Robert Sawyer: Triggers

“Stand by, everyone,” said the calm male voice of the bomb-squad leader, who was operating the robot remotely from a police truck parked on the far side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which had also been evacuated, along with the Treasury Building and the buildings on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue. “I have the bomb in sight…”

“Let’s get him into the O.R.,” said one of the doctors.

The trauma bed was on a wheeled base. Susan Dawson followed as they rolled it out of the room and down a corridor. They came to a metal door with a sign next to it that said, “Trauma Elevator—DO NOT BLOCK.” Susan made it inside with the president, Dr. Griffin, and two other physicians, and they rode up to the second floor. Dr. Snow—who wasn’t a surgeon—headed to the ICU to make arrangements for Jerrison, who would eventually be taken there if the surgery was successful.

The president was wheeled out of the elevator, down another corridor, and into an operating room. More Secret Service agents were already up here. Susan took a moment to deploy them. Rather than piling them all in front of the door to the operating room, she spread them out along the corridor; she didn’t want any unauthorized personnel getting anywhere near Jerrison. When Reagan had been shot, a dozen Secret Service agents had crammed into the O.R., but they’d gotten in the way of the surgical team and represented an unnecessary infection risk; protocol now called for only a single agent to actually go in—and she designated Darryl Hudkins, who had the most EMT training.

Susan pointed to two occupied gurneys a short distance away, one with a thin white-haired man in his sixties, the other with a plump younger woman; they were attended by a nurse. “I want them out of here.”

“They’ll be gone in a few minutes,” Griffin said. He led Susan up a steep narrow staircase to the observation gallery. As they settled in, she heard, “Rockhound is airborne” in her ear, and then, a moment later, she received a report about the discovery of a bomb at the White House. She looked down at Darryl Hudkins just as he looked up at her, his face a question. She shook her head: no point distracting the surgical team with this awful news; they needed to focus. Darryl nodded.

People in the operating room were working rapidly. The anesthesiologist was the only one sitting; she had a chair at the head of the surgical bed the president had been transferred to. A nurse was cleaning the president’s chest with antiseptic soap.

“Which one is the lead surgeon?” Susan asked.

Griffin pointed at a tall white man, who, now that the nurse had stepped aside, was applying the surgical drape over the president’s chest. The doctor’s features were mostly hidden by a face mask and head covering, although Susan thought he perhaps had a beard. “Him,” said Griffin. “Eric Redekop. A doctor of the first water. Trained at Harvard and—”

They were interrupted by the sound of a bone saw, audible even through the angled glass in front of her. The president was being cut open.

Susan watched, fascinated and appalled, as a chest spreader was used. Jerrison’s torso was a mess of blood and bone, and her stomach churned looking at it, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the spectacle. One of the doctors replaced a now-empty bag of blood with a fresh one.

Suddenly, the whole tenor of the room changed: people rushing around. Griffin stood up and leaned against the glass with splayed hands. “What’s happening?” demanded Susan.

Griffin’s voice was so low, she almost didn’t hear it. “His heart’s stopped.”

The O.R. had a built-in defibrillator, and another doctor was adjusting controls on it. With the open chest, they didn’t have to use the paddles; the doctor applied electrical stimulation directly to Jerrison’s heart. A nurse in a green smock was obscuring Susan’s view of the vital-signs monitor now, but she saw the woman shake her head.

The man administered another shock. Nothing.

Susan rose to her feet, too. Her own heart was pounding—but the president’s still wasn’t.

Something else happened—Susan didn’t know what—and various people changed positions below. The defibrillator operator tried a third time. The nurse watching the vital signs shook her head once more, and that famous phrase echoed through Susan’s mind: a heartbeat away from the presidency…

The nurse moved, and Susan could at last see the flat green line tracing across the monitor. She spoke into her wrist. “Do we know where Hovarth is?”

Griffin looked at her, his jaw falling. Connally Hovarth was chief justice of the United States.

“He’s in his chambers,” said a voice in her ear.

“Get him out to Andrews,” Susan said. “Have him ready to administer the oath as soon as Air Force Two touches down.”

Kadeem Adams desperately wanted the flashbacks to end. They came all the time: when he was out for a walk, when he was in the grocery store, when he was trying to make love to his girlfriend. Yes, Professor Singh, and Dr. Fairfax at the DCOE before him, had told him to avoid triggers—things that might set off a flashback. But anything—everything!—could provoke one. A chirping bird morphed into a baby crying. A car horn became a wailing alarm. A plate falling to the floor turned into the rat-a-tat of gunfire.

Kadeem knew better than to hope for the best. If things had worked out for him in the past, he wouldn’t have failed to get that scholarship, he wouldn’t have been working at a McDonald’s, he wouldn’t have enlisted because it was the only halfway-decent-paying job he could get, he wouldn’t have ended up on the front line in Iraq.

Still, he was grateful for Professor Singh’s attention. Kadeem had never met a Sikh before—there’d been none in the ’hood—and he hadn’t known what to expect. At first, they’d had trouble communicating; Singh’s accent was thick, and his speech was rapid-fire, at least to Kadeem’s ears. But slowly he’d gotten used to Singh’s voice, and Singh had gotten used to his, and the seemingly endless alternation of him saying “What?” and Singh saying “Pardon?” had fallen by the wayside.

“Okay, guru,” Kadeem said. He knew it amused Singh when he called him that, and Singh’s beard lifted a bit as he smiled. “Let’s do this.”

Kadeem walked over to the low-back padded chair and sat down. Next to it, on an articulated arm, was the latticework sphere. Kadeem had once quipped that it looked like the skeleton of God’s soccer ball, but he knew that wasn’t quite right. It was about two feet in diameter, and it was, as Singh had told him, an open geodesic, made up of triangles fashioned from lengths of steel tubing. Singh unclipped its two halves and opened it. The hemispheres, joined by a hinge, swung apart.

There was an open section at the south pole of the sphere. As Singh jockeyed the articulated arm to move the hemispheres closer to Kadeem’s head, that opening allowed for his neck. Singh rejoined the two halves, enclosing Kadeem’s head. There were about eight inches of clearance on all sides, and Kadeem could easily see through the open triangles. Still, it was unnerving, as if his head were now in some bizarre jail cell. He took a deep, calming breath.

Singh loomed close—like an optician adjusting glasses even Elton John wouldn’t wear. He moved the sphere on its arm a bit to the left, and a bit up, and then, apparently deciding he’d gone too far up, a bit down. And then he nodded in satisfaction and stepped away.

“All right,” Singh said. “Relax.”

“Easier said than done, guru,” replied Kadeem.

Singh’s back was to him, his turban piled high. But his voice was warm. “It will be fine, my friend. Let me just calibrate a few things, and—yes, yes, okay. Are you ready?”