The First Patient

CHAPTER 41

Astonished and bewildered by what he had discovered, Gabe stood beside the recessed doorway to Lab B-10 willing his pulse to slow and his sense of what was smart to take over.

Get back to the house… Get back and regroup!

He was alone in the brightly lit corridor of an underground laboratory that had at least one tunneling scanning microscope-the pricey, highly technical, sine qua non centerpiece of nanotechnology research. The facility, carved into the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, not far from the Shenandoah Valley, was reached from one direction through a little-used hidden entrance in the guest wing of Lily Sexton's opulent country home. There had to be one or more other entrances as well, but how far they were from this one was anybody's guess.

Go back!

Two things were all too clear at this point. The brilliant, elegant, beguiling Ms. Sexton had far more than a passing interest in nanotechnology-one of the sciences she was slated to try to place under government control should she become the country's first Secretary of Science and Technology. In addition, she quite probably had more than the passing acquaintance she claimed to have had with Dr. Jim Ferendelli.

Gabe was equidistant between the door back to Lily Sexton's house and the next doorway on the corridor, which he could see was B-9. His best approach would be to head back and, as soon as possible, check some real estate ledgers and maps involving the area. But the part of him that had always caused trouble was urging him on-at least to the next room.

This is dumb and risky, he warned himself, as he inched along the wall toward B-9.

Risky and dumb.

He felt the adrenaline rush that had long ago stopped being a significant part of his life but had led him to any number of dangerous decisions along the way. The last thing he needed, just seven hours before he was scheduled to meet Ferendelli, was to get caught down here.

He moved ahead several more feet.

The recessed B-9 doorway was identical in every respect to B-10-brushed steel and high-tech, with thick glass filling the top half. He peered into the brightly lit room, which was another deserted lab, featuring another research apparatus he recognized from his studies of nanotechnology-a scanning electron microscope. The SEM was capable of creating remarkably well-defined images of invisibly tiny nanotubes and fullerenes by bombarding them with a stream of electrons.

The brass plaque beneath the glass read simply: ELECTRON MICROSCOPY. No nameplate. Gabe speculated that Dr. K. Rawdon of the tunneling microscope lab was probably the head of this unit as well.

Distracted, Gabe was a step slower than he might have been in reacting to the voices and footsteps echoing down the hallway from someplace ahead and to the right. He held his breath and flattened himself within the recessed doorway of B-9 just as two men in security guard uniforms emerged from a corridor, chatting and laughing. They each wore sidearms.

"Did you understand a word they were saying in there?" one asked.

"No, but that's why they're eggheads and earning the big bucks and we aren't."

"I did love the stuff Dr. Rosenberg was showing, though. Real, living brains without bodies. Could you believe that? I heard he was keeping them in his lab on A Wing, but that's the first time I actually saw them."

"Yeah, I wonder what they're thinking. Maybe something like 'Gosh, it's dark in here.' "

"Yeah, and 'Hey, I can't hear a damn thing, either. Where in the hell is everybody?' "

Both men laughed roundly. If either of them had turned to his left, he would have been looking directly at Gabe, who was just thirty feet away and unable to conceal himself fully in the recessed doorway. Instead, they turned to their right, away from him, and exited Corridor B through a pair of swinging steel doors.

Gabe's desperate need for answers again began doing battle with his common sense.

The silence that followed the guards' departure was not complete. Gabe could still hear the low, machinelike hum and also some voices.

Real living brains without bodies.

Fascinating.

There was no way he could retreat now without trying to get even a little more information. His common sense had been routed. Just a little more information… Just a little more.

Hanging on pegs near the scanning electron microscope were two knee-length lab coats. Gabe tested the knob to the room and the heavy door swung open. Seconds later, he emerged wearing one of the white coats. With his boots back at the beginning of the tunnel, his dark socks protruded from beneath his jeans, looking rather foolish but at the same time making it easier to move silently up the corridor. Still, it seemed as if anyone within earshot would be able to hear his heart slamming against the inside of his chest.

Room B-8, fiefdom of a Dr. P. Wilansky, was another empty lab filled with sophisticated equipment. There was a branching corridor ahead and to the right-the hallway from which the guards had come. The low machine hum was more pronounced, as was a man's voice, loud enough now to make out some words.

"Note… brain… stained… immunofluorescence…"

Gabe inched around the corner and peered down the corridor. At the end were two more doors, identical to the others. The right one was closed and the left one open. Pressed against the wall, every muscle tensed, he moved ahead. If someone came through the doors behind him now, there would be no retreat and, in all likelihood, no meeting with Ferendelli. Still, he had to see.

"… This slide is a photo taken two months after the subjects were dosed with ten micrograms of fullerenes coated with antibodies specifically coded to hypothalamus neuroprotein. Administration in this subject was oral, but the results for intravenous and aerosolized fullerene administration were virtually the same. As you can see, there has been virtually no change in the location and concentration of immunofluorescence, even after thirty days. When these little fellows attach, they stay pretty well attached, although there is a very gradual leeching out."

Gabe thought the line about the "little fellows" and the way Rosenberg delivered it might have engendered at least a chuckle or two, but the assemblage remained stonily silent.

Five more feet.

Gabe was just a few steps from the closed door now. Through the glass he could see seven white-coated scientists-five men and two women-their backs to him, standing shoulder to shoulder at the far end of a carpeted room that was about a twenty-five-foot square-probably a conference room with the chairs removed.

Turn around and leave! Leave while you have the chance!

A slide was being projected on a screen before the small gathering. From what Gabe could see, the image was a cross section of brain, with the jade green glow of an immunofluorescent marker dye scattered over an area that apparently was the hypothalamus. At his very sharpest in neuroanatomy, which would have been a few minutes after finishing the course in med school, he could have easily identified the structures in the brain slice. Now, though, those days were long past and he would have to take Dr. Rosenberg's word.

A grainy slide with fluorescent marker was hardly the real living brains without bodies that the security guards had talked about. Gabe inched closer. At that moment, as if on cue, one of the scientists at the center of the line stepped back, turned to her left, and coughed deeply several times.

Through the opening she had created, Gabe saw three large glass cylinders, four feet high and a foot in diameter. They were filled to near the top with a translucent golden liquid-serum or some other form of nutrient, he guessed-which was being aerated by a bubbler built into the base, the source of the mechanical hum. A large number of monitoring wires snaked over the lips of each cylinder, connecting outside them with elaborate monitoring equipment, at least one of which was an EEG-an electroencephalogram-that was showing continuous brain-wave activity.

The other ends of the wires were implanted in brains-one in each cylinder, suspended by some sort of transparent Lucite frame. Each brain included not only the cerebrum and cerebellum but also the brain stem and eight inches of spinal cord.

Gosh, it's dark in here indeed!

Functioning, metabolizing brains! Living, thinking brains!

They could have been human, but Gabe's knee-jerk assessment was that if they were, they weren't the brains of fully grown humans. Before he could further assess their nature or any other aspect of the macabre setup, the woman stopped coughing and stepped back into her slot in the chorus line of white-coated scientists.

Now, go!

This time he began a slow, measured retreat back to the B corridor and out of the laboratory. There would be time to sort out what he had just seen and heard, but for now his focus had to be on getting out of the lab and back to D.C.

His attention still fixed on the conference room doorway, Gabe moved backward, checking over his shoulder with every step, anticipating the return of the security guards. Instead, the danger came from the room itself. With little more than a brief, perfunctory round of applause, the scientists turned and, without much conversation, filed out through the already open door and directly toward where he was standing, not more than twenty-five feet away.

Gabe had, at best, a few seconds to react. His instinct was simply to turn and run, but even if he made it back down the tunnel to Lily Sexton's, there was a good chance the armed security guards would catch up to him before he had gone too far. If he did manage to get away, there were bound to be repercussions when Lily learned what he had done.

Still, fleeing seemed like his only option, and he was set to do that when he flashed on his first cellmate at MCI Hagerstown, Danny James, a canny jewel thief, who had entered a mansion during a lavish party wearing a tuxedo, marched up to the master bedroom, located the family safe behind a mirror, cracked it, pocketed what jewels the hostess wasn't wearing, and then stayed for a round of hors d'oeuvres before strolling out to his car. He would have made an absolutely clean escape had he not taken the jewels from his pocket and set them on the passenger seat to admire only moments before being accidentally rear-ended by a police cruiser.

"Everyone with even half a life is always wrapped up in his own business," James said one evening after final lockdown. "The trick is to be bold and to look like you know what you're doing, so they can continue to think about their two favorite topics-themselves and their work."

The next day, dressed as a garbageman and, Gabe assumed, acting like a garbageman, James managed to ride a waste disposal truck out of the prison and into the sunset. When Gabe was released at the end of his year, to the best of his knowledge Danny James had still not been caught.

The trick is to be bold and look like you know what you're doing.

Almost instinctively, ignoring his stocking feet, Gabe stopped preparing to run. Instead, he strode forward toward the first of the group, a gangling, stooped-shouldered professor with thick glasses and an unruly thatch of pure white hair that looked like the product of an electric shock.

"You all done in there with Dr. Rosenberg?" Gabe asked cheerfully.

The man, perhaps sixty, glanced at him momentarily, mumbled something about the session taking far too long, and walked past him, followed lemminglike by the others. It was not at all clear if he or any of the rest noticed that the man threatening to intrude on their thoughts and their concerns about the run-over session was wearing no shoes and had no identification badge hanging from his neck.

It was all Gabe could do to keep from continuing his spontaneous performance by marching into the conference room to question Dr. Rosenberg about his research and whether the brains were, in fact, human. But it seemed unlikely that any of the security team would be as self-absorbed as the scientists or as accepting that anyone in a lab coat had to be one of the good guys, shoes or no shoes.

The extensive underground laboratory, devoted at least in part to nanotechnology research and to neurobiology, made no sense yet, but certainly it had to be connected to the books he had taken from Jim Ferendelli's library. For days, questions had been piling up like autumn leaves. Now, in just a few hours, there would finally be answers-provided, of course, that he could get out.

Cautiously, he made his way to Corridor B and then to the swinging door back to Lily Pad Stables. As he passed Laboratory B-10, he could see Dr. K. Rawdon hunched over the oculars of the scanning tunneling microscope. On the wall above the scientist was an ornately painted sign, in a simple black lacquer frame, which Gabe had missed on his first pass by the lab.

THINK SMALL, the sign read in lowercase letters.

THINK SMALL.