Terminal Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

others. His seizures have already gotten him into trouble with the law, and his seizures are getting worse. The operation will prevent seizures, and we think that is an important benefit to the patient.”
    High up, Manon gave a little shrug. Janet Ross knew the gesture; it signaled irreconcilable differences, an impasse.
    “Well, then,” Ellis said, “are there other questions?”
    There were no other questions.

3
    “J ESUS FUCKING C HRIST ,” E LLIS SAID, WIPING his forehead. “He didn’t let up, did he?”
    Janet Ross walked with him across the parking lot toward the Langer research building. It was late afternoon; the sunlight was yellowing, turning pale and weak.
    “His point was valid,” she said mildly.
    Ellis sighed. “I keep forgetting you’re on his side.”
    “Why do you keep forgetting?” she asked. She smiled as she said it. As the psychiatrist on the NPS staff, she’d opposed Benson’s operation from the beginning.
    “Look,” Ellis said. “We do what we can. It’d be great to cure him, but we can’t do that. We can only help him to a partial cure. So we’ll do that. We’ll help him. It’s not a perfect world.”
    She walked alongside him in silence. There was nothing to say. She had told Ellis her opinion many times before. The operation might not help—it might, in fact, make Benson much worse. She was sure Ellis understood that possibility, but he was stubbornly ignoring it. Or so it seemed to her.
    Actually, she liked Ellis, as much as she liked anysurgeon. She regarded surgeons as flagrantly action-oriented men (they were almost always men, which she found significant) desperate to do something, to take some physical action. In that sense, Ellis was better than most of them. He had wisely turned down several stage-three candidates before Benson, and she knew that was difficult for him to do, because he was terribly eager to perform the new operation.
    “I hate all this,” Ellis said. “Hospital politics.”
    “But you want to do Benson.…”
    “I’m ready,” Ellis said. “We’re all ready. We have to take that first big step, and now is the time to take it.” He glanced at her. “Why do you look so uncertain?”
    “Because I am,” she said.
    They came to the Langer building. Ellis went off to an early dinner with McPherson—a political dinner, he said irritably—and she took the elevator to the fourth floor.
    After ten years of steady expansion, the Neuropsychiatric Research Unit encompassed the entire fourth floor of the Langer research building. The other floors were painted a dead, cold white, but the NPS was bright with primary colors. The intention was to make patients feel optimistic and happy, but it always had the reverse effect on Ross. She found it falsely and artificially cheerful, like a nursery school for retarded children.
    She got off the elevator and looked at the reception area, one wall a bright blue, the other red. Like almost everything else about the NPS, the colors had been McPherson’s idea. It was strange, she thought, how much an organization reflected the personality of itsleader. McPherson himself always seemed to have a bright kindergarten quality about him, and a boundless optimism.
    Certainly you had to be optimistic if you planned to operate on Harry Benson.
    The Unit was quiet now, most of the staff gone home for the night. She walked down the corridor past the colored doors with the stenciled labels: SONOENCEPHALOGRAPHY, CORTICAL FUNCTION, EEG, RAS SCORING, PARIETAL T , and, at the far end of the hall, TELECOMP . The work done behind those doors was as complex as the labels—and this was just the patient-care wing, what McPherson called “Applications.”
    Applications was ordinary compared to Development, the research wing with its chemitrodes and compsims and elad scenarios. To say nothing of the big projects, like George and Martha, or Form Q. Development was ten years ahead of Applications—and Applications was very, very