“All right. Prepare the patient. I want him in Surgery Three in half an hour.”
He went out into the corridor, a tall, quiet man with cool blue eyes and firm lips. Dr. Kenneth Morrissey was waiting for him. The younger man looked troubled.
“Surgery, Doctor?”
“Come on,” Bruno said. “We’ve got to get ready. How’s Wheeler?”
“Simple fracture of the radius, I think. I’m having plates made.”
“Turn him over to one of the other doctors,” Bruno suggested. “I need your help.” He used his key on the locked door. “Gregson’s in good shape for the experiment.”
Morrissey didn’t answer. Bruno laughed a little.
“What’s bothering you, Ken?”
“It’s the word experiment,” Morrissey said.
“Pentothal narcosynthesis was an experiment when they first tried it. So is this—empathy surrogate. If there’s a risk, I’ll be taking it, not Gregson.”
“You can’t be sure.”
They stepped into the elevator.
“I am sure,” Bruno said, with odd emphasis. “That’s been my rule all my life. I make sure. I’ve got to be sure before I undertake anything new. This experiment can’t possibly fail. I don’t run risks with patients.”
“Well—”
“Come in here.” Bruno led the way from the elevator to an examination room. “I want a final checkup. Try my blood-pressure.” He stripped off his white coat and deftly wound the pneumatic rubber around his arm.
“I’ve explained the whole situation to Gregson’s wife.” Bruno went on as Morrissey squeezed the bulb. “She’s signed the authorization papers. She knows it’s the only chance to cure Gregson. After all, Ken, the man’s been insane for seven years. Cerebral deterioration’s beginning to set in.”
“Cellular, you mean? Um‑m. I’m not worried about that. Blood-pressure okay. Heart—”
Morrissey picked up a stethoscope. After a while he nodded.
“A physician hasn’t any right to be afraid of the dark,” Bruno said.
“A physician isn’t charting unmapped territory,” Morrissey said abruptly. “You can dissect a cadaver, but you can’t do that to the psyche. As a psychiatrist you should be the first to admit that we don’t know all there is to know about the mind. Would you take a transfusion from a meningitis patient?”
Bruno chuckled. “Witchcraft, Ken—pure witchcraft! The germ theory of psychosis! Afraid I’ll catch Gregson’s insanity? I hate to disillusion you, but episodic disorders aren’t contagious.”
“Just because you can’t see a bug doesn’t mean it isn’t there,” Morrissey growled. “What about a filterable virus? A few years ago nobody could conceive of liquid life.”
“Next you’ll be going back to Elizabethan times and talking about spleen and humors.” Bruno resumed his shirt and coat. He sobered. “In a way, though, this is a transfusion. The only type of transfusion possible. I’ll admit no one knows all there is to know about psychoses. Nobody knows what makes a man think, either. But that’s where physics is beginning to meet medicine. Witchcraft and medicine isolated digitalin when they met. And scientists are beginning to know the nature of thought—an electronic pattern of energy.”
“Empirical!”
“Compare not the brain, but the mind itself, to a uranium pile,” Bruno said. “The potentialities for atomic explosion are in the mind because you can’t make a high-specialized colloid for thinking without approaching the danger level. It’s the price humans pay for being Homo sapiens. In a uranium pile you’ve got boron-steel bars as dampers, to absorb the neutrons before they can get out of control. In the mind, those dampers are purely psychic, naturally—but they’re what keep a man sane.”
“You can prove anything by symbolism,” Morrissey said sourly. “And you can’t stick bars of boron-steel in Gregson’s skull.”
“Yes, I can,” Bruno said. “In effect.”
“But those dampers are—ideas! Thoughts! You can’t—”
“What is a thought?” Bruno asked.
Morrissey grimaced and followed the Chief of Staff out.
“You can chart a thought on the encephalograph—” he said stubbornly.
“Because it’s a radiation. What causes that radiation? Energy emitted by certain electronic patterns. What causes electronic patterns? The basic physical structure of matter. What causes uranium to throw off neutrons under special conditions? Same answer. If an uranium pile starts to get out of control, you can damp it, if you move fast, with boron or cadmium.”
“If you move fast. Why use Gregson? He’s been insane for years.”
“If he’d been insane for only a week, we couldn’t prove it was the empathy surrogate that cured him. You’re just arguing to dodge the responsibility. If you don’t want to help me, I’ll get somebody else.”
“It would take weeks to train another man,” Morrissey said. “No, I’ll operate. Only—have you thought of the possible effect on your own mind?”
“Certainly,” Bruno said. “Why the devil do you suppose I’ve been running exhaustive psychological tests on myself? I’m completely oriented, I’m so normal that my mind must be full of boron dampers.” He paused at the door of his office. “Barbara’s here. I’ll meet you in Surgery.”
Morrissey’s shoulders slumped. Bruno smiled slightly and opened the door. His wife was sitting on a leather couch, idly turning the pages of a psychiatric review.
“Studying?” Bruno said. “Want a job as a nurse?”
“Hello, darling,” she said, tossing the magazine aside.
She came toward him quickly. She was small and dark and, Bruno thought academically, extremely pretty. Then his thoughts stopped being academic as he kissed her.
“What’s up?”
“You’re doing that operation tonight, aren’t you? I wanted to wish you luck.”
“How’d you know?”
“Bob,” she said, “we’ve been married long enough so I can read your mind a little. I don’t know what the operation is, but I know it’s important. So—for luck!”
She kissed him again. Then, with a smile and a nod, she slipped out and was gone. Dr. Robert Bruno sighed, not unhappily, and sat behind his desk. He used the annunciator to check the sanitarium’s routine, made certain everything was running smoothly, and clicked his tongue with satisfaction.
Now—the experiment. …
Surgery Three had some new equipment for the experiment. Bruno’s collaborator, Andrew Parsons, the atomic physicist, was there, small and untidy, with a scowling, wrinkled face that looked incongruous under the surgeon’s cap. There was to be no real surgery; trepanning wasn’t necessary, but aseptic precautions were taken as a matter of
