Damon Knight: Orbit 17

Sam was slipping back into basic reverie. Hey, Eureka! he thought, scientific experiments are fetishes! little rg is reified and deified! Anders simply made himself an idol, he plain invented the whole idea, and aside from verbalization and calligraphy, there is no such thing as the fractional-fucking-anticipatory-goalresponse! But Dr. Anders can take the concept and stroke it, polish it, fondle it, tighten it up, plane it, use pumice, sanding sealer, intellective varnish, wax, safecracker finger-pads on the beautiful flow of variables—wow! what spurious shit! And, as a neurophysiologist, I am concerned with the waking brain. My measurement indices are neurons and neuronal systems. Oh, Descartes, where is the antidote to thy sting? you have deified the pineal and made the body-temple an automaton of hydraulic channels! And Newton, so early in seeing macrocosm and microcosm, how could you propose that neuronal transmissions were accomplished through cosmic aethers!

The flow of people grew quite secondary to Leighton’s thoughts. I am a doctor, he subvocalized—what a magical pronouncement! I am a scientist, a Ph.D., scholar, academician, perhaps a dry pedant, perhaps a sifter of convoluted flecks of nit! I am humanoid: skin, fat, muscles, bone, organs, tissue, molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, neutrinos—I am infinitely regressive. Galaxies whirl in my viscera, and I may be whirling in a galaxy in somebody else’s viscera. And, at the very bottom of the regress, Leighton thought, smiling reflexively at a favorite student, is ionization: specific neurochemical (facilitatory or inhibitory) transmitter substances. But, he thought, this is just jargon. For all I know, there may be dominoes falling against each other in there—

“Is there anything wrong, Sam?” Brenda asked. She had been his secretary for ten years, called him Dr. Leighton at the right times, and knew him better than his wife did. Sam closed the door absentmindedly, and realized that he had not sought routine eye contact with Brenda. “No, baby,” he said, then looked around the room, realizing he should be more careful what he called her. They had had liaisons over the years, but knew their lives were too canalized to justify marrying each other.

“You’ve got something on your mind,” she said.

“Just some ruminating. I want to go make some notes on it before it slips my mind.”

“Dean Guglielmo called.”

“What did he want?”

“Sounded testy, he—”

“That’s the Corsican in him.”

“He’s calling a meeting of some sort, but he said he’d pop by to see you.”

Sam walked into his office and sat down. He could rarely sit in the rich black leather chair without remembering Brenda standing there so many years ago, bending to kiss his cheek tentatively, then sliding onto his lap, an exquisite blend of flower and panther. Half his age, she had fulfilled his incest tropisms, as he had hers. It was natural enough to think about sex, but frontal lobe cathexis on it was the quickest way to bring on detumescence. Sex is surely hydraulic, Leighton thought, and began to write.

I am a scientist, he wrote slowly, am I therefore mechanistic in my devotion? Are my own thoughts and feelings amenable to the energy concept? Matter is primary, primary, primary—come quickly, ghost of Pavlov, show me how to objectify mental processes. Lower your cortical mantle on my bowed head, and I will rise, neuronally knighted and anointed, to mediate new and raging hypothalamic amperages, and to relate as a supreme diplomat to all men. If the pineal is an energy cell, Descartes, then issue me one with high kilovolt-ampere rating, a surging nuclear powerpak homology—then, what the hell, Sam thought, nearly every concept in neurophysiology has been revised in the last decade—or have we simply invented new verbal models, new jargonese, new bows and wows? How many years did I preach the “all or nothing” principle of neuronal excitation before graded responses were discovered? I was dispensing erroneous information. How many of my students have committed professional blunders because of this—ha, that’s the enigma, the kicker, almost a sad joke, because it doesn’t matter anyway. Life seems to be idiot-proof. Remission rates hover around chance levels no matter what. Neuron membranes are not uniform throughout— how the hell could a limenal stimulus set off a full-sized action? You don’t light a segmented fuse and get steady combustion. If I were a jellyfish I’d need all-or-nothing systems, but I am a man, I am a scientist, and I am graded, gradated, infinitely plastic, and, damn it all, I’m beginning to stew and fret in my own circular pondering again—

“Brenda,” Sam spoke into the phone.

“Yessir.”

“Who’s out there?”

“Dean Guglielmo is here.”

“Send him right in.”

“He’s on his way,” Brenda said in a tight whisper.

Dr. Victor Guglielmo was about fifty years old, short, dark, ethnically stereotyped. With any caprice of time-warp, he might have remained in Corsica, married a lovely dark beauty, and watched her body-weight double in five years. Instead, he had come to the big city, where his father became a nationally known piano builder and voicer. Young Vic was all but coerced through med school. He tried pediatrics for a while, but found that he had a disquietingly active dislike for children. He took psychiatry boards, and discovered that he didn’t like adults much better. He began to gravitate toward administration, showed some good abilities in this fuzzy area, and had developed a reputation as a fiscal planning wizard.

“We’ve got to do some belt tightening, Sam,” he said, sitting heavily in a chair. He crossed his legs and looked steadily at Leighton.

“Any big crises?” Sam asked, not in the least certain why Guglielmo was here.

“We’ve had a forty-two percent cost overrun on the new patient wing—keep this under your hat—I’m afraid to leak it, the young lion administrators want my job bad enough to nail me to any wall. All departments are going to have to generate more fees. I want you and your staff to start doing neurologicals.”

“You can’t mean routine neurological exams—on patients?” “I’m afraid I do.”

“But I’m not a physician, Vic.”

“Neither are most of the people who do neurologicals. Most of ours are done by senior students, interns, residents; it’s pretty tame stuff.” Guglielmo looked uneasy, but held onto a controlled gruffness. Sam felt vulnerable, and could feel autonomic mechanisms seeping endocrine fires in his viscera.

“This is bound to get out, Vic. I’m a teacher, a scientist, not a practitioner. And you know I can’t sign insurance forms for medical services.”

“Just sign M.D. instead of Ph.D.”

“I hope I’m hearing you wrong, Vic. What you’re asking is impossible.”

“Sam, if I didn’t have a hundred-thousand-dollar home, four cars, a boat, three kids in college, and a wife who spends money like it was water—and if I could scrape up a few thousand cash, I think I’d blast off for South America.”

“Things are that bad?”

“The bank is barely holding on. We’re into them for something like eight million. It’s a good thing the president of the bank is also chairman of our board of regents.”

“But we’ve got a five-hundred-bed hospital here, man. That much room and board alone must bring in a hundred thousand every day. How could we possibly be in fiscal troubles?”

“Too much money on the books, not enough cash flow, mountains of paperwork required to collect small insurance fees, the goddamn forty-two percent overrun—”

“My ethical senses tell me medicine may not be practiced as an entrepreneurial venture. You sound like we’re running some kind of business here.”