The Mind of Mr Soames (2 page)

‘Busy man.’

McCabe shrugged and made a huffing sound. ‘Seems strange to me that we should have to call in a Jap to do what we can’t do ourselves.’

‘I see your point, but Takaito is recognised as top dog in his own sphere of diagnostic psychoneurology,’ Conway pointed out.

‘Dog is the appropriate word,’ McCabe snorted. Takaito took up where Pavlov left off. Did you know he has special breeding kennels with an output of more than two thousand dogs a year for research and vivisection? That’s about six dogs a day every day including Good Friday and bank holidays. All the same, if he can do anything for this Soames character’—he jerked a thumb towards the inert body on the table—‘I’ll take my hat off to him and his honourable ancestors.’

The chances were slender enough, Conway thought. During the past thirty years some of the world’s most brilliant psychoneurologists had carefully deployed their skill and experience in futile attempts to trigger Soames’s dormant brain into conscious awareness, but had failed consistently and completely on every occasion. There was a word for his condition, in fact there were several words for it, and a few rather complex phrases. Part of the difficulty was that nobody had as yet accurately diagnosed the trouble. Soames was unique. He was perfectly normal in every respect, except that he had been born in a state of total unconsciousness and had stayed that way ever since. In some obscure fashion his brain seemed to be utterly disassociated from the rest of his nervous system so that he perceived nothing and was incapable of responding to external stimuli, even quite vicious electric shocks. True, the expected muscular spasms would occur during such tests, but that was merely involuntary motor reaction; his mind continued to remain in its blank condition of unawareness. Electroencephalograph tests revealed regular alpha and beta rhythms of considerable amplitude, characteristic of deep sleep. In the end it was tacitly agreed that for diagnostic purposes John Soames was suffering from congenital synaptic coma, which was simply a more pompous way of saying that he had been unconscious from birth.

The fact that Soames was still alive was regarded as something of a minor miracle, even among specialised medical circles. The miracle had been achieved unspectacularly by the long-term application of perceptive care over the years, with intravenous feeding coupled with physical and electrical exercise and massage to prevent muscular atrophy. For nearly fifteen years he had been kept in a refrigerated tank (refrigerated, that is, to a controlled temperature level of a few degrees above freezing point) in order to reduce the rate of metabolism to match the effete action of heart and lungs. How long the game of keeping John Soames alive could continue before his comatose body decided to surrender unconditionally was any body’s guess, but in recent years, despite his superficially excellent physical development, he had begun to show signs of deteriorating resilience during the frequent clinical tests and experiments that were carried out on him.

‘What’s Takaito’s angle?’ Conway asked.

McCabe stroked his nose thoughtfully. ‘Only Takaito himself knows that. Some kind of cortical by-pass, I gather, involving a direct nerve graft to certain lobes which he believes are isolated by a neural barrier.’

‘Mm—tricky, these nerve grafts, if not impossible.’

‘It’s been done before—Menshekin in Leningrad, and Sankey in Chicago, and some unpronounceable Chinese surgeon in Peking, if I remember rightly. But it’s certainly tricky, as you say. I wish him the best of Japanese luck.’

‘I take it he hasn’t seen Soames before—in the flesh, I mean.’

‘No, but he’s spent over a year studying stereo x-rays of his brain, and he’s worked out his own theory.’

‘This must be costing the earth,’ Conway murmured doubtfully. ‘I wonder who’s paying the fee.’

‘Strangely enough, it’s for free,’ McCabe said. ‘I gather that Takaito’s genuinely interested. No doubt a human being makes a change from dogs, especially Japanese dogs. Anyway, he’s merely breaking his journey from Tokyo to New York long enough to perform the operation.’

‘New York to Tokyo via London. That’s doing it the hard way.’

‘Why should Takaito care? The BMA are chipping in on the additional expenses involved—all in the interests of psycho-neural research.’

Conway considered for a moment. ‘Supposing Takaito achieves a break-through, and John Soames becomes conscious for the first time in his life. What then?’

McCabe grinned maliciously. ‘That’s when the fun begins, Dave. The instant he opens his eyes and begins to take an interest in the outside world he becomes the responsibility of the psychiatric department, and so far as I’m concerned you’re welcome to him.’ He paused reflectively. ‘Actually, it shouldn’t be too difficult—a spot of high-pressure education and rehabilitation and he might even become an MP.’

‘Just plain habilitation without the “re”,’ Conway pointed out. ‘Don’t forget that Soames has never lived at all yet, in effect.’

‘I can tell you the chances of success,’ McCabe said brightly. ‘One in twenty, according to Bennett.’

‘Last time it was one in fifty, so the odds are decreasing.’

‘That’s a good sign,’ McCabe remarked, with a speculative gleam in his eye. ‘You know what I’m going to do right now, Dave?’

‘Start taking bets?’

‘No. As a matter of fact I’m going to turn myself into a human being again. I’m going to have a wash and a shave and then I’ve got an interesting proposition to put to that fascinating bitch in the EEG room. I’ll be back later.’

He rubbed his bristly chin with a ruminative air and went off in a hurry, leaving Conway faintly irritated. Echoes of Morry, with the same slightly salacious, opportunist attitude of mind, but then only a Morry or a McCabe could think of Ann Henderson as a fascinating bitch. At least, he decided, they’re still on the outside looking in, and they don’t really know the girl. McCabe’s wasting his time, just as Morry did, only Morry never knew when to stop.

He dismissed the unpleasant train of thought before it got under way and moved across to the other side of the theatre. One of the nurses was removing Soames’s thick black hair with electric clippers preparatory to shaving the scalp in readiness for the inevitable trepanning. Beyond them, by the opposite wall, three men in grey overalls were erecting a scaffolding of dural tubing. This mysterious activity explained itself when the double door of the theatre swung open abruptly to admit two more men carrying equipment of decidedly electronic aspect, among which was a gadget strongly resembling a small industrial-type television camera. He remembered then something of the elaborate arrangements which had been made to secure the maximum possible professional participation in Dr Takaito’s experimental operation: closed-circuit colour television for the benefit of more than two hundred doctors and brain specialists who would be watching video monitors in the lecture hall, and 16-millimetre cine cameras making a permanent record on colour film of the Japanese specialist’s technique and procedure. In addition, it was hoped to obtain a tape-recorded running commentary on the operation by Takaito himself, detailing (even if in Japanese) the purpose of his every move.

Conway found himself wondering what John Soames would think about it all—that is, if he were able to think. To be the focal point of so much expert attention and applied genius; to find consciousness and, in effect, life itself in the centre of the medical profession’s shrewdest and most capable brains... One could hardly ask for more. To be born, as it were, at the age of thirty, surrounded by solicitous if impersonal doctors, psychoneurologists and psychiatrists, with all the parameters of one’s new and unimaginable life proscribed (and, indeed, prescribed) in accordance with the best and most authoritative scientific principles of the day. In a way it was a chance in a billion, an opportunity which no newly born baby had ever been offered in history—and that, of course, was precisely what John Soames would be, if Dr Takaito’s operation proved successful; a baby with a blank mind in an adult body, starting with a clean sheet in terms of education and environment.

Suddenly, feeling in need of a cigarette, he left the cool green and white geometry of the operating theatre, and made his way to the main entrance of the clinic and the fresher informality of the outside world. The sun was shining on the lawns and flower beds, and a fresh breeze stirred the line of plane trees near the high brick wall which screened the arterial road beyond. For north-west London the atmosphere was unusually pastoral, and the grounds surrounding the building were spacious enough to suggest open parkland. The clinic itself—or the Osborne Psychoneural Institute, to give it its full name—was a curious blend of old and new. The main administrative section was accommodated in an old dark-grey Georgian-style house, rather large and stately, but faintly anachronistic in this day and age. It was probably a converted mansion, a relic of a more affluent and gracious era. On either side, and to the rear, modern red-brick buildings with metal framed windows spread out in cross formation, containing the various wards and laboratories. The Institute possessed a vaguely somnolent air of stillness and seclusion, as if civilisation were more than a thousand miles away; only occasionally could the rumble of heavy traffic be heard beyond the high perimeter wall which sealed off suburbia.

Idly he walked round to the rear of the building, to the edge of the small lake which glistened and quivered under the trees, smoking and thinking irrelevant thoughts. About the shape of the lake itself, for instance—ovoid with indentations, like an amoeba; and the trees with their underground roots forming a sombre inverted mirror image of the soaring overhead network of branches and twigs, balanced in a symmetry never observed and rarely visualised; two faces curiously blended, one round and smooth, adorned by the almost platinum blonde hair of Penelope, and the other rather lean with intense brown eyes and hair that was dark enough to be regarded as black, the face of Ann Henderson; the sheer ingenuity of Messiter’s new matrix computer with fifteen million transistorised memory units which could stimulate human thinking and learn by experience, but could never create even a simple concept or display the quality of imagination; Penelope’s shrill drunken laugh, always mildly hysterical in tone, and Ann’s low-pitched mellow voice, invariably quiet and sincere; Patterson’s clinical experiments with a derivative of mescalin in the treatment of schizophrenia, and the detailed work of Erlich Vosch in investigating the brain chemistry of dreams. Young men, Patterson and Vosch, still in their thirties and just a little older than himself—or Soames for that matter. Strange thing about the human brain, that in one man it should exhibit incredible powers of analysis and integration in the realm of ideas, while in another it simply refused to work at all.

With a faint sense of irony he noted the trend of his thoughts, curving inwards as always from the generalised external world to the particularised orbit of the mind, with the phantom overtones of women occasionally intruding irrelevantly. The psychiatrist’s syndrome—well, some psychiatrists, anyway.

He walked slowly and pensively round the lake and returned to the administrative block. The west wing of the mansion comprised living quarters for the resident staff, with kitchen and dining-room, and it was there that he had his own small but comfortable bed-sitter. He entered the building by the rear door and made his way downstairs to the dining-room in search of coffee, which was available on request any time after ten-thirty. Already there were a dozen or more people dispersed among the circular tables making the most of morning refreshment facilities. He collected his coffee from the counter, which was arranged on serve-yourself lines, and looked around for an empty table, feeling, if anything, just a little unsociable and not really in a conversational mood. Unexpectedly he found himself looking straight at Ann Henderson at an isolated table near the window. She smiled, and with that his feeling of insularity evaporated. He went over and joined her.

Ann was odd-woman-out in the general medical establishment of the Institute, an honour she shared with Pauline Stanton of the Radiography Department, but whereas Pauline was middle-aged and thick-set and wore horn-rimmed glasses, Ann was personable and shapely, and her features, if not exactly pretty, were certainly interesting. She had smooth black hair, cut relatively short but frequently untidy, and brown eyes, and she used negligible cosmetics. A curious liaison existed between Conway and the girl; they were precisely the same age, sharing the same birth date (and, in consequence, the same sign of the zodiac and the same astrological forecasts as promulgated in the evening papers—a device which had provided a useful conversational opening gambit on past occasions). Ann was not a doctor, but she held an engineering degree in electronics, and her particular responsibility was the E.E.G. Department where she supervised the use of the electroencephalograph. McCabe’s fascinating bitch, Conway thought ironically.

‘Hello, Dave,’ she said. ‘You look tired.’

‘Night duty,’ he remarked briefly.

‘In that case you ought to be catching up with your sleep.’

‘I am, but it doesn’t show.’

‘What does show is a Soames complex,’ she observed. ‘Most of the staff seem to be suffering from it this morning.’

He shrugged. ‘Medical history in the making—or does that sound pontifical? One has a duty to be present, I suppose, if only to make obeisances and scraping and bowing noises in the direction of Dr Takaito.’

‘You sound as if you dislike Dr Takaito.’

‘My dear Ann, I love the man. It’s so kind of him to drop by on his way to New York in order to help us out on this baffling Soames case. What, I ask myself, should we have done without Japanese intervention?’

‘You sound like McCabe,’ she accused. ‘He’s got a thing about the Japs. Apparently his father died on the Burma railway during the last war.’

He regarded her with raised eyebrows. ‘You seem to know a great deal more about McCabe’s background than I do.’

‘Now I begin to understand,’ she said, smiling. ‘It’s not Takaito who’s made you feel sour.’