that may astound you.'
Kennedy listened abstractedly while Annaccone announced that the PET scan had been perfected so that the 10 percent risk of cardiac arrest and complete memory loss had been reduced to one tenth of 1 percent. He smiled faintly when Helen Du Pray voiced her outrage at any free citizen's being forced by law to take such a test. He had expected that of her. He smiled also when Dr. Annaccone showed his hurt feelings-Zed was too learned a man to be so thin-skinned.
He listened with less amusement when Gray, Wix and Dazzy agreed with the Vice President. He had correctly predicted that Christian Klee would not speak.
They were all watching Kennedy, waiting for him, trying to see which way he would go. He would have to convince them he was right. He began slowly. 'I know all the difficulties,' he said, 'but I am determined to make this test part of our legal system. Not totally-there is still some degree of danger, small as it is. Though Dr. Annaccone has assured me that with further research, even that will be reduced to zero. But this is a scientific test that will revolutionize our society. Never mind the difficulties, we will iron them out.'
Annaccone said quietly, 'Congress will not pass such a law.'
' We'll make them,' Kennedy said grimly. 'Other countries will use it. Other intelligence agencies will use it. We have to.' He laughed and said to Annaccone, 'I'll have to cut your budget. Your discoveries cause too much trouble, and put all the lawyers out of work. But with this test no innocent man will ever be found guilty.'
Very deliberately he rose and walked to the doors that looked out onto the Rose Garden. Then he said, 'I will show how much I believe in this. Our enemies constantly accuse me of being responsible for the atom bomb going off. They say that I could have stopped it. Euge, I want you to help Dr. Annaccone set it up for me. I want to be the first to undergo the PET scan test. Immediately. Arrange for witnessing, the legal formalities.'
He smiled at Klee. 'They will ask the question 'Are you in any way responsible for the explosion of the atom bomb. And I will answer.' He paused for a moment and then said, 'I will take the test, and so will my Attorney General. Right, Chris?'
'Sure,' Klee joked uneasily. 'But you first.'
At Walter Reed Hospital, the suite reserved for President Kennedy had a special conference room. In it were the President and his personal staff, Wix, Gray, Dazzy and Du Pray, along with Congressman Jintz and Senator Lambertino, and a panel of three qualified physicians who would monitor and verify the results of the brain-scan test. Now they listened to Dr. Annaccone as he explained the procedure.
Dr. Annaccone prepared his slides and turned on the projector. Then he began his lecture. He said, 'This test is, as some of you already know, an infallible lie-detector test, the truth assessed by measuring the levels of activity from certain chemicals in the brain. This has been done by the refinement of positron emission tomography (PET) scans. The procedure was first shown to work in a limited way at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Slides were made of human brains at work.'
A large slide showed on the huge white screen in front of them. Then another, and another. Brilliant colors appeared, lighting up the different parts of the brain as patients read, listened or spoke. Or simply just thought about the meaning of a word. Dr. Annaccone used blood and glucose to tag them with radioactive labels.
'In essence, under the PET scan,' Dr. Annaccone said, 'the brain speaks in living color. A spot in back of the brain lights up during reading. In the middle of the brain against that background of dark blue, you can see an irregular white spot appear with a tiny blotch of pink and a seepage of blue.
That appears during speech. In the front of the brain, a similar spot lights up during the thinking process. Over these images we have laid a magnetic resonance image of the brain's anatomy. The whole brain is now a magic lantern.'
Dr. Annaccone looked around the room to see if everyone was following him. Then he went on, 'You see that spot in the middle of the brain changing? When a subject lies, there is an increase in the amount of blood flowing through the brain, which then projects another image.'
Startlingly, in the center of the white spot there was now a circle of red within a larger yellow irregular field. 'The subject is lying,' Dr. Annaccone said. 'When we test the President, that red spot within the yellow is what we must look for.' Dr. Annaccone nodded to the President.
'Now we will proceed to the examining room,' he said.
Inside the lead-walled room, Francis Kennedy lay on the cold hard table.
Behind him a large long metal cylinder loomed. As Dr. Annaccone strapped the plastic mask over Kennedy's forehead and across his chin, Kennedy felt a momentary shiver of fear. He hated anything over his face. His arms were then tied down along his sides. Then he felt Dr. Annaccone slide the table into the cylinder. Inside the cylinder it was narrower than he expected. Blacker. Silent. Now he was surrounded by a ring of radioactive detection crystals.
Then Kennedy heard the echo of Dr. Annaccone's voice instructing him to look at the white cross directly in front of his eyes. The voice sounded hollow. 'You must keep your eyes on the cross,' the doctor repeated.
In a room five stories below, in the basement of the hospital, a pneumatic tube held a syringe containing radioactive oxygen, a cyclotron of tagged water.
When the order came from the scanning room above, that tube flew, a lead rocket twisting through hidden tunnels behind the walls of the hospital until it reached its target.
Dr. Annaccone opened the pneumatic tube and held the syringe in his hands. He walked over to the foot of the PET scanner and called in to Kennedy. Again the voice was hollow, an echo, when Kennedy heard, 'The injection,' and then felt the doctor reach into the dark and plunge the needle into his arm.
From the glass-enclosed room at the end of the scanner, the staff could see only the bottom of Kennedy's feet. When Dr. Annaccone joined them again, he turned on the computer high on the wall above, so that they could all watch the workings of Kennedy's brain. They watched as the tracer circulated through Kennedy's blood, emitting positrons, particles of antimatter that collided with electrons and produced explosions of gamma ray energy.
They watched as the radioactive blood rushed to Kennedy's visual cortex creating streams of gamma rays immediately picked up by the ring of radioactive detectors. All the time Kennedy kept staring at the white cross as instructed.
Then, through the microphone piped directly into the scanner, Kennedy heard the questions from Dr. Annaccone.
'What is your full name?'
'Francis Xavier Kennedy.'
'What is your occupation?'
'President of the United States.'
'Did you in any way conspire to have the atom bomb explode in New York?'
'No, I did not.'
'Did you have any knowledge that could have prevented its explosion?'
'No, I did not,' Kennedy answered. And inside the black cylinder his words seemed to fall back like the wind on his face.
Dr. Annaccone watched the computer screen above his head.
The computer showed the patterns form in the blue mass of the brain so elegantly formed in Kennedy's curving skull.
The staff watched apprehensively.
But no telltale yellow dot, no red circle appeared.
'The President is telling the truth,' Dr. Annaccone said.
Christian Klee felt his knees buckling. He knew he could not pass such a test.
CHAPTER 24
I DON'T UNDERSTAND how he passed it, Christian Klee said.
The Oracle said with contempt that barely came across because of the frailties of his age, 'So now our civilization has an infallible test, a scientific test, mind you, for determining whether a man tells the truth. And the
