“She’s only thirteen, Bligh!”
“Oh, sure.” He coughed diffidently. In an ordinary conversational tone he said, “Lana, come on in.”
The trapdoor at the head of the stairs creaked and opened; Lana, with an eight-year-old in attendance, came placidly down. Bligh explained, “You see, Mr. Mundin, the Wabbits are pretty thorough. What about it, Lana—can you find a doctor to fix the kid up?”
It took a little time—while the eight-year-old aide-de-camp
ran courier duty to Crib Row. “It’s a bag named Two-Ton Tessie,” Lana explained while he was gone. “She had a special gentleman friend, a doctor. And when she got picked up and conditioned he couldn’t get along with any of the other girls. So——”
So the doctor found another doctor, a diagnostician; and the diagnostician, as a professional courtesy, found a surgeon. . . .
It took a long phone call to Coett, and quite a lot of Coett’s money.
Mundin made a disgusted noise in his throat. But they had a lead.
Don Lavin had himself a brain tumor—just’as, once upon a time, a young lady who had made a mistake could have it rectified by means of an expensive attack of appendicitis— and there would be even a skin-deep MacBurney’s incision to prove it … which would bewilder, in the case of real appendicitis attack, a subsequent surgeon.
The highly reputable diagnostician whose name had been given them described Don’s “tumor” as a spongioblastoma, the commonest and most malignant of the intracranial gliomas. He recommended immediate surgery . . . and then bought himself a new Cadillac copter with power doors, windows, ramp, and steering.
The surgeon was even more reputable—and expensive. He extirpated the spongioblastoma in his own private hospital— or at least the hospital Tissue Committee examined what he said he had removed from Don Lavin’s skull, and this indisputably was spongioblastoma multiforma, consisting of round, elongated, and piriform cells, characteristically recalling the varied cytological picture in osteogenic sarcoma of bone. The surgeon then built a new wing on his hospital. . . .
But that’s getting a litle ahead. …
Chronically suspicious, Norma scowled down at her brother, mumbling under the last of the anesthesia. She said to Mundin, “He could have left Don an idiot. What better way to cover his tracks?”
Mundin sighed. They had watched the surgery: The lights, the sterilizer, the hole saw. The wisp of scorched smell from the bone; the nerve-wrenching moment when the disk of skull
lifted out. Insertion of anode and cathode needles, minute electroshocks that smashed this pattern, blurred that memory, shattered this reflex into jangling neuronic rubble. The three days and their fifty hours of endless tests and questions, the strobe flickers in Don’s eyes, the miles of EEG tape, the mapping of Don’s brain and its workings.
Norvell Bligh, handy little man, looked in. “Doctor’s coming,” he said. And, faithful little man, resumed his post outside the door.
Dr. Niessen, F.A.C.S., asked them, “Anything yet?” ‘
On cue, Don chose that moment to open his eyes and smile at Norma. “Hello, sis. It feels better now.”
Norma burst into tears and Dr. Niessen looked mightily relieved. “Check the block?” the doctor suggested to Mundin; but Don broke in:
“The stock, you mean? That’s all right. Safe deposit box 27,993 Coshocton First National. No key. Identification is a picture of me, my fingerprints. And a code phrase: ‘Gray, my friend, is all theory and green life’s golden tree.’ Goethe,” he went on chattily. ‘Top used to say that one a lot after they put the boots to him. It cheered him up a little.”
Dr. Niessen nodded and looked at the others. Norma choked, “Have you got it all back, Don? All?”
Her brother winced. “Oy, have I! Fifty hours they worked on me. That part I don’t want to remember.”
The doctor muttered, “Barbarous. We’re all lawbreakers here, but I’m glad you came to me. Mr. Kozloft——” That was Don. “Mr. Korioff, are you able to verify my conjecture that flicker-feedback was the principal means employed?”
“Yep, I guess so. If flicker-feedback is them shining a light in your eyes and you go into convulsions. And there were those guys in the bottles.”