Europe, and there were signs that some of these people had already arrived, claimed desks, and gotten down to work.
At the moment there was nothing for Dr. Radhakrishnan to do except sit down with a big stack of medical records that had been assembled on the head cases in Building 2, and sort through them, looking for patients with the right sort of brain damage.
A couple of hours after Dr. Radhakrishnan arrived, a patient named Mohinder Singh was brought in. He was a lorry driver from Himachal Pradesh, way up north in the foothills of the Himalayas. He had been driving down a mountain road with a bundle of half-inch pipe lashed to the back of his lorry. The pipes were apparently of different lengths; some stuck out farther than others. His brakes had gone out and he had gone off the road and slammed into something. The bundle of pipes had shot forward. The longest one had come in through the back window of the truck, struck him just behind the ear, passed all the way through his head, and emerged through one of the eyeballs. A nearby road crew had used a hacksaw to cut off most of the pipe, leaving only the portion that was stuck through his head, and he had been evacuated to a nearby Lady Wilburdon Charities clinic where he had been noticed by one of the talent scouts.
He did not look very promising at first. It seemed likely that the pipe had smashed things around quite a bit inside there and bruised large portions of the brain. But Dr. Radhakrishnan had not gotten to where he was by being hasty and superficial. He shipped Singh down the road to the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences for a series of head scans.
AIIMS was India's foremost medical research institute and it was only a couple of minutes away from the Barracks along the Delhi Ring Road. They would be able to take some excellent pictures of Mr. Singh's brain with the equipment they had there. And, in a stroke of luck, the chunk of pipe that was still embedded in Mr. Singh's head was made out of copper, a nonmagnetic substance; they would be able to run him through an NMR scanner without turning it into a projectile.
Dr. Radhakrishnan was stunned to learn that the pipe had gone through his head almost three days previously. He must have beer in great pain, but he refused to acknowledge it. From the head down he was well-nourished and in perfect health. This was one patient who was not going to go into shock every time they put a needle in his arm.
When Singh came back from AIIMS with a stack of films and scans piled on his chest, Dr. Radhakrishnan was pleasantly surprised. The pipe was thin-walled, cut off fresh and sharp on the end that had gone through Singh's head. As best as Dr. Radhakrishnan could tell from trying to interpret the images, it had sliced its way through the soft, gelatinous brain tissue, rather than shoving it around and bruising it. It had acted almost like a core sampler.