Going back to his list, Philips crossed off Collins. After Marino he wrote, “morgue see Werner.” Philips had a strong feeling that the diener knew what had happened to Lisa Marino’s body. After McCarthy, Philips wrote, “neurosurgical lab.”
That left Lucas. He was confident from his conversation with Travis that she was not at New York Medical Center, unless she had been admitted under an alias, but that hardly made sense, so he wrote, “night charge nurse Neuro 14 West” after her name.
Then he picked up the phone and called Admitting again. It took thirty-six rings for someone to answer. Once again the person Philips had to talk to was unavailable. Philips left his name and a request to be called back.
By that time the computer had finished its run. Philips read the report with excitement, comparing it to the old reading, and then checking the film itself. The computer not only picked up everything mentioned on the report, it even found some mild bone thickening and opacity in the frontal sinuses that had been missed on the original reading. Looking at the films, Philips had to agree with the computer. It was amazing.
He was repeating the procedure with the next film, when Helen stuck her head in the door saying in an apologetic voice that the “big boss” wanted to see him as soon as possible.
Dr. Harold Goldblatt’s office was situated at the far end of the department, in a wing of the building that stuck out into the central courtyard like a small rectangular tumor. Everyone knew when they’d entered his domain because the floor was carpeted and the walls changed to paneled mahogany. It reminded Philips of one of those downtown law firms whose letterhead had as many names as a page in the phone directory.
He knocked on the heavy wood door. Goldblatt was sitting behind his massive mahogany desk. The room had windows on three sides and the desk faced the door. There was more than a casual resemblance to the Oval Office. Goldblatt revered the trappings of power, and after a lifetime of Machiavellian maneuvering, he had become an international figure in radiology. At one time he had been good at neuroradiology; now he was an institution, and his professional knowledge was dated and therefore limited. Although Martin was privately cynical about Goldblatt’s understanding of such innovations as the CAT scanner, he still admired the man. He had been a major force in elevating radiology to its current prestigious status.
Goldblatt stood up, to shake Philips’ hand and motioned him to a chair facing the desk. Goldblatt was a vigorous sixty-four years old. He still dressed the way he had when he’d graduated from Harvard in 1939. His suit was a boxy three-piece affair with baggy, cuffed trousers, hemmed about an inch above his ankles. He wore a thin bow tie, tied by hand and therefore crooked and asymmetrical. His hair was almost white and cut in a modified crew cut, which allowed a little bit of length over the ears. He peered at Martin over the tops of wire-rimmed Ben Franklins.
“Dr. Philips,” began Goldblatt, sitting down. He put his elbows on his desk, clasping his hands together in a solid embrace. “Bringing up cadavers who are barely cold from the morgue to the department in the middle of the night is not my idea of normal practice.”
Philips agreed that it sounded preposterous, and as an explanation, not an excuse, he told Goldblatt first about the X-ray reading program that he and William Michaels had developed, and then about the abnormal density the computer program had picked up on Lisa Marino’s X ray. He told Goldblatt that he needed more films to characterize the abnormality. He said that he felt it imperative to follow up on the discovery because it could be used to launch the concept of a computer X-ray analyzer.
After Philips had spoken, Goldblatt smiled benignly, nodding, “Listening to you, Martin, makes me wonder if you know exactly what you are doing.”
“I believe I do.” Goldblatt’s comment surprised Philips, and it was difficult not to take offense.
“I don’t mean on the technical side of your endeavor. I mean with regard to the implication of your work. Frankly, I don’t think the department can support a project whose goal is to alienate the patient even further than he is already from the physician. You’re proposing a system whereby a machine replaces the radiologist.”