Brain Child by John Saul Page A

appeared, smiling warmly at him.
    “Dr. Lonsdale? Dr. Torres will see you now.” He put the journal aside and followed the neat young woman back to Torres’s office. Nodding a greeting, Torres beckoned him to a chair near his desk. In another chair, already seated, was Frank Mallory.
    “Frank? What are you doing here?”
    “I asked him to come,” Torres replied. “There are some things I have to review with him.”
    “But Alex—”
    “He’s stable, Marsh,” Frank told him. “There haven’t been any changes in his condition for several hours. Benny’s there, and a nurse is always in the room.”
    “If we may proceed,” Torres interrupted. He turned toward a television screen on a table next to his desk. The screen displayed a high-resolution photograph of a human brain.
    “It’s not what you think it is,” Torres said. Startled, both Marsh Lonsdale and Frank Mallory glanced toward Torres.
    “I beg your pardon?” Frank asked.
    “It’s not a photograph. It’s a computer-generated graphic representation of Alexander Lonsdale’s brain.” He paused a beat; then: “Before the accident.”
    Mallory’s gaze shifted back to the screen. “Here’s what happened,” he heard Torres’s voice say. “Or, more exactly, here’s a reconstruction of what happened.” He typed some instructions into the keyboard in front of him, and suddenly the image on the monitor began to move, turning upside down. Then, at the bottom of the screen, another shape came into view. As the three of them watched, the image of the brain came into contact with the other object, and suddenly began to distort. It was, Marsh realized, just like watching a movie of someone’s head being smashed against a sharp rock.
    In slow motion, he could see the skull crack, then splinter and begin to cave in.
    Beneath the skull, brain tissue gave way, part of it crushed, part of it torn. Fragments of skull broke away, lacerating the brain further. Frank Mallory and Raymond Torres watched in silence, but Marsh was unable to stifle a groan of empathic pain. Suddenly it was over, and the brain was once again right-side-up. And then, as Torres tapped more instructions into the computer, the image changed again.
    “Christ,” Mallory whispered. “That’s not possible.”
    “What is it?” Torres demanded.
    “It’s Alex’s head,” Mallory breathed. Marsh, his faceashen, gazed at Mallory, but the other man’s eyes remained fixed on the screen. “It’s his head,” Mallory breathed. “And it looks just the way it did when they brought him into the hospital. But … how?”
    “We’ll get to that,” Torres replied. Then: “Dr. Mallory, I want you to concentrate on that image very hard. This is very important. How close is that picture to what you saw when they brought the patient in?” He held up a cautioning hand. “Don’t answer right away, please. Examine it carefully. If you need me to, I can rotate the image so you can see it from other angles. But I need to know how exact it is.”
    For two long minutes, as Marsh looked on in agonized silence, Mallory examined the image, asking Torres to turn it first in one direction, then in another. At last he nodded. “As far as I can tell, it’s perfect. If there are any flaws, I can’t see them.”
    “All right. Now, the next part should be easier for you. Don’t say anything, just watch, and if there’s anything that doesn’t look as you remember it, tell me.”
    As they watched, the image came to life once more. A forceps appeared and began removing fragments of bone from the brain. Then the forceps was gone, and a probe appeared. The probe moved, and a small bit of brain tissue tore loose. Mallory winced.
    It went on and on, in agonizing detail. For each fragment of bone that was removed from the wound, a new wound was inflicted on Alex’s brain. And then, after what seemed an aeon, it was over.
    Frank Mallory was staring at an exact image of Alex’s brain after he’d finished