Prototype

personal evaluation.” Mendenhall turned to Adrienne. “You’ve spent more time with him than anyone at this table. What’s your opinion?”

“If it came to a sanity hearing, Clay would walk. And I’d be the star witness in his favor.” Shaking her head. “He just wants to go home.”

“You wouldn’t say he presents a danger to himself or anyone else, then.” Dr. Ryker this time, slender and compact and possessed of extremely direct eye contact. He no doubt made a fine supervisor, she reasoned, because he could make any subordinate squirm.

“His impulse control has been reasonably stable,” she said.

“Stable.” Ryker raised an eyebrow. “Night before last he nearly staved in his own forehead.”

“I doubt there’s a person in this room who hasn’t thrashed at some point during a nightmare. If they’d had casts on both hands, the exact same thing might’ve happened.”

“Nearly two weeks ago he smashed a window and mutilated his stomach.” Ryker pressed a slim advantage as if it were a stiletto. “And a week before that, you yourself implied to Dr. Mendenhall that Clay Palmer was a menace who desperately needed attention because his violent outbursts were worsening.”

“I wasn’t pleading for his confinement. I was requesting a chance to continue treating him because he seemed to be responding well to it' — and because he fascinated the hell out of me? — “and he wanted to continue. If he no longer does… there’s no rationale for forcing it on him.” She drew a breath and raised a finger to silence an interruption, let her summarize. “Clay is emotionally disturbed, somewhat self- destructive, and he’s prone to violence when provoked. But he is not irrational or out of touch with reality or any less able to function in the world than any of millions of people on the streets right now. Can I say he won’t commit an act that’ll jeopardize his entire future? No, I’m sorry, I can’t. Neither can I guarantee that about you or anyone else. But the law doesn’t recognize the risk of future offenses as grounds for imprisonment.”

“The right judge might see it differently. This is hardly a typical case.”

A woman from the lab spoke up, a research psychologist who had been administering a trunkful of tests. “So let’s assume that a judge does. Does it make Clay any more cooperative?”

“Possibly, if what he’s doing is throwing a tantrum. Even the most unruly child gets tired of kicking and holding his breath, sooner or later.”

But this is not a child you’re discussing! She quelled an impulse to shout this into Ryker’s face. Bowed out with little to contribute as they debated and weighed options among themselves. To listen was an education in itself, a crash course in everything that was wrong with the state of modern science, the fundamental evidence being that the last consideration on their minds was that they were here because of the sufferings of a human being.

That they could do their jobs was not in doubt. But they would live and work in a peculiar vacuum of their own creation. Science was no longer the innocent, leisurely pursuit of well-bred Victorian gentlemen and aristocrats. Its two fundamental consumers were now private industry and the military, under whose influence science was no longer about discovery and understanding for their own sake, but for the perpetuation of power and profit. Bettering the human condition was, more often than not, incidental.

So, was most of this crew naturally insensitive to Clay’s pain, or were they simply victims of systemic failure?

She would give them the benefit of the doubt. They were all beholden to the checkbooks that fed them, with too desperate an interest in maintaining that support to be objective. Among them was no such thing as a generalist, and with their focus trained on the narrow parameters of practical application, little wonder they had trouble seeing a broader spectrum beyond the lab walls. Little wonder they overlooked human dimensions, even when confronted with a deviation that cut to the core of humanity.

Compared to them, her interest in Clay felt more pure than it had in weeks. She’d worried about that, wondering at times if she weren’t just one more carrion eater who simply wore a kinder face as she too picked away, at the expense of his feelings. Watching the growing volume of tapes made of their sessions, her thickening file of notes, wondering, What does it all mean, what does he mean… and where am I really going with this?

And when Ferris Mendenhall gazed long and pensively at a note slid to him by Ryker, then nodded, and politely asked if she would mind stepping from the room for a few minutes, Adrienne had no idea why.

* * *

She paced out in the hall, restless, the espresso humming through her bloodstream. Take up smoking while waiting? Why not. Adrienne understood the appeal, some mindless function to assign her hands and mouth.

Catching her reflection in a window overlooking a parking lot five floors below, and homes beyond, she scrutinized. Had she erred somewhere? Not professional enough in demeanor? Did they intend to bulldoze her right out of having any say at all regarding Clay Palmer? She was every bit as educated and degreed as most of them in there — barring an exception or two — so why did she get the feeling they looked down on her?

Because they fed from a richer trough, that’s why. They did not get bogged down in the small, middling lives of individuals whose existence never touched the world they knew of, and who died struggling against pain, alone, anonymously.

When they called her back in, she resumed her place at the table and steadied herself to hear almost anything.

Except what they actually said.

“Would you be prepared,” said Mendenhall, with drooping moustache and burnished forehead, more resembling a cattle baron than the administrator of a psychiatric ward, “to accept a temporary leave of absence to go to Denver?”

“Excuse me…?”

“This would be assuming Clay Palmer agrees to continuing his therapy with you, of course. But he appears to place a great deal of trust in you — a trust that he doesn’t grant indiscriminately.”

Ryker leaned forward, elbows on the conference table; she caught a clashing whiff of deodorant soap and cologne. “It puts you in an invaluable position to help gain more understanding of what Helverson’s syndrome is. And help him at the same time.”

She blinked. Blinked again. I wanted to know where I was going with this…?

I just got the chance to find out.

PART TWO/CORROSION

A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick

— William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Eleven

The screaming man was really beginning to get on Valentine’s nerves.

It wasn’t that the sound of pain bothered him; rather, the simple fact was that it was distracting. There were times, it seemed, when all the world conspired to keep a man