Soulminder Read Online Free PDF Page B

give it a try.”
    “So that you can go in as deep as you want?” Coleman snapped. “Is that it? So you can play with your scalpel and hope that this half-baked idea will cover any mistakes you make in there—?”
    “It doesn’t matter,” Angie spoke up, with a sudden strength in her voice that made her husband pause and look at her. “Dr. Janecki is going to try to get as much of the tumor out as she can, whether we use Soulminder or not.” She blinked tears from her eyes as she looked at her husband. “Danny’s going to be healed thoroughly,” she said quietly, “or he’s going to die. Right here, right now.”
    Coleman licked his lips, concern replacing the antagonism in his face. “You don’t mean that, Angie. Where there’s life there’s always hope.”
    “Not any more, Peter,” she said, an infinite weariness in her voice. “Not for me. Not for Danny. Can’t you see that he’s been through enough hell already?” She looked at Janecki. “He’s not going to spend the next five years of his life in and out of hospitals, Doctor, and then die anyway,” she said. “Heal him completely … or let him go on to God.”
    Janecki nodded, her own eyes a little moist. “I understand, Mrs. Coleman. I’ll do everything I can.” She glanced at Sommer. “About Dr. Sommer’s proposal, then … ?”
    Angie looked up at her husband. Coleman’s face was tight … but when he broke from her gaze and looked at Sommer there was no resistance left. Only resignation. “Go ahead, Doctor,” he said.
    Sommer nodded, a swirl of sympathetic pain and dark memory tightening his stomach and throat. “Thank you,” he said quietly. The newly reworked Soulminder’s first trial run … with a five-year-old boy as its subject.
    Unbidden, David’s face rose up accusingly before his eyes, and the ache in his stomach grew worse. A five-year-old boy , he thought morosely. God, why did it have to be a five-year-old boy ? “We’ll have to do a tracing to map the Kirlian and Mullner patterns of his soul,” he forced himself to say. “With your permission, I’ll go ahead and set up for that right away.” He got to his feet, wondering how he was ever going to face the boy in there—
    “I’ll handle that,” Sands put in smoothly, standing up beside him. “You can go with Dr. Janecki and start setting up the equipment in the operating room. Mr. and Mrs. Coleman, perhaps you’d like to come and watch me—the procedure’s completely painless, but I imagine Danny would like your reassurance of that.”
    They nodded. Getting silently to their feet, they followed Sands from the lounge.
    “I hope, Doctor,” Janecki commented into the silence, “that you’re right about all this.”
    Sommer took a deep breath. “I do, too. I know what they’re going through, Dr. Janecki. I lost a son myself eleven years ago.”
    “I’m sorry,” Janecki said, her eyes locking onto his. “What I meant was that I hope you’re right about Soulminder not doing any … damage.”
    Sommer felt his stomach tighten. “I hope so, too,” he said quietly.
    The boy’s face was painfully thin, a thinness that his shaved head and the size of the operating table beneath him only served to emphasize. Watching the small monitor screen as they prepared him, Sommer felt a fresh ache in his heart. Danny was so young … just as David had been. If I should die before I wake …
    “Adrian?” Sands’s voice came from the speakerphone beside him. “Things underway there yet?”
    With an effort, Sommer forced the memories back. “They’re just getting ready to start,” he told her. “You getting everything all right?”
    “Coming in clear and clean,” she assured him. “The trap here is set and running.”
    “Same here,” Sommer said, wondering if this particular elaboration had really been necessary. If the trap set up beneath the operating table failed to catch Danny’s soul, after all, there was virtually no chance that the backup