Brain Child Page 0,94
it on the table next to his coffee cup.
“That’s why he wants Alex back,” Ellen said for the third time. Why, she wondered, couldn’t Marsh understand that there was nothing sinister in Raymond’s wanting Alex to come back to the Institute for a few days? “Besides,” she went on, “if he thought it was anything serious, he wouldn’t have let Alex come home with me this afternoon. He could have just kept him there.”
“And I would have had an injunction by tomorrow morning,” Marsh pointed out. “Which I’m sure he knows. In spite of that release, I’m still his father, and unless he tells us the details of the surgery, and tells us exactly what he thinks has gone wrong, Alex doesn’t go back there again.” He pushed his chair back and stood up, and though Ellen wanted to argue with him further, she knew it was useless. She would just have to do what she knew was best for Alex, and deal with Marsh after she’d done it. As Marsh left the dining room, she began clearing the dishes from the table and loading them into the dishwasher.
Marsh found Alex in his room. He was at his desk, one of Marsh’s medical texts in front of him, opened to the anatomy of the human brain, while one of the white rats poked inquisitively around among the clutter that surrounded the book.
“Anything I can help you with?”
Alex looked up. “I don’t think so.”
“Try me,” Marsh challenged. When Alex still hesitated, he picked up the rat and scratched it around its ears. The little animal wriggled with pleasure. “Mind telling me what you’re going to use to dissect this little fellow’s brain with?”
Alex’s eyes met his father’s. “How did you know?”
“I may not be a genius,” Marsh replied, “but last night you told me that considering the damage that was done to your brain, you ought to be dead. Now I find you studying the anatomy of the brain, and white rats are not exactly unheard of as subjects for dissection.”
“All right,” Alex said. “I want to see what happens to the rat if I cut as far into its brain as Dr. Torres had to cut into mine.”
“You mean you want to see if it dies,” Marsh replied. His son nodded. “Then I think we’d better go down to the Center, and I think you’d better let me help you.”
“You mean you will?” Alex asked.
“If I don’t, your rats won’t survive the first cut.”
When they came downstairs a few minutes later, Ellen glanced at them from her place at the kitchen sink, then, seeing the rat cage, smiled appreciatively. “Well, at least we agree that the house is no place for those things,” she offered, hoping to break the tension that had spoiled dinner.
“We’re taking them down to the lab,” Marsh told her. “And we may hang around awhile, if anything interesting’s going on.”
Ellen frowned. “Interesting? What could be interesting in the lab at this hour? There won’t even be anyone there.”
“Well be there,” Marsh replied. Then, while Ellen wondered what was going on, her husband and son disappeared into the patio. A moment later she heard the gate slam closed.
The fluorescent lamps over the lab table cast a shadowless light, and as Marsh prepared to inject the anesthesia into the rat’s vein, he suddenly wondered if the creature somehow knew what was about to happen. Its little eyes seemed wary, and he could feel it trembling in his hand. He glanced at Alex, who stood at the other side of the table, looking on impassively. “It won’t survive this, you know,” Marsh told his son.
“I know,” Alex replied in the emotionless voice Marsh knew he would never get used to. “Go ahead.”
Marsh slid the needle under the rat’s skin and pressed the plunger. The rat struggled for a few seconds, then gradually went limp, and Marsh began fastening it to the dissecting board. When he was done, he studied the illustration he’d found in one of the lab books, then deftly used a scalpel to cut the skin away from the rat’s skull, starting just behind the left eye and slicing neatly around to the opposite position behind the right eye, then folding the loose flap of skin forward. Then, using a tiny saw, he began removing the top of the skull itself. He worked slowly. When he was done, the rat’s brain lay exposed to the light, but its heartbeat and breathing were still unaffected.
“This probably isn’t going