Terminal Man by Michael Crichton Page B

way she was relieved—she never had to talk about medicine, or the hospital, or psychiatry. Arthur wasn’t interested in any of those things; he was interested in her as a woman. (“Not as a sex object?” Damn Dr. Ramos.)
    Then, as she got to know him better, she found herself wanting to talk about her work. And she found, with some surprise, that Arthur didn’t want to hear about it. Arthur was threatened by her work; he had problems about achievement. He was nominally a stockbroker—an easy thing for a rich man’s son to be—and he talked with authority about money, investments, interest rates, bond issues. But there was an aggressive quality in his manner, a defensiveness, as if he were substantiating himself.
    And then she realized what she should have known from the beginning, that Arthur was chiefly interested in her because she was substantial. It was—in theory—more difficult to impress her, to sweep her off her feet, than it was to impress the little actresses who hung out at Bumbles and the Candy Store. And therefore more satisfying.
    As time went on, she no longer drew pleasure from being frivolous around him, and everything becamevaguely depressing. She recognized all the signs: her work at the hospital became busier, and she had to break dates with him. When she did see him, she was bored by his flamboyance, his restless impulsiveness, his clothes, and his cars. She would look at him across the dinner table and try to discover what she had once seen. She could not find even a trace of it. Last night she had broken it off. They both knew it was coming, and—
    “You stopped talking,” Gerhard said.
    “I don’t know what to say … Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the patient. The quick brown fox jumped over the pithed frog. We are all headed for that final common pathway in the sky.” She paused. “Is that enough?”
    “A little more.”
    “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? I’m sorry I don’t remember the rest. How does the poem go?” She laughed.
    “That’s fine, we have the level now.”
    She looked up at the loudspeaker. “Will you be interfacing at the end of the series?”
    “Probably,” Gerhard said, “if it goes well. Rog is in a hurry to get him onto tranquilizers.”
    She nodded. This was the final stage in Benson’s treatment, and it had to be done before tranquilizers could be administered. Benson had been kept on sedation with phenobarbital until midnight the night before. He would be clearheaded this morning, and ready for interfacing.
    It was McPherson who had coined the term “interfacing.” McPherson liked computer terminology. An interface was the boundary between two systems. Or between a computer and an effector mechanism. InBenson’s case, it was almost a boundary between two computers—his brain and the little computer wired into his shoulder. The wires had been attached, but the switches hadn’t been thrown yet. Once they were, the feedback loop of Benson-computer-Benson would be instituted.
    McPherson saw this case as the first of many. He planned to go from organic seizures to schizophrenics to mentally retarded patients to blind patients. The charts were all there on his office wall, projecting the technology five years into the future. And he planned to use more and more sophisticated computers in the link-up. Eventually, he would get to projects like Form Q, which seemed farfetched even to Ross.
    But today the practical question was which of the forty electrodes would prevent an attack. Nobody knew that yet. It would be determined experimentally.
    During the operation, the electrodes had been located precisely, within millimeters of the target area. That was good surgical placement, but considering the density of the brain it was grossly inadequate. A nerve cell in the brain was just a micron in diameter. There were a thousand nerve cells in the space of a millimeter.
    From that standpoint, the electrodes had