Brain Child Page 0,43

if it doesn’t happen. And keep in mind that while he doesn’t smile, he doesn’t frown, either.”

Marsh silently wondered if Torres had intended that to be a comforting thought. If he had, he’d failed totally.

In the lab, Alex began to come up from the anesthesia that was always administered to him during the daily tests, and, as always, slowly became aware of the strange and fleeting images that filled his mind. As always, the images were unidentifiable; as always, they were accompanied by an incomprehensible stream of something that was almost, but not quite, like sound.

Then he came fully awake, and the images and sounds faded away. He opened his eyes.

“How do you feel?” the technician asked. His name was Peter Bloch, but other than that, Alex didn’t know much about him. Nor, for that matter, was he curious to know anything about him. To Alex, Peter was simply one more part of the Institute.

“Okay,” he said. Then: “How come I always see and hear things just before I wake up?”

Peter frowned. “What kind of things?”

“I don’t know. It’s like a flickering I can’t quite see, and there’s a sort of squeaky, rasping sound.”

Peter began disconnecting the monitors from the tiny wires that emerged, almost like hairs, from the metal plate that had replaced part of Alex’s left parietal bone, and the scalp that had been drawn across to cover it. “What about pain?”

“No. There’s no pain.”

“Anything at all? Do you feel anything, or smell anything? Taste anything?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m not sure,” Peter told him. “I know that during the tests, some of these electrodes are constantly stimulating your brain, then measuring its responses. That’s why we have to put you to sleep. We’re giving your brain artificial stimuli, and if you were awake, it could be pretty unpleasant. You might feel like we’d burned your hand, or cut your arm, or you might smell or taste something pretty awful. It sounds like you’re just waking up too early, and responding to visual and otic stimuli—seeing and hearing things that aren’t there at all.”

Alex got up from the table and pulled his shirt on, then sat still, waiting for the last of the anesthesia to wear off. “Shall I tell Dr. Torres about it?”

Peter Bloch shrugged. “If you want. I’ll make a note of it, and tomorrow we’ll hold off on flushing you out with oxygen for a few more minutes.”

“That’s okay,” Alex replied. “It doesn’t bother me.”

Peter offered him an uncertain grin. “Does anything ever bother you?”

Alex thought a moment, then shook his head. “No.” He tucked in his shirt and carefully put his feet on the floor, then took his cane in his right hand and began making his slow way to the door.

Peter Bloch watched him go, and his grin faded away. He began closing up the lab, shutting down the equipment that had been in use almost constantly over the last three months. For himself, he was glad Alex Lonsdale was going home. The work load, since Alex had arrived, had been nearly intolerable, and Torres had never let up on the staff for a moment.

Besides, Peter realized as he took off his lab jacket and hunched into his favorite khaki windbreaker, he didn’t like Alex Lonsdale.

True, what Torres had accomplished with Alex would probably make some kind of medical history, but Peter wasn’t impressed. To him, it didn’t matter how well Alex was doing.

The kid was a zombie.

Marsh drove north out of Palo Alto, staying on Middlefield Road until he came to La Paloma Drive, where he turned left to start up into the hills. Every few minutes he glanced over at Alex, who sat impassively in the passenger seat next to him, while from the back seat Ellen kept up a steady stream of chatter:

“Do you remember what’s just around the next curve? We’re almost to La Paloma, and things will start looking familiar to you.”

Alex pictured the map he’d studied. “The county park,” he said. “Hillside Park.”

“You remember!” Ellen exclaimed.

“It was on the map Dr. Torres gave me,” Alex corrected her. They came around the bend in the road, and Marsh slowed the car. “Stop,” Alex suddenly said.

Marsh braked the car, and followed Alex’s gaze. In the distance, there was a group of children playing on a swing set, while two teenage boys tossed a Frisbee back and forth.

“What is it, Alex?” Marsh asked.

Alex’s eyes seemed to be fixed on the children on the swings.

“I always wanted to do that when I was little,”