"Astonishing," Mr. Salvador said. He looked quite awake and considerably less grumpy.

Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke another few words. Then he said, to Mr. Salvador, "I have asked him his name."

Mr. Singh's mouth came open and then closed again, the lips coming together: "Mmmmmo-

"Mo," Dr. Radhakrishnan echoed.

"Derrrrrr."

"-der. Mohinder."

"Ssssin."

"Mohinder Singh. Very good." Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke in Hindi again, then translated: "What kind of lorry were you driving at the time of your accident?"

"Ta... ta."

"That's right. A Tata 1210."

"Still no signs of tumor or rejection?"

"None."

"Right," Mr. Salvador said, "that's it, then." He spun on his heel and burst out of the room.

Dr. Radhakrishnan waited for a few moments, then followed him.

The offices were upstairs. He entered the stairwell and heard Mr. Salvador above him, taking the steps two or three at a time.

By the time he had followed Mr. Salvador, quietly, up to the office level, old Bucky had already got through to someone on the telephone:

"What? All right, I'll speak loudly. Can you hear me? Good. Listen carefully; we are go for launch. Yes. Yes. Unequivocally. Yes, you have a good day too."

17

Working out the politics of Mary Catherine's temporary leave of absence from her residency and arranging the trip to the various and far-flung organs of the Radhakrishnan Institute took a few weeks. The trip itself lasted a week and a half. When Mary Catherine flew home from California, Mel drove his sports car, a Mercedes 500 SL, down from Chicago and picked her up at the Champaign-Urbana Airport. He took U.S. 45 from there; it passed within two blocks of the Cozzano house and served almost as a private driveway connecting the family with the outside world. Mel preferred two-lane roads with lots of heavy trucks, because that way he had something to pass.

Mel tried to make small talk as they blasted along between the snowed-over cornfields. Mary Catherine was preoccupied and spent most of the time squinting out the window. Farm machinery threw spouts of black diesel straight up into the sky, visible from miles away. From time to time the tires of the Mercedes rumbled as they drove over a spot where mud and cornstalks had been tracked across the road by a tractor and then frozen down hard to the pavement. South of Pesotum it became possible to see the towers of CBAP heaving up over the linear horizon, kicking out silvery bubbles of steam that dissolved into the clouds.

"Something on your mind?" he asked.

"Just a lot of impressions in a short time," she said, shaking her head. "I want to be coherent when I talk to Dad.

Mel grinned, just a bit. So that was it. Even in his current condition, Dad continued to scare the hell out of Mary Catherine.

"Just give your professional opinion," Mel said. "After that, we're all grownups."

He slowed the Mercedes and turned off the highway. The tires started to buzz as they drove down brick streets. A plywood sign marked the entrance to town:

WELCOME TO TUSCOLA

ATTEND OUR CHURCHES

"It's small in terms of staff. It is absolutely gigantic in terms of resources. Everything they own seems to be brand new," Mary Catherine said.

She was sitting on the sofa in the living room. Dad was sitting directly across the coffee table from her, watching her face. Mel was off to the side. Patricia was hovering, throwing logs on the fire, getting coffee.

"If you buy their basic scientific approach, then these guys are certainly equipped to move forward with it," Mary Catherine continued. "They have money to burn."

"Do you buy it?" Mel said.

"It works on baboons. It makes paralyzed baboons capable of moving, and even walking again. That has been proved, I think, beyond a doubt."

"Does it work on femelhebbers?" Cozzano asked, using his new word for people.

"I asked them that question many times," Mary Catherine said, "and I might as well have been saying 'femelhebbers' for all the information I got."

Cozzano laughed and shook his head ruefully.

"I was skeptical going in. But what they have done is extremely impressive, and it seems to me that if they could produce one healthy person who has gone through their therapy, then we might actually have something."

"Tell me about your detailed impressions," Mel said.

"I saw the institute itself dead last - just this morning. These guys made up the whole itinerary for me, so I didn't have much flexibility."

"Did you feel you were getting the Potemkin Village treat­ment?" Mel asked.

"Yes. But that's normal."

"True," Mel said.

"First place I went was Genomics, in Seattle. It's south of down­town, near the Kingdome, in a big old warehouse that they gutted and redid. All pretty new and clean, as you'd expect. Most of the space is used for things unrelated to this project. They have one suite on the top floor where they do brain work for Radhakrishnan. When I was there they had several cell-culturing projects underway. It's a typical lab with small glass containers all over the place with handwritten labels stuck to them, and by reading the labels I could pick up the names of some of the subjects they're working on. The names I saw were-" Mary Catherine leafed through her notes for a second, "Margaret Thatcher, Earl Strong, Easyrider, Scatflinger and Mohinder Singh."

An uneasy laugh passed around the table. "I know who the first two are..." Mel said.

"That's what I thought. But later, when I went to Elton, I found out that Margaret Thatcher and Earl Strong are two of their baboons. They name all the baboons after political figures."

"Did you also see baboons named Easyrider and Scatflinger?" Mel said. "Those sound more like animal names to me."

"No. And I have no ideas on Mohinder Singh, either."

"Mohinder Singh might be a baboon," Mel concluded, "named after some guy in India that Radhakrishnan doesn't like. But it's also possible that Mohinder Singh is a human being."

"They keep talking about their facilities in India," Mary Catherine said. "It may be a person they are experimenting on out there. Working on, I should say."

"Well, go on," Mel said.

"From Seattle I went to New Mexico for a couple of days. Very nice facility there - the Coover Biotech Pavilion."

Mel and Cozzano exchanged looks.

"Again, they obviously know what they're doing. I spent a long time going over detailed records of all of the baboons they've worked on. It's clear that they have learned a lot about this over the years. Their first subjects had rejection problems, or the biochips failed to take, et cetera. Over time they have solved those problems. Now they can do it almost routinely.

"Then I went to San Francisco and talked to some of the people working on the chips at Pacific Netware. These guys are really good - the best in the business. They were the only ones willing to talk about the human element."

"What do you mean by that?" Mel said.

"All of the biologist types are gun-shy about the idea of doing this with human beings. You can't get them to talk about it. It's clear that there are some potential ethical problems there that they have been trained to avoid. But the chipheads don't have any of those cultural inhibitions. They would probably volunteer to get these things implanted in their own heads."

"Why? Are they brain damaged?"

"No more so than anyone who works on computers for a living. But to them, see, it's not a therapy so much as it is a way of improving the human mind. That's what gets these guys psyched about it."

"You're joking," Cozzano said.

"The biologists won't even allow themselves to think about trying this on people - even several brain-damaged volunteers. The computer people have already gone way beyond that point in their thinking. Half the guys I talked to firmly believed that in ten or twenty years they would be walking around with supercomputers stuck in their heads."