Brain Child by John Saul

just as easily call you when I’ve come to a decision.”
    Marsh had shaken his head. “No. I have to be here. Alex is my only child. There’s … well, there’s just nowhere else for me to go.”
    Torres had risen from his chair in a manner that Marsh found almost offensively dismissive. “As I said, as you wish. But you’ll have to excuse me—I have a great deal to do this morning.”
    Marsh had stared at the man in stunned disbelief. “You’re not even interested in hearing about the case?”
    “It’s all in the records, isn’t it?” Torres had countered.
    “Alex
isn’t in the records, Dr. Torres,” Marsh had replied, his voice trembling with the effort to control his anger. Torres seemed to consider his words for a moment, but didn’t reseat himself, and when he finally replied, his voice was cool.
    “I’m a research man, Dr. Lonsdale. I’m a research man because, as I discovered long ago, I don’t have much of a bedside manner. There are those, I know, who don’t think I relate to people very well. Frankly, I don’t care. I’m interested in helping people, not in coddling them. And I don’t have to know the details of your son’s life in order to help him. I don’t care who he is, or what he’s like, or what the details of his accident were. All I care about are the details of his injuries, so that I can make a reasonable judgment about whether or not I can help him. In other words, everything I need to know about your boy should be in his records. If there is anything missing, I—or someone on my staff—will know, and do whatever has to be done to rectify the matter. If you want to spend the rest of the day here, just in case we need you, I have no objection. Frankly, I doubt we’ll need you. If we need anybody, it will be the patient’s attending physician.”
    “Frank Mallory.”
    “Whoever.” Torres shrugged disinterestedly. “But feel free to stay. We have a comfortable lounge, and you’ll certainly find plenty to read.” Suddenly he smiled. “All of it, of course, having to do with our work. One thing I insist on is that the lounge be well stocked with every article and monograph I’ve ever written.”
    Offended as he was by the man’s open pride in himself, Marsh managed to keep silent, for without Torres, he knew there was no hope for Alex at all. And by two o’clock that afternoon he’d become totally convinced that whatever Raymond Torres lacked in personal warmth, he more than made up for in professional expertise.
    The articles he’d read—and he’d read at least thirty of them, forcing himself to maintain his concentrationthrough the interminable hours—covered a wide field of interest. Torres had not only made himself an expert on the structure of the brain, but he had also become a leading theorist on the functioning of the brain as well. In dozens of articles, Torres had described cases in which he’d found methods with which to circumvent damaged areas of a brain, and utilize other, healthy areas to take over the functions of the traumatized tissue. And through it all ran one constant theme—that the mysteries of the human brain were, indeed, solvable, but that the potentialities of the brain were only just being discovered. Indeed, he’d summed it up in a few sentences that had particularly intrigued Marsh:
    The backup systems of the brain appear to me to be almost limitless. Long ago, we discovered that if a portion of the brain fails, another portion of the same brain can sometimes take over the function of the failed portion. It is almost as if each area of the brain not only knows what every other area does, but can perform that work itself if it really has to. The problem, then, seems to be one of convincing a damaged brain not to give up, and, further, of making it aware of its own problems so that it may redistribute its work load among its healthy components.
    Marsh had read and reread that article several times when the receptionist suddenly