Soulminder (4 page)

Three days later, he did.

“You have to understand,” Dr. Dian Janecki said gently, “that with this type of operation the chances of success are directly proportional to the immediate risk involved. The more of the medulloblastoma we can clean out of your son’s cerebellum, the better his long-term chances of survival. At the same time, the deeper we go and the longer we stay there, the greater the dangers of the operation itself.”

“We know that, Doctor,” Peter Coleman said impatiently, the strain of his son’s long illness etched on both his and his wife’s faces. “If you’re going to suggest more chemical treatments, don’t bother. All they do is make Danny sick, and they aren’t helping him a damn.”

Janecki nodded her agreement. “I know that. And my colleagues and I agree that we can’t put off surgery any longer.” Her eyes flicked to Sommer. “What I’m going to offer you is—well, maybe it’s an unexpected bit of hope. Dr. Sommer, if you and Dr. Sands would care to explain your proposal?”

Sommer mentally braced himself. “What we have, Mr. and Mrs. Coleman, is—maybe—a way to give Dr. Janecki that extra time she wants while still minimizing the risks of the surgery itself.”

They listened in stony silence while he explained how Soulminder could—in theory, at least—hold their son’s soul in safety while the surgeons removed the cancer and gave his body time to recover. He finished, and for a long moment both parents were silent. Sommer held his breath …

Coleman shook his head. “No,” he said firmly. “Out of the question.”

Huddled beside him, his wife threw him a startled look. “Peter—?”

“Out of the question, Angie,” he repeated, more emphatically this time. “It’s unnatural, it’s unworkable”—he threw Sommer a suspicious glare—“and I’m not sure that it’s not downright blasphemous right along with it.”

“All surgery is unnatural,” Sands pointed out calmly. “So is all medical treatment, if you want to come down to it. As for unworkable; yes, we freely admit that we can’t guarantee success. But if we don’t keep trying, we’ll never succeed.”

Coleman sent her the same glare he’d just given Sommer. “You are
not
going to experiment on my son,” he growled.

Angie’s hand tightened its grip on her husband’s. “Peter, if there’s even a
chance
it might help, why not try it?”

He looked down at her. “Why? I’ll tell you why.” He looked back at Sommer. “Tell me, Doctor, what happens if your Soulminder gizmo works but winds up damaging Danny’s soul in the process? Or what if you can’t get it back into Danny’s body afterwards? Or can’t get it out at all?”

They were, Sommer had to admit, good questions. “I don’t know,” he conceded. “Releasing the soul from the trap shouldn’t be a problem—shutting off the power will do that much. But as to the rest of it, we just don’t have any answers yet.”

“They can’t hurt Danny’s soul,” Angie said, a new trace of firmness creeping into her voice. “There’s nothing this world can do to a person that God won’t heal in the next life.”

“And what if God rejects Danny because he was part of something blasphemous?” Coleman countered. “What makes you people think you can stuff a human soul into a machine, anyway?”

“You could argue that the human body is nothing but a biomechanical machine,” Sands pointed out. “Yet
it
manages to hold onto the soul quite adequately.”

Coleman visibly clenched his teeth, shifting his eyes to Janecki. “What’s
your
opinion of this, Doctor?” he demanded. “You really believe they can do it?”

“I don’t know,” Janecki told him. “All I can say is that in my lifetime I’ve seen a lot of medical advances, some of which sounded a lot less plausible than this one. It’s your decision, of course … but in my opinion I don’t see any reason not to 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 duplicate Sands had going in their lab would be able to do so. But on the other hand, distance might not be the significant factor, and the more sophisticated computer back there might be able to feed Sands’s trap a better Mullner trace than could the portable machine humming along at Sommer’s side.

Besides which, it was probably better that Sommer be here alone. Already he could tell that it was going to be a morning filled with thoughts of David, and Sands’s presence would only be an intrusion. “Kirlian and Mullner both look strong,” he added.

“Same here,” Sands confirmed. “By the way, I noticed a few minutes ago that the trap software was doing a continual scan of the entire Mullner-trace file. Is it supposed to be doing that?”

Sommer cursed under his breath. “Not really. I put that in as a secondary system in case the primary targeting flag got confused and lost hold of its target trace. I guess it did.”

“Fixable?”

“Not now,” he sighed. “I’ll have to tear the targeting software apart and completely rebuild it. Damn—I
knew
we were going to have trouble with that.”

“Well, no harm done,” Sands assured him. “This is only here for backup anyway, remember. As long as it doesn’t latch onto one of the already departed and yank them back from heaven, that is.”

“Not funny, Jessica,” Sommer growled.

“Sorry. They started there yet?”

He peered at the scene. “Looks like they’ve just finished putting him under,” he told her.

“Good. Be sure and keep a close watch on the EEG trace—if something starts to go wrong, we’ll want as much warning as possible.”

“Sure,” he said between stiff lips. There was an odd note of anticipation in Sands’s voice, a quiet eagerness that sent an unpleasant shiver up his back. On some level, he realized, she was actually hoping Danny would die this morning.

The operation began.

For Sommer, it was an exercise in tense boredom. The camera had been positioned with convenience rather than a clinical view in mind, and it was rare when he got even a glimpse of the operating field beyond the wall of green surgical gowns. The surgeons’ voices, when he was able to hear them over the beeping of monitoring instruments, were calm and businesslike: the voices of people accustomed to holding human lives in their hands. Beside the TV monitor the bank of repeater instruments punctuated the minutes with the monotonous constancy of a steady heartbeat. The minutes stretched into an hour; into an hour and a half; into an hour and three-quarters.

And precisely an hour and fifty-two minutes into the operation, it abruptly fell apart.

“Adrian!” Sands snapped over the phone.

“I see it,” Sommer gritted, fists clenched in agonized helplessness.
If I should die before I wake
… “Looks like neurogenic shock—no blood’s getting to his tissues. The EEG … God, Jessica, they’re losing him.”

“Steady, Adrian,” she said tightly. “This is going to work. Everything reading ready?”

Sommer gave the Soulminder instruments a quick scan. “It’s all set,” he told her, stomach churning. He’d fought to hold onto some semblance of professional calm through this, but now he could feel the professionalism boiling away like an ice cube on a hot burner.

Eleven years later, he was once again watching helplessly as David died. “No,” he half whispered, half groaned.

Once again, hope and wish proved inadequate. Two minutes later, it was all over.

“Adrian!” Sands barked. “What the hell’s happening?”

“He’s dead,” Sommer said mechanically, his eyes on the flat EEG trace. “It was … it all happened so quickly.”

“Never mind that,” Sands bit out tautly. “What about the trap?”

Sommer broke his gaze from the EEG, recognizing even as he did so that he was afraid to look at the Soulminder instruments. If it hadn’t worked …

The trap registered active.

He tried twice before he could get the words out. “It’s got him,” he breathed at last. “Jessica, it worked. It’s really
got
him.”

Sands’s shuddering sigh whistled through the phone speaker. “Okay,” she said. “Good. Great. But we’re not out of the woods yet—we still have to get him back in his body—”

“Hold it,” Sommer interrupted her. On the monitor Dr. Janecki had stepped up to the camera’s microphone. “Dr. Sommer?” she called. “Should we continue with the operation?”

Bracing himself, Sommer switched on his intercom. “Yes,” he said. “The first stage seems to have worked.”

Even on the small monitor screen, he could see relief smoothing the lines around her eyes. A cautious and almost disbelieving relief. “I understand,” she said.

She turned away and began issuing instructions, and Sommer flipped off the intercom. “Dr. Janecki’s going to continue the operation,” he told Sands. “They’re getting the heart-lung machine set up—looks like they’ve got a hypo of neuropreservative, too.” He shivered at the thought. Neuropreservatives were still highly experimental, and what they did for dying brain and nerve cells was usually more than offset by the hallucinations and associated emotional trauma they inflicted.

But, of course, Danny wasn’t there to feel any of that.

“Well, she’s the doctor,” Sands grunted. “Probably knows what she’s doing. You think I should go ahead and shut down the backup trap?”

“No, leave it running,” Sommer said. “There’s no guarantee this one will keep going long enough, and if we really have Danny’s soul here I don’t want to lose it now.”

“Good point,” she agreed. “Keep an eye on the readouts, and if anything changes let me know right away.”

“You’ll be the first,” Sommer assured her, a trace of humor seeping through his fading tension. Leaning back in his chair, he took a deep breath, his eyes drifting to rest on the trap. A big, ugly conglomeration of hardware, sophisticated electronics, and software.

And now the temporary resting place for the soul of a five-year-old boy.

Or at least, he hoped that was what was there. It could, he reminded himself soberly, just as easily be nothing more than an echo of Danny’s Mullner trace, or a secondary trace made of Danny’s now-gone soul, or something else entirely.

Only time would tell. Time, and a successful attempt to return the soul to Danny’s body. Only then would they really know.

For now, all he could do was wait. And hope that Sands’s off-handed comment about pulling someone else back from heaven had been only a joke.

The operation was a success, with as much of the boy’s tumor removed as the doctors could manage.

The surgery was followed by two days of recovery. Not nearly enough, in Sommer’s opinion, given the complexity of the surgery. But it was as much as anyone was willing to allow.