Terminal Man (20 page)

Because once you developed an organic computer—a computer composed of living cells, and deriving energy from oxygenated, nutrified blood—then you could transplant it into a human being. And you would have a man with two brains.

What would that be like? McPherson could hardly imagine it. There were endless problems, of course. Problems of interconnection, problems of location, speculative problems about competition between the old brain and the new transplant. But there was plenty of time to solve that before 1986. After all, in 1950 most people still laughed at the idea of going to the moon.

Form Q. It was only a vision now, but with funding it would happen. And he had been convinced that it would happen, until Benson left the hospital. That changed everything.

Ellis stuck his head in the office door. “Anybody want coffee?”

“Yes,” McPherson said. He looked over at Morris.

“No,” Morris said. He got up out of his chair. “I think I’ll replay some of Benson’s interview tapes.”

“Good idea,” McPherson said, though he did not really think so. He realized that Morris had to keep busy—had to do something, anything, just to remain active.

Morris left, Ellis left, and McPherson was alone with his multicolored charts, and his thoughts.

I
T WAS NOON WHEN
R
OSS FINISHED WITH
ANDERS
, and she was tired. The Scotch had calmed her, but it had intensified her fatigue. Toward the end she had found herself stumbling over words, losing track of her thoughts, making statements and then amending them because they were not exactly what she had intended to say. She had never felt so tired, so drugged with fatigue, in her life.

Anders, on the other hand, was maddeningly alert. He said, “Where do you suppose Benson is now? Where would he be likely to go?”

She shook her head. “It’s impossible to know. He’s
in a post-seizure state—post-ictal, we call it—and that’s not predictable.”

“You’re his psychiatrist,” Anders said. “You must know a lot about him. Isn’t there any way to predict how he’ll act?”

“No,” she said. God, she was tired. Why couldn’t he understand? “Benson is in an abnormal state. He’s nearly psychotic, he’s confused, he’s receiving stimulations frequently, he’s having seizures frequently. He could do anything.”

“If he’s confused …” Anders let his voice trail off. “What would he do if he was confused? How would he behave?”

“Look,” she said, “it’s no good working that way. He could do
anything.
”

“Okay,” Anders said. He glanced at her, and sipped his coffee.

Why couldn’t he just let it go, for Christ’s sake? His desire to psych out Benson was ludicrously unrealistic. Besides, everybody knew how this was going to turn out. Somebody would spot Benson and shoot him, and that would be the end of it. Even Benson had said—

She paused, frowning. What had he said? Something about how it would all end. What were his exact words? She tried to remember, but couldn’t. She had been too frightened to pay close attention.

“These are the impossible ones,” Anders said, getting up and walking to the window. “In another city, you might have a chance, but not in Los Angeles. Not in five hundred square miles of city. It’s bigger than New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Philadelphia put together. Did you know that?”

“No,” she said, hardly listening.

“Too many places to hide,” he said. “Too many ways to escape—too many roads, too many airports, too many marinas. If he’s smart, he’s left already. Gone to Mexico or to Canada.”

“He won’t do that,” she said.

“What will he do?”

“He’ll come back to the hospital.”

There was a pause. “I thought you couldn’t predict his behavior,” Anders said.

“It’s just a feeling,” she said, “that’s all.”

“We’d better go to the hospital,” he said.

The NPS looked like the planning room for a war. All patient visits had been canceled until Monday; no one but staff and police were admitted to the fourth floor. But for some reason, all the Development people were there, and they were running around with horrified looks on their faces, obviously worried that their grants and their jobs were in jeopardy. Phones rang constantly; reporters were calling in; McPherson was locked in his office with hospital administrators; Ellis was swearing at anyone who came within ten yards of him; Morris was off somewhere and couldn’t be found; Gerhard and Richards were trying to free some telephone lines so they could run a projection program using another computer, but all the lines were in use.

Physically, the NPS was a shambles—ashtrays heaped with cigarette butts, coffee cups crumpled on the floor, half-eaten hamburgers and tacos everywhere, jackets and uniforms thrown across the backs of chairs. And the telephones never stopped ringing: as soon as anyone hung up on a call, the phone rang again instantly.

Ross sat with Anders in her office and went over the
Miscellaneous Crime Report, checking the description of Benson. The description was computerized, but it read out fairly accurately:
male Caucasian black hair brown eyes 5’8” 140# 34 years old.
Personal oddities:
312/3 wig,
and
319/1 bandages on neck.
Thought to be armed with: 40/11
revolver.
Trademarks: 23/60
abnormal act (other)—perseveration.

Reason for crime:
23/86 suspect insane.

Ross sighed. “He doesn’t really fit your computer categories.”

“Nobody does,” Anders said. “All we can hope is that it’s accurate enough to allow somebody to identify him. We’re also circulating his picture. Several hundred photos are being run off now, and distributed around the city. That’ll help.”

“What happens now?” Ross said.

“We wait,” he said. “Unless you can think of a hiding place he’d use.”

She shook her head.

“Then we wait,” he said.

I
T WAS A BROAD, LOW-CEILINGED, WHITE-TILED
room, lit brightly by overhead fluorescent lights. Six stainless-steel tables were set out in a row, each
emptying into a sink at one end of the room. Five of the tables were empty; the body of Angela Black lay on the sixth. Two police pathologists and Morris were bent over the body as the autopsy proceeded.

Morris had seen a lot of autopsies in his day, but the autopsies he attended as a surgeon were usually different. In this one, the pathologists spent nearly half an hour examining the exterior appearance of the body and taking photographs before they made the initial incision. They paid a lot of attention to the external appearance of the stab wounds, and what they called a “stretch laceration” appearance to the wounds.

One of the pathologists explained that this means the wounds were caused by a blunt object. It didn’t cut the skin; it pulled it and caused a split in the taut portion. Then the instrument went in, but the initial split was always slightly ahead of the deeper penetration track. They also pointed out that skin hair had been forced down into the wounds in several places—further evidence of a blunt object producing the cuts.

“What kind of blunt object?” Morris had asked.

They shook their heads. “No way to know yet. We’ll have to take a look at the penetration.”

Penetration meant the depth that the weapon had entered the body. Determining penetration was difficult; skin was elastic and tended to snap back into shape; underlying tissues moved around before and after death. It was a slow business. Morris was tired. His eyes hurt. After a time, he left the autopsy room and went next door to the police lab, where the girl’s purse contents were spread out on a large table.

Three men went through it: one identifying the objects, one recording them, and the third tagging them.
Morris watched in silence. Most of the objects seemed commonplace: lipstick, compact, car keys, wallet, Kleenex, chewing gum, birth control pills, address book, ball-point pen, eye shadow, hair clip. And two packs of matches.

“Two packs of matches,” one of the cops intoned. “Both marked Airport Marina Hotel.”

Morris sighed. They were going through this so slowly, so patiently. It was no better than the autopsy. Did they really think they’d find anything this way? He found the plodding routine intolerable. Janet Ross called that the surgeon’s disease, this urge to take decisive action, the inability to wait patiently. Once in an early NPS conference where they were considering a stage-three candidate—a woman named Worley—Morris had argued strongly for taking her as a surgical candidate, even though she had several other problems. Ross had laughed; “poor impulse control,” she had said. In that moment, he could cheerfully have killed her, and his murderous feelings were not relieved when Ellis then said, in a clinical, quiet tone, that he agreed that Mrs. Worley was an inappropriate surgical candidate. Morris felt let down in the worst way, even though McPherson said that he thought the candidate had some worth, and probably should be listed as a “possible” and held for a while.