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Torres. And even his visits to her were rare. There was a feeling in La Paloma that Torres resented his mother, that she was little more to him than a constant reminder of his past, and that, if there was one thing Torres would like to ignore, it was his past. In La Paloma he was primarily regarded as a curiosity: the boy from behind the mission who had somehow made good.
Beyond La Paloma, he had become, over the years, something of an enigma within the medical community. To his supporters, his aloofness was a result only of the fact that he devoted nearly every waking hour to his research into the functioning of the human brain, while his detractors attributed that same aloofness to intellectual arrogance.
But for all the questions about him, Raymond Torres had succeeded in becoming one of the country’s foremost authorities on the structure and functioning of the human brain. In recent years, the thrust of his research had changed slightly, and his primary interest had become reconstuctive brain surgery.
“But isn’t most of his work experimental?” Mallory asked now. “I don’t think a lot of it has even been tried on human beings yet.”
Marshall Lonsdale’s desperation was reflected in his eyes. “Raymond Torres knows more about the human brain than anybody else alive. And some of the reconstruction work he’s done is just this side of incredible. I’d say it was incredible if I hadn’t seen the results myself. I want him to work on Alex.”
“Marsh—”
But Marsh was on his feet, his eyes fixed on the pile of X rays, CAT scans, lab results, graphs, and other documentation pertaining to the damage his son’s brain had sustained. “He’s still alive, Frank,” he said. “And as long as he’s alive, I have to try to help him. I can’t just leave him alone—you can see what he’ll be like as well as I can. He’ll be a vegetable, Frank. My God, you told me so yourself just now. Nothing can hurt him anymore, Frank. All Torres can do is help. Call him for me. Tell him what’s happened, and that I want to talk to him. Just talk to him, that’s all. Just get me in to see him.”
When Frank Mallory still hesitated, Marshall Lonsdale spoke once more. “Alex is all I have, Frank. I can’t just let him die.”
When he was alone, Frank Mallory picked up the phone and dialed the number of Raymond Torres’s office in Palo Alto, twenty miles away. After talking to him for thirty minutes, he finally convinced Torres to see Marsh Lonsdale and look at Alex’s case.
The doctor made no promises, but he agreed to talk, and to look.
Privately, Frank half-hoped Torres would turn Marsh down.
CHAPTER FIVE
Exhaustion was overtaking Marsh, and he was beginning to feel that the situation was hopeless. He’d been in Raymond Torres’s offices for most of the day, and for most of the day he’d been by himself. Not that it hadn’t been interesting; it had, despite the overriding fear for his son’s life that had never left his consciousness since the moment he had arrived that morning.
He’d stared at the Institute through bleary eyes. The building itself was a bastard—it had obviously started out as a home, and an imposing one. But from the central core of the mansion—for a mansion it had been—two wings had spread, and no attempt had been made to make them architecturally compatible with the original structure. Instead, they were sleekly functional, in stark contrast with the Georgian massiveness of the core. The buildings were surrounded by a sprawling lawn dotted with trees, and only a neat brass plaque mounted on the face of a large rock near the street identified the structure: INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMAN BRAIN.
Inside, a receptionist had led him immediately to Raymond Torres’s office, where he’d turned all of Alex’s records over to the surgeon himself, who, without so much as glancing at them, had given them to an assistant. When the assistant had disappeared, Torres had offered him a chair, then spent what Marsh thought was an unnecessarily long time lighting his pipe.
It took Marsh only a few seconds to decide that there was nothing of Torres’s scientific reputation in either his manner or his bearing. He was tall, and his chiseled features were carefully framed by prematurely graying hair in a manner that seemed to Marsh more suitable for a movie star than a scientist. The star image was further enhanced by the perfectly cut