"When I am tense I bite my lip. Today I think I have swallowed half of my own blood supply."

"Think of it as opening day for a new business venture," Mr. Salvador said. "It's always a debacle."

"Even debacle does not do justice to this day," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "It was an apocalypse."

Mr. Salvador shrugged. "That's why we make mistakes, so we can learn from them."

"One gets very impatient, doing research for years and years. The pace is so gradual. After a while you say, "I wish I could just get on with it and put one of these things into a human brain and see what happens. But this business today reminds me of why we take years and years to get ready for these things."

"The patients are both alive. All's well that ends well."

A waiter came by and gave Dr. Radhakrishnan another drink. Mr. Salvador tossed some rupees on to the table. "Why don't you take that with you?" he said. "I have something to show you."

"What?"

"Let's go for a spin."

The former site of the Ashok Theatre had been surrounded by a barricade twenty feet high. In places it consisted of chain-link fence with tarps stretched across it. In places it was pieced together with scraps of wood. In and of itself the fence was a considerable invest­ments; the materials that went into it could have housed thousands. Things did not become much clearer after Mr. Salvador and Dr. Radhakrishnan had gotten past the guard at the gate. Most of the site was filled with a scaffolding. It was just a dense three-dimensional web of steel, with some parts of it additionally shored up with wooden beams. So far most of the work was being done in iron; the scaffolding was intertangled with another web of reinforcing rods.

The density of activity was incredible. The site seemed to con­tain several workers per square yard, all doing something as fast as they could. Several cranes were active, moving giant prefabricated constructs of reinforcing rod into place.

"All reinforced concrete. So it looks like hell until we pour," Mr. Salvador said.

Dr. Radhakrishnan would have gotten lost in a second, but Mr. Salvador knew his way through the tangle. He led him fearlessly into a passage that cut through the heart of it, straight in toward the center, brushing past workers the entire way. He noticed along the way that he was now walking on planks. Looking down between gaps, he could see straight down one or two stories. The place was extraordinarily well lit with thousands of electric lights strung on long yellow cords. Hundreds more workers were down below them, bending more steel rods into place. Large amounts of concrete had already been poured down there.

As they approached the middle, Dr. Radhakrishnan could see glimpses of more concrete through gaps in the scaffolding. It was a sort of squat concrete obelisk, rectangular in cross-section, rising straight up out of the foundation below them, up to a height of three stories above their heads. It was large enough, perhaps, to put a volleyball court on each level. The walls had a few rectangular openings on each level where, presumably, this part of the building would later be connected to adjacent rooms or hallways. Thousands of reinforcing bars sprouted from the walls at the levels of the floors-to-be and along the locations of future walls, giving the whole tower a bristly, hairy appearance. The bare concrete walls, still so new and clean they were almost white, had already been partly obscured by conduits, plumbing, and ductwork that grew up and snaked around the structure like tropical vines climbing a tree. Craning his neck to look up towards the top, Dr. Radhakrishnan could see the louvered enclosures of large pieces of machinery mounted on the roof, probably air conditioners and electrical generators.

The obelisk was connected to the surrounding scaffold work by a couple of catwalks, giving it the appearance of a keep in the center of a medieval castle. When they walked across the bridges into the building, they passed through some kind of a cultural divide. Everyone working inside here was Korean, Japanese, or American and they were speaking English to each other with varying degrees of proficiency. Some of them were wearing smart, clean coveralls, and some of them were wearing ties. Two or three big Calyx computer systems were already up and running, nice ones with huge color screens, and engineers were using them to zoom in on various subsystems.

"This, of course, is the essential core of the operation," Mr. Salvador said. "The only part that you will really need in order to continue your research. It will be ready to use in a week. As long as you don't mind walking through an active construction site in order to reach it, that is."

"Not at all," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

15

Merely scooping out a hole in a man's brain and dropping in a biochip was not enough. It was like assaulting a supercomputer with a Skilsaw and then throwing in a handful of loose silicon chips.

The biochip had to be connected into the brain tissue in billions or trillions of different ways. All of the connections were micro­scopic and could not be made by the hand of any surgeon. They had to grow.

Brain cells didn't grow. But the connections between them did. The network of linkages was constantly shifting and reconnecting itself in a process that was usually described as "learning." Dr. Radhakrishnan did not really care for this terminology because it contained a value judgement. It implied that every time new synapses were formed inside a person's mind it was because they were memorizing Shakespeare or being taught how to integrate transcendental functions. Of course, in reality most of the internal rewiring that went on in people's brains took place in response to watching game shows on television, being beaten up by family members, figuring out the cheapest place to buy cigarettes, and being conditioned not to mix plaids with stripes.

As soon as it had seemed like it was a safe bet that Mr. Easyrider and Mr. Scatflinger were going to live for while, they were trans­ferred back to the Barracks in a specially equipped ambulance. They were laid side by side in a separate room that had been built onto one end of Building 2. They were connected up to numerous machines, wired into a support system. Each of them had a red polygon on his head, a U-shaped welt, hairy with black sutures, marking the boundary of the flap that had been peeled back during surgery.

In the center of the area outlined by the surgical scar, a bundle of lines was plugged into the patient's head. It passed through the middle of the flake of skull that had been neatly sawed out by Dr. Radhakrishnan's bone saw. While Dr. Radhakrishnan had occupied himself with implanting the biochip, a lesser surgeon - more of a technician, really - had drilled a few holes through the disembodied chunk of skull and implanted a plastic connector. The connector was about the size of a dime and was really a cluster of smaller connections: half a dozen tiny tubes for passing fluids in and out, and a miniature, fifty-pin electrical plug, a nearly microscopic version of the port on the back of a computer. Since most communication between the biochip and the outside world was supposed to happen over the radio, only a few of these fifty pins were hooked up to the biochip itself. Most of them were hooked up to sensors that monitored the patient's condition and to the electrostimulus system that was supposed to encourage the growth of new connections between brain and biochip.

When the operation was finished, this connector peeked through the skin, somewhat in the fashion of a wall socket. The researchers could then interface with the patient by sticking a matching plug into the socket; when it was stuck in properly, all of the fluid and electrical connections were made in an instant. So many tubes and wires were crammed together in this bottleneck that they seemed to explode from the side of the patient's head. Some of the connections ran directly to various pieces of bedside machinery that monitored pressure inside the skull, delivered drugs, or helped to oxygenate the brain tissue in the biochip. Others were taped to the head of the bed, from which they ran over to the nearest wall, passed through a hole, and ran through a conduit that connected the two buildings.