Randall Wallace: The Touch

“We’re off the hook,” the Chief of Sales said. “We look great.”

“And we make a profit,” Finance agreed and whispered, “Why didn’t we think of that?”

Sales whispered back, “Because we don’t own the company.”

A breathless, excited Malcolm appeared at the conference room door. “Lara!” he called. “You’ve got to see this!”

Lara immediately left the meeting and followed Malcolm down a long corridor of cubicles to the stairway—Malcolm hated elevators—and they headed down two flights to the lab, while Lara’s assistant Juliet called from the upper landing, “You have a financials conference in five minutes!”

“And I need your approval on the new graphics for the AMA Journal!” pleaded the copywriter who was waiting outside the boardroom. Lara and Malcolm disappeared into The Egg—the lab floor, where their new projects hatched. Malcolm struggled to contain his excitement. “For the last two years we’ve been beating the bushes looking for exceptional degrees of micro-manual dexterity to help with the Roscoe project. One of our scouts came across something at an art museum.”

“An art museum?”

“I know what you’re thinking, our scouts shouldn’t be wasting time looking at art, and I wish I could tell you it was part of our master plan to expand into unconventional areas to find unconventional talent, but the truth is, the guy was traveling around from one university hospital to another and kept being told time after time that the surgeon capable of the microscopic manipulations we’re looking for just doesn’t exist. So he took a break and walked into an art museum. And there they had an exhibition called ‘The Grandeur of the Small.’”

“He just stumbled onto it?”

“Fell face first into it.”

They stopped outside a windowed laboratory where several researchers worked. The activity inside was modern Bride of Frankenstein: high-tech instruments with an inventor’s disarray. Malcolm couldn’t explain further, he had to show her. He pushed open the airlock door and led her into a room bright with white enamel and chrome. His briefcase—Lara gave it to him on his birthday, the first year she took over the company after her father’s death—was lying on one of the lab tables. The briefcase was the company’s version of a safe; anything Malcolm put into it was not to be touched. Malcolm flipped open the brass latches and withdrew a protective box of polished chrome. He opened the box. It appeared to be empty.

Malcolm lifted a pair of tweezers, and used them to withdraw an almost invisible object and place it on the slide of a microscope station. The microscope there was capable of sweeping views of the object on the slide. Malcolm dialed in adjustments—he was both physician and engineer, as her father was—then stepped back; Lara moved to the microscope.

She looked through the eyepiece, stepped back, caught her breath, and looked again. What she saw through the eyepiece of the microscope was a sculpture of Abraham Lincoln standing instead of sitting at the Lincoln Memorial. When she stepped back again, her thoughts were racing. And Malcolm was grinning.

She wasn’t. “Exactly how small is this?” she snapped.

“It would fit inside the eye of a needle,” Malcolm answered. Still grinning.

Lara looked back into the eyepiece. To the naked eye the object Malcolm held in the cushioned tweezers was no larger than a period in pica type. In the eyepiece Lincoln was majestic, chiseled as if from granite. There was emotion on the face of the Lincoln sculpture. Even discounting the carving’s super miniaturization, it was a work of art, portraying the noble President having risen to his feet as if in outrage at the world he saw now. “And it’s handmade?” Lara marveled, not quite able to believe what she was seeing.

“Not just that,” she heard Malcolm say beside her. “It’s handmade… by a doctor.”

She backed away from the eyepiece.

“Using surgical instruments,” Malcolm added.

She dipped her head once again to the microscope’s eyepiece, to take in the magnificence of the minuscule carving. “A man capable of making this…”

“That’s right. Could do anything.”

She straightened and faced Malcolm. “What’s the catch? Why isn’t he here already?”

“We’re checking him out now. But it seems this doctor, this…” He glanced to the notes his scouts brought him. “…this Andrew Jones? He quit operating. He supervises and teaches now, but he hasn’t cut in two years. We’ll work up a profile on him. Judging from the artistry of his work, this young doctor is deeply thoughtful… sensitive… a delicate man…”

At the moment when the people at Blair Bio-Med in Chicago were trying to divine his softer qualities, the Dr. Jones in question was on a rugby field on the campus of the University of Virginia. The sky was slate gray and blended with the ground, where the previous night’s thin snow merged with the mud into a crusty sludge. Anyone out in this weather had to be crazy.

And the rugby players seemed just that, scrambling around and banging unpadded bodies in the bitter cold. From a vantage point outside the game, it looked like chaos; from inside the scrum it was, well, chaos—colliding shoulders, banging heads, swinging elbows. A kicking foot punched the ball high into the air; it tumbled through the stony sky and fell into the gnarly arms of a runner, who plunged only a few steps before his opponents dragged him to the ground and the players bunched together again in another scrum, a melee of grunting men, all bloody knees and knuckles.

The players had no real uniforms; they wore shirts of two basic colors, depending on which team they played for that day, and shorts of any color at all; mostly, that day, the dominant color was mud. None of them had particular team loyalty; when not enough players would show up on a particular day, enough guys would swap sides so they would field even numbers. They did this for fun.

They shoved each other for a few seconds, until one of them got his foot into the scrum deep enough to rake the ball back to his team’s side, and as the ball tumbled out they scattered into formation, racing down the field shoveling lateral passes from player to player. An especially burly brute caught one of these passes and was charging down the sidelines when a blur—the thoughtful, sensitive, delicate Dr. Jones—streaked into him in a bone-banging collision. Heads bashed; the ball went flying. But nobody worried about the ball because of the impending fight; with several players spread around the ground like train cars in a railroad disaster, the runner’s teammate yelled at Jones, “Hey, man, this ain’t American football!”

Jones jumped to his feet, and said, too close to his face, “It’s America, isn’t it? You think this sport is for wimps?”

“Who you callin’ wimp?!” one of the other players barked, jumping up and shoving Jones as well as two more players nearby, all of whom had come out to wear T-shirts and shorts in the icy mud for exactly this sort of thing.

“It was a clean hit!” Jones shouted, pushing back. As more players joined the melee Jones grabbed the arm of the burly guy he leveled and started to help him up when he saw the guy’s head was split open.

“Hey, Jones,” somebody said, “you’re not supposed to tackle with your face.”

“He does everything with his face!” somebody else said. “Just ask your girlfriend!” All the guys were laughing even as they were shoving.

Jones prodded the gash on the head of the guy he had hit. “Come on, let me see, let me see. Hey, bring me my bag, will ya?”

Three minutes later the muddy, bruised, bloody ruggers were clustered at the edge of the field, grimacing like six-year-old boys as they watched Jones sewing closed the gash on the guy’s forehead. “Don’t worry,” Jones said. “You’ll be pretty as ever! Scissors.”