39

Dr. Mary Catherine Cozzano finished her neurology residency during the last week of June. She spent a couple of days in Chicago celebrating with her fellow graduates, but during the past four years they had forgotten how to goof off, and it took a positive effort to have fun. Then she moved back into her old bedroom in Tuscola. She wasn't crazy about moving back home at the age of thirty, but she needed a quiet place in which to study for the board exams. She didn't have a job lined up yet, and probably wouldn't, at least until things settled down, which would not be until Election Day.

Besides, the house was still partly occupied by technical personnel from the Radhakrishnan Institute, their computers were all over the place, and so she could almost convince herself that she was actually living in an advanced neurological research center. She spent an hour or two each day going over the records of Dad's recovery, learning about the therapy and how it worked. As Dad had gotten the basic rehab out of the way - learning to walk, learning to talk - his staff of therapists had withered away to a hand­ful who helped him with things like writing. In the same way, the hard-tech people had dwindled, going back to the Radhakrishnan Institute and leaving high-bandwidth communications links in their place, so that they could monitor the biochip from the other side of the country. Zeldo had told her at the beginning of June that he too would be leaving soon, but he was still here, sleeping on the floor of James's old bedroom, which had become a weird mixture of James's adolescent decor (ILLINI pennants and Michael Jordan posters) with appallingly pricey, high-powered computer gear. When Mary Catherine asked Zeldo why he was still here, he broke eye contact and muttered some hacker aphorism about how hard it was to chase down the last few bugs.

She wasn't sure what to make of the fact that her father was now right-handed.

On the night of the State of the Union address, the blood clot had shot up Dad's aortal arch, the giant superhighway that carried almost all of the heart's output. It had spun off into two separate fragments. One had gone up each of the carotid arteries, left and right. The one on the right had caused paralysis on the left side of his body, and the one on the left had nailed that hemisphere's speech centers, causing aphasia.

Then, a couple of months later, in the den, the second stroke had caused more damage to the left side of his brain, causing paralysis on the right side of his body.

Dad's soul could make the decision to move, and his brain could issue the order to his arm or leg, but the order never got there because the links had been severed by the stroke. Dr. Radhakrishnan had implanted two chips, one on each side of the brain. Their function was to replace those broken links so that the orders to move could get out to his body again. Now that the chips had been trained to convey messages to the correct body parts, Dad's paralysis was gone.

But aphasia was a different thing. It wasn't just paralysis of the tongue. It went deeper than that. And you couldn't stimulate it with baboons. It was uncanny that this therapy had worked so well the first time out. Dad sounded like Dad, and said the things that Dad would say, but sometimes when he was talking, she suddenly became disoriented, stopped listening to him, and began to wonder where his words were coming from, whether they were passing through the biochip. Dad could tell when Mary Catherine was doing this; he called it "going neurologist" and it drove him crazy.

She felt flaccid and out of shape after four years of residency. Every morning she would rise at five and go for a run. Any later in the day, and it would get so warm and sticky that she couldn't really get a good workout. Besides, she had done much worse things to her sleep schedule during residency and so she didn't mind getting up early to do something she felt good about.

Her usual route took her down the street to the city park, where she would take a couple of laps around the Softball diamond and do some stretching on the infield. Then she would head out of town, crossing U.S. 45 and the Illinois Central, and run along one of the farm roads, measuring her distance by counting the crossroads, which came at one-mile intervals. Central Illinois in July was stiflingly humid, and as often as not she found herself running through fog and mist. The early morning sunlight, shining in low, threw a clammy metallic haze over the landscape.

On the morning of the Fourth of July, a shape materialized in front of Mary Catherine as she jogged down the country road. At first she thought it was a car coming toward her in the wrong lane, but then she realized that it was not moving. She thought it must be a car that had broken down. As she got closer she could see a dark shape standing next to the car, motionless, waiting. She unzipped her belt pack and reached into it, making sure that that the stun gun was in there.

It was a small car, low to the ground. A sporty little Mercedes. A big hand-lettered sign was leaning against the rear bumper, printed on a square of poster board. It said, MARY CATHERINE - DON'T MAKE A SOUND!

The figure leaning against the car was Mel Meyer. As Mary Catherine approached, Mel straightened up and turned to face her, holding one finger up to his lips, shushing her.

It was not exactly a warm and affectionate reunion. Mel pulled a small black box from the pocket of his black raincoat. He walked toward Mary Catherine, clicked a switch on the box, and then waved it up and down the length of her body, watching an LED graph built into its top. Every time the box passed near her midsection, the graph shot up to its peak level. Mel moved the little box in a narrowing orbit until he finally zerowed in on her belt pack.

The pack was still unzipped. Mel pulled it open and peered into it, his bald head grazing Mary Catherine's bosom. He nudged the stun gun out of the way and carefully pulled her key chain out. The world's largest keychain had shed a couple of pounds since Mary Catherine had left the hospital, but it was still formidable. Mel turned it over in his hand, waving his little black box over it, and finally zeroed in on the miniature Swiss Army knife.

He disconnected it from the keychain and held it right up next to his black box. The LED graph was pinned at its highest reading.

Then he walked across the road, wound up, and flung the knife off into the middle of a cornfield. He made one more pass over Mary Catherine's body with the little black box. This time the LED meter did not flicker.

"Okay," Mel finally said. He spoke quietly, but it was easy to hear him in the absolute silence of predawn. "You're clean."

"What-"

"If anyone asks, tell them that, uh- " Mel closed his eyes and stood motionless for a few seconds, "you noticed a dog that had broken away and gotten its collar tangled up in a barbed wire fence and you had to take out your knife and cut through his collar to get him loose. In the process you dropped your knife on the ground and forgot to pick it up."

"Hardly plausible."

"It doesn't have to be plausible. Just good enough that no one can call bullshit on you without bring down the wrath of the Governor."

"What was in the knife?"

"A listening device."

"Must have been a small one."

Mel was disappointed. "Are you kidding? Don't be a sap. They can make them the size of fleas now."

"Oh. Sorry."

"Mary Catherine, some heavy shit is going on, and we need to talk. What time you usually get back to the house?"

"Around six."

"Okay, I'll drop you off by the park about then," Mel said. "Hop in."

The passenger door of the Mercedes was already ajar. Mary Catherine, a little shell-shocked, climbed into it. Mel sat down behind the wheel, started the engine, drove thirty feet up the road and turned on to a gravel farm road, a tunnel into the corn. He drove for a quarter of a mile, until the main road was shrouded in the mist.