“How come,” he asked as he came abreast, “they had to search for you?”
“Left my pocketphone in my other suit,” Coburn returned briefly. “On purpose—I wanted a little peace and quiet. No luck.”
They worked north and west through the arcades and passages that connected the Union with the Science group, ignoring the moving walkways as being too slow. But when they came to the conveyor subway under Third Avenue opposite the Pottenger Medical School, they found it flooded, its machinery stalled, and were forced to detour west to the Fairfax Avenue conveyor. Coburn cursed impartially the engineers and the planning commission for the fact that spring brings torrential rains to Southern California, Chamber of Commerce or no.
They got rid of their wet clothes in the Physicians’ Room and moved on to the gowning room for surgery. An orderly helped Huxley into white trousers and cotton shoe covers, and they moved to the next room to scrub. Coburn invited Huxley to scrub also in order that he might watch the operation close up. For three minutes by the little sand glass they scrubbed away with strong green soap, then stepped through a door and were gowned and gloved by silent, efficient nurses. Huxley felt rather silly to be helped on with his clothes by a nurse who had to stand on tip-toe to get the sleeves high enough. They were ushered through the glass door into surgery III, rubber-covered hands held out, as if holding a skein of yarn.
The patient was already in place on the table, head raised up and skull clamped immobile. Someone snapped a switch and a merciless circle of blue-white lights beat down on the only portion of him that was exposed, the right side of his skull. Coburn glanced quickly around the room, Huxley following his glance—light green walls, two operating nurses, gowned, masked, and hooded into sexlessness, a “dirty” nurse, busy with something in the corner, the anesthetist, the instruments that told Coburn the state of the patient’s heart action and respiration.
A nurse held the chart for the surgeon to read. At a word from Coburn, the anesthetist uncovered the patient’s face for a moment. Lean brown face, acquiline nose, closed sunken eyes. Huxley repressed an exclamation. Coburn raised his eyebrows at Huxley.
“What’s the trouble?”
“It’s Juan Valdez!”
“Who’s he?”
“The one I was telling you about—the law student with the trick eyes.”
“Hmm—Well, his trick eyes didn’t see around enough corners this time. He’s lucky to be alive. You’ll see better, Phil, if you stand over there.”
Coburn changed to impersonal efficiency, ignored Huxley’s presence and concentrated the whole of his able intellect on the damaged flesh before him. The skull had been crushed, or punched, apparently by coming into violent contact with some hard object with moderately sharp edges. The wound lay above the right ear, and was, superficially, two inches, or more, across. It was impossible, before exploration, to tell just how much damage had been suffered by the bony structure and the grey matter behind.
Undoubtedly there was some damage to the brain itself. The wound had been cleaned up on the surface and the area around it shaved and painted. The trauma showed up as a definite hole in the cranium. It was bleeding slightly and was partly filled with a curiously nauseating conglomerate of clotted purple blood, white tissue, grey tissue, pale yellow tissue.
The surgeon’s lean slender fingers, unhuman in their pale orange coverings, moved gently, deftly in the wound, as if imbued with a separate life and intelligence of their own. Destroyed tissue, too freshly dead for the component cells to realize it, was cleared away—chipped fragments of bone, lacerated mater dura, the grey cortical tissue of the cerebrum itself.
Huxley became fascinated by the minuscule drama, lost track of time, and of the sequence of events. He remembered terse orders for assistance, “Clamp!” “Retractor!” “Sponge!” The sound of the tiny saw, a muffled whine, then the tooth-tingling grind it made in cutting through solid living bone. Gently a spatulate instrument was used to straighten out the tortured convolutions. Incredible and unreal, he watched a scalpel whittle at the door of the mind, shave the thin wall of reason.
Three times a nurse wiped sweat from the surgeon’s face.
Wax performed its function. Vitallium alloy replaced bone, dressing shut out infection. Huxley had watched uncounted operations, but felt again that almost insupportable sense of relief and triumph that comes when the surgeon turns away, and begins stripping off his gloves as he heads for the gowning room.
When Huxley joined Coburn, the surgeon had doused his mask and cap, and was feeling under his gown for cigarets. He looked entirely human again. He grinned at Huxley and inquired, “Well, how did you like it?”
“Swell. It was the first time I was able to watch that type of thing so closely. You can’t see so well from behind the glass, you know. Is he going to be all right?”
Coburn’s expression changed. “He is a friend of yours, isn’t he? That had slipped my mind for the moment. Sorry. He’ll be all right, I’m pretty sure. He’s young and strong, and he came through the operation very nicely. You can come see for yourself in a couple of days.”
“You excised quite a lot of the speech center, didn’t you? Will he be able to talk when he gets well? Isn’t he likely to have aphasia, or some other speech disorder?”
“Speech center? Why, I wasn’t even close to the speech centers.”
“Huh?”
“Put a rock in your right hand, Phil, so you’ll know it next time. You’re turned around a hundred and eighty degrees. I was working in the right cerebral lobe, not the left lobe.”
Huxley looked puzzled, spread both hands out in front of him, glanced from one to the other, then his face cleared and he laughed. “You’re right. You know, I have the damndest time with that. I never can remember which way to deal in a bridge game. But wait a minute—I had it so firmly fixed in my mind that you were on the left side in the speech centers that I am confused. What do you think the result will be on his neurophysiology?”
“Nothing—if past experience is any criterion. What I took away he’ll never miss. I was working in terra incognito, pal—No Man’s Land. If that portion of the brain that I was in has any function, the best physiologists haven’t been able to prove it.”
CHAPTER TWO
* * *
THREE BLIND MICE
BRRRINNG!
Joan Freeman reached out blindly with one hand and shut off the alarm clock, her eyes jammed shut in the vain belief that she could remain asleep if she did. Her mind wondered. Sunday. Don’t have to get up early on Sunday. Then why had she set the alarm? She remembered suddenly and rolled out of bed, warm feet on a floor cold in the morning air. Her pajamas landed on that floor as she landed in the shower, yelled, turned the shower to warm, then back to cold again.
The last item from the refrigerator had gone into a basket, and a thermos jug was filled by the time she heard the sound of a car on the hill outside, the crunch of tires on granite in the driveway. She hurriedly pulled on short boots, snapped the loops of her jodphurs under them, and looked at herself in the mirror. Not bad, she thought. Not Miss America, but she wouldn’t frighten any children.
A banging at the door was echoed by the doorbell, and a baritone voice, “Joan! Are you decent?”
“Practically. Come on in, Phil.”
Huxley, in slacks and polo shirt, was followed by another figure. He turned to him. “Joan, this is Ben Coburn, Doctor Ben Coburn. Doctor Coburn, Miss Freeman.”
“Awfully nice of you to let me come, Miss Freeman.”
“Not at all, Doctor. Phil had told me so much about you that I have been anxious to meet you.” The conventionalities flowed with the ease of all long-established tribal taboo.
“Call him Ben, Joan. It’s good for his ego.”
While Joan and Phil loaded the car Coburn looked over the young woman’s studio house. A single large room, paneled in knotty pine and dominated by a friendly fieldstone fireplace set about with untidy bookcases, gave evidence
of her personality. He had stepped through open french doors into a tiny patio, paved with mossy bricks and fitted with a barbecue pit and a little fishpond, brilliant in the morning sunlight, when he heard himself called.
“Doc! Stir your stumps! Time’s awastin’!”
He glanced again around the patio, and rejoined the others at the car. “I like your house, Miss Freeman. Why should we bother to leave Beachwood Drive when Griffith Park can’t be any pleasanter?”
“That’s easy. If you stay at home, it’s not a picnic—it’s just breakfast. My name’s Joan.”
“May I put in a request for ‘just breakfast’ here some morning—Joan?”
“Lay off o’ that mug, Joan,” advised Phil in a stage whisper. “His intentions ain’t honorable.”
Joan straightened up the remains of what had recently been a proper-sized meal. She chucked into the fire three well-picked bones to which thick sirloin steaks were no longer attached, added some discarded wrapping paper and one lonely roll. She shook the thermos jug. It gurgled slightly. “Anybody want some more grapefruit juice?” she called.
“Any more coffee?” asked Coburn, then continued to Huxley, “His special talents are gone completely?”
“Plenty,” Joan replied. “Serve yourselves.”
The Doctor filled his own cup and Huxley’s. Phil answered, “Gone entirely, I’m reasonably certain. I thought it might be hysterical shock from the operation, but I tried him under hypnosis, and the results were still negative—completely. Joan, you’re some cook. Will you adopt me?”
“You’re over twenty-one.”
“I could easily have him certified as incompetent,” volunteered Coburn.
“Single women aren’t favored for adoption.”
“Marry me, and it will be all right—we can both adopt him and you can cook for all of us.”
“Well, I won’t say that I won’t and I won’t say that I will, but I will say that it’s the best offer I’ve had today. What were you guys talking about?”
“Make him put it in writing, Joan. We were talking about Valdez.”
“Oh! You were going to run those last tests yesterday, weren’t you? How did you come out?”
“Absolutely negative insofar as his special clairvoyance was concerned. It’s gone.”
“Hmm—How about the control tests?”
“The Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Test showed exactly the same profile as before the accident, within the inherent limits of accuracy of the technique. His intelligence quotient came within the technique limit, too. Association tests didn’t show anything either. By all the accepted standards of neuropsychology he is the same individual, except in two respects; he’s minus a chunk of his cortex, and he is no longer able to see around corners. Oh, yes, and he’s annoyed at losing that ability.”
After a pause she answered, “That’s pretty conclusive, isn’t it?”
Huxley turned to Coburn. “What do you think, Ben?”
“Well, I don’t know. You are trying to get me to admit that that piece of grey matter I cut out of his head gave him the ability to see in a fashion not possible to normal sense organs and not accounted for by orthodox medical theory, aren’t you?”
“I’m not trying to make you admit anything. I’m trying to find out something.”
“Well, since you put it that way, I would say if we stipulate that all your primary data were obtained with care under properly controlled conditions—”
“They were.”
“—and that you have exercised even greater care in obtaining your negative secondary data—”
“I have. Damn it, I tried for three weeks under all conceivable conditions.”
“Then we have the inescapable conclusions, first—” He ticked them off on his fingers. “—that this subject could see without the intervention of physical sense organs; and second, that this unusual, to put it mildly, ability was in some way related to a portion of his cerebrum in the dexter lobe.”
“Bravo!” This was Joan’s contribution.
“Thanks, Ben,” acknowledged Phil. “I had reached the same conclusions, of course, but it’s very encouraging to have someone else agree with me.”
“Well, now that you are there, where are you?”
“I don’t know exactly. Let me put it this way; I got into psychology for the same reason a person joins a church—because he feels an overpowering need to understand himself and the world around him. When I was a young student, I thought modern psychology could tell me the answers, but I soon found out that the best psychologists didn’t know a damn thing about the real core of the matter. Oh, I am not disparaging the work that has been done; it was badly needed and has been very useful in its way. None of ’em know what life is, what thought is, whether free will is a reality or an illusion, or whether that last question means anything. The best of ’em admit their ignorance; the worst of them make dogmatic assertions that are obvious absurdities—for example some of the mechanistic behaviorists that think just because Pavlov could condition a dog to drool at the sound of a bell that, therefore, they knew all about how Paderewski made music!”
Joan, who had been lying quietly in the shade of the big live oaks and listening, spoke up. “Ben, you are a brain surgeon, aren’t you?”
“One of the best,” certified Phil.
“You’ve seen a lot of brains, furthermore you’ve seen ’em while they were alive, which is more than most psychologists have. What do you believe thought is? What do you think makes us tick?”
He grinned at her. “You’ve got me, kid. I don’t pretend to know. It’s not my business; I’m just a tinker.”
She sat up. “Give me a cigaret, Phil. I’ve arrived just where Phil is, but by a different road. My father wanted me to study law. I soon found out that I was more interested in the principles behind law and I changed over to the School of Philosophy. But philosophy wasn’t the answer. There really isn’t anything to philosophy. Did you ever eat that cotton candy they sell at fairs? Well, philosophy is like that—it looks as if it were really something, and it’s awfully pretty, and it tastes sweet, but when you go to bite it you can’t get your teeth into it, and when you try to swallow, there isn’t anything there. Philosophy is word-chasing, as significant as a puppy chasing its tail.
“I was about to get my Ph.D. in the School of Philosophy, when I chucked it and came to the science division and started taking courses in psychology. I thought that if I was a good little girl and patient, all would be revealed to me. Well, Phil has told us what that leads to. I began to think about studying medicine, or biology. You just gave the show away on that. Maybe it was a mistake to teach women to read and write.”
Ben laughed. “This seems to be experience meeting at the village church; I might as well make my confession. I guess most medical men start out with a desire to know all about man and what makes him tick, but it’s a big field, the final answers are elusive and there is always so much work that needs to be done right now, that we quit worrying about the final problems. I’m as interested as I ever was in knowing what life, and thought, and so forth, really are, but I have to have an attack of insomnia to find time to worry about them. Phil, are you seriously proposing to tackle such things?”
“In a way, yes. I’ve been gathering data on all sorts of phenomena that run contrary to orthodox psychological theory—all the junk that goes under the general name of meta-psychics—telepathy, clairvoyance, so-called psychic manifestations, clairaudience, levitation, yoga stuff, stigmata, anything of that sort I can find.”
“Don’t you find that most of that stuff can be explained in an ordinary fashion?”
“Quite a lot of it, sure. Then you can strain orthodox theory all out of shape and ignore the statistical laws of probability to account for most of the rest. Then by attributing anything that is left over to charlatanism, credulity, and self-hypnosis, and refuse to investigate it, you can go peacefully back to sleep.”
“Occam’s razor,” murmured Joan.
“Huh?”
“William of Occam’s Razor. It’s a name for a principle in logic; whenever two hypotheses both cover the facts, use the simpler of the two. When a conventional scientist has to strain his orthodox theories all out of shape, ’til they resemble something thought up by Rube Goldberg, to account for unorthodox phenomena, he’s ignoring the principle of Occam’s Razor. It’s simpler to draw up a new hypothesis to cover all the facts than to strain an old one that was never intended to cover the non-conforming data. But scientists are more attached to their theories than they are to their wives and families.”
“My,” said Phil admiringly, “to think that that came out from under a permanent wave.”
“If you’ll hold him, Ben, I’ll beat him with this here thermos jug.”
“I apologize. You’re absolutely right, darling. I decided to forget about theories, to treat these outcast phenomena like any ordinary data, and to see where it landed me.”
“What sort of stuff,” put in Ben, “have you dug up, Phil?”
“Quite a variety, some verified, some mere rumor, a little of it carefully checked under laboratory conditions, like Valdez. Of course, you’ve heard of all the stunts attributed to yoga. Very little of it has been duplicated in the Western Hemisphere, which counts against it; nevertheless a lot of odd stuff in India has been reported by competent, cool-minded observers—telepathy, accurate soothsaying, clairvoyance, fire walking, and so forth.”
“Why do you include fire walking in metapsychics?”
“On the chance that the mind can control the body and other material objects in some esoteric fashion.” “Hmm.”
“Is the idea any more marvelous than the fact that you can cause your hand to scratch your head? We haven’t any more idea of the actual workings of volition on matter in one case than in the other. Take the Tierra del Fuegans. They slept on the ground, naked, even in zero weather. Now the body can’t make any such adjustment in its economy. It hasn’t the machinery; any physiologist will tell you so. A naked human being caught outdoors in zero weather must exercise, or die. But the Tierra del Fuegans didn’t know about metabolic rates and such. They just slept—nice, and warm, and cozy.”