Brain Child Page 0,33
Jim spoke. “I talked to Marsh earlier,” he said. “He told me the operation will take at least eighteen hours. It’s not going to be any party, honey.”
Lisa paled slightly, and fought down the tears that were welling in her eyes. When she spoke, though, her voice was steady. “I know it’s not a party, Dad,” she said softly. “I just want to do whatever I can to help.”
“Your mother can—”
“No! I can, and I will. I’ll take care of Kim, and see to it that there’s no mob scene. I’ll be all right, Dad. Just let me do this my way, all right?”
When she was gone, and they could hear her murmuring into the telephone, Jim turned to Carol. “What happened up there?” he asked.
“I think she just grew up, Jim. Anyway, she’s sure trying.”
There was a silence, then Kim squirmed in her father’s lap, twisting around to look up at him. “Do I have to go to the movies with her dumb old friends?” she demanded.
“If you do, I’ll bet they’ll let you choose the movie,” Jim replied. Somewhat mollified, Kim settled down again.
“I hope Alex gets better soon,” she said. “I like Alex.”
“We all do,” Carol told her. “And he will get better, if we all pray a lot.”
And, she added to herself, if Raymond Torres really knows what he’s doing.
As Carol Cochran entertained that thought, Raymond Torres himself was making his final rounds of the evening.
Not, of course, that they were really rounds, for Alex Lonsdale was his only patient. He stopped first in Alex’s room, just across the hall from the operating complex. The night nurse glanced up from the book she was reading. “Nothing, doctor,” she said as Torres scanned the monitors that were tracking Alex’s vital functions. “No change from an hour ago.”
Torres nodded, and gazed thoughtfully at the boy in the bed.
Looks like his mother. The thought drifted through his mind, followed by a sudden flood of unbidden memories from a past he thought could no longer hurt him. Along with his memories of Ellen Lonsdale came memories of three other girls, and as their faces came into focus in his mind’s eye, he felt himself begin to tremble.
Forget it, he told himself. It was long ago, and it’s all over now. It doesn’t matter. With an effort of will, he forced himself to concentrate on the motionless form of Alex Lonsdale. He leaned over and carefully opened one of the boy’s eyes, checked the pupil, then closed the eye again. There had been no reaction to the sudden incursion of light. Not a good sign.
“All right,” he said. “I’m sleeping here tonight, in the room over my office. If anything happens—anything at all—I want to be awakened at once.”
“Of course, doctor,” the nurse replied. Not that he need have said anything—the first rule for staff working under Torres was made very clear at the time they were hired: “If anything happens, let Dr. Torres know at once.” And everyone at the Institute adhered to the rule, quickly learning to suspend his own judgment. So tonight, if Alex Lonsdale so much as twitched, an instrument would record it, and Raymond Torres would be notified immediately. As Torres left the room, the nurse went back to her book.
Torres crossed the corridor and went into the scrub room, his eyes noting instantly that everything necessary for tomorrows scrub was already there—gowns, gloves, masks, everything. And it would all be checked at least twice more during the night. He proceeded into the O.R. itself, where six technicians were going over every piece of equipment in the room, running test after test, rechecking their own work, then having it verified by two other technicians. They would continue working throughout the night, searching for anything that could possibly fail, and replacing it. They would leave only when it was time for the sterilization process to begin, an hour before the operation was scheduled.
Satisfied, he moved on down the corridor to what had long ago become known as the Rehearsal Hall. It was a large room, housing several desks, each of which held a computer terminal. It was here that every operation carried out at the Institute was rehearsed.
Tonight, all the desks were occupied, and all the terminals glowed brightly in the soft light of the Rehearsal Hall. The technicians at the monitors, using the model of Alex’s brain that had been generated earlier that day, were going over the operation step by step, searching for bugs in