Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

A thin smile. "Lap of the gods, right. Aren't you spending the money already? Everyone else is, including my wife and kids. What have we got you down for-one point two million shares."

"Yeah, just like Harry. At three cents a share, what does that come to? A whole year's worth of Big Macs."

"No, Marlene, that's not the way it works. Your strike price is set at six and a half. We're planning to offer at eight, which means that you don't make any money at all unless…" He stopped, because his vice president for special security had her eyes crossed and her fingers in her ears and was going wah-wah-wah.

"Well, I'm glad someone around here's still happy," said Osborne.

Lucy Karp was lying on her back inside a narrow metal tube full of clanging noise. In her ears were air-powered earphones, like the ones that serve out dull music to passengers in flight, and there was a similarly designed microphone in front of her mouth. Through the headset a man was speaking phrases in German and then repeating them in English. Lucy repeated the German phrases and answered the question asked. It was simplified language, the kind native speakers use with children and foreigners (What is your name? My name is Lucy. How old are you? I am seventeen. That is a table. That is a chair). Over the next few days, she would be introduced to the elements of grammar, a vocabulary of about sixteen hundred words, and a raft of idiomatic expressions. At the end of the week she expected that she would be indistinguishable, except for a certain poverty of expression, from a native speaker of that language. As she spoke the words and acquired the language and perfected her pronunciation, the magnetic-resonance-imaging machine was recording the flow of blood to different areas of her brain. Pictures of this would later be printed out in brilliant false colors and distributed to scientists around the world, who would argue interminably about what, if anything, the patterns meant.

The session ended. Lucy slid from the maw of the device and replaced the metal articles she had removed, a gold cross and several sacred medals, and a couple of enamel pinks from a junk shop, and her belt. She spent a few minutes exchanging pleasantries with the technicians in charge of the MRI machines and with Kurt the German, then went in to see Dr. Shadkin, who ran the lab and who had seduced her, with an astute combination of money and friendship, into becoming an experimental subject.

"Lucy! How did it go?" said Shadkin when Lucy rapped on the doorframe. He was rotund, bespectacled, bush-bearded, with thick, ear-length hair parted in the middle. He looked more like a medieval innkeeper than one of the world's great lights on the acquisition of language by the human brain. Lucy answered, "Squeak, squeak-a, squeak squeak."

"No kidding? Would you like a food pellet? A sip of water? Access to sexual intercourse?"

Lucy smiled. Shadkin was the only one of the scientists she had met who still treated her like a regular kid. The others all acted as if they regretted the silly ethical laws that prevented the vivisection of teenagers. No, unfair; but they did seem to look right through her, or maybe that was only, as Shadkin maintained, the general lack of social skills among scientists, especially, oddly enough, social scientists.

"Not right now, thanks. Make any great discoveries today?"

Shadkin looked sourly at his monitor, on which was an outline of a brain pieced with blotches of blue, yellow, and red. "Progress is slow, but don't tell the NSF. The variations that seem to appear in your brain are real, but they don't seem significant enough to explain what you do. And then there's this damn delay. You use the noodle and then comes the blood. What we really need are recordings at the neuronal level. You wouldn't reconsider having the top of your head sliced off?"

"Squeak-a squeak squeak!"

"Just kidding, ha-ha. Meanwhile, the linguistic geographers are pretty excited about the Indo-European project, though. Are you having fun with it?"

"It's just a job, Doc," said Lucy morosely, but seeing the look of concern that appeared on his face, added, "No, I take that back. I kind of like the idea that languages evolved, and I wonder why. Why do they always diverge and never converge? Why don't they ever improve, like everything else? Surely, by now there should be a language in which everything thinkable could be said without ambiguity."

"I thought that was French."

She laughed. "Yeah, right. Anyway, it is kind of interesting, except…" She let out a sigh. "I'm tired."

"I guess you are. Look, kiddo, you need a break, take some time off. Let the big-domes wait for their data."

"Maybe."

"Hey, I'm not kidding." He tapped the monitor with a knuckle. "See this blue smear? Excessive seriousness. You need to loosen up. Go a little crazy. I say this as your personal physician."

"Okay, Doc. I'll try, in my pathetically serious way. I shall buy a box of Cracker Jacks and, perhaps, if I feel up to it, ride the carousel."

She waved and left, before she had to absorb any more well-meaning advice. The subway was filling up. A ragged black man on crutches got on at Seventy-second Street and sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" as he shuffled through the car. Lucy put a wad of dollar bills in his cup as he went by. All the other passengers pretended not to see this, although several shot her dirty looks. She pulled out a German dictionary and memorized Bleibe through Boden for the rest of the trip to Thirty-fourth Street.

At Holy Redeemer, people were starting to gather for the fiveo'clock mass. She sat in the rearmost pew, pulled out a kneeler, and got down, but her mind was too restless for common prayer. She did not, in any case, wish to pray. In the recent past, the spirit would have come to her, unbidden, filling her with uncanny joy, and she had imagined, despite all she had read, that this would be a constant thing, like her talent with languages, but it proved not to be so. Treats for beginners, one of the saints had called it, and like the spoiled baby she was, Lucy wanted more. The notion of actually doing spiritual work dismayed her: Was God yet another struggle like math? Oh, far, far harder than quadratic equations, as she knew in her bones. The worst was that she suspected that her mother had gone through the same crisis at about the same age-there had been hints enough-and had blown a big raspberry at deep religion and had gone off on her merry way, doing exactly what she pleased, while punching her card every week in the good old thoughtless devotional Catholic way. Lucy had no intention of going that route, no intention, but intention was not, apparently, good enough. Her mind wandered, as did her gaze, and she spotted David Grale in a side chapel. He was lighting candles, five of them, and then he sank down before an image of the Virgin and appeared deep in prayer. She watched him, examining as best she could in the dim light the curl of his hair and the tender, exposed nape of his neck as he bowed his head. She discovered her mind filling up brimful with what they used to call impulse thoughts; she became disgusted with herself entirely and stalked out.

Lucy sat on the steps, hunched under her cloak in the late-afternoon chill. In her bag were scattered packs of the cigarettes she gave away, and she found some Marlboros, twitched one out, and smoked it, without much pleasure, to get back at her body via that small pollution. She watched people: old Latinas in black, people from the varied races of Asia, mostly poor, a few old white Catholics in shabby, unfashionable clothes-the small daily mass crowd, the pathetic remnants of her mother's church.

He came out and sat next to her. They sat in silence for a while, for which she was grateful. He always had this calming effect on her, stilling the boil of language in her head.