"Charles L. Harness - The Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

"Oh, come, girl. Relax. Pulse and respiration normal. In fact, I think you're nearer collapse than he. This
is very interesting..." His voice trailed off in musing surmise. "Look, Anna, there's nothing to keep both of
us here. He's in no danger whatever. I've got to run along. I'm sure you can attend to him."

I know, she thought. You want me to be alone with him.

She acknowledged his suggestion with a reluctant nod of her head, and the door closed behind his
chuckle.

For some moments thereafter she studied in deep abstraction the regular rise and fall of the man's chest.

So Ruy Jacques had set another medical precedent. He'd received a local anaesthetic that should have
done nothing more than desensitize the deformed growth in his back for an hour or two. But here he lay,
in apparent coma, just as though under a general cerebral anaesthetic.
Her frown deepened.

X-ray plates had showed his dorsal growth simply as a compacted mass of cartilaginous laminated tissue
(the same as hers) penetrated here and there by neural ganglia. In deadening those ganglia she should
have accomplished nothing more than local anaesthetization of that tissue mass, in the same manner that
one anaesthetizes an arm or leg by deadening the appropriate spinal ganglion. But the actual result was
not local, but general. It was as though one had administered a mild local to the radial nerve of the
forearm to deaden pain in the hand, but had instead anaesthetized the cerebrum.

And that, of course, was utterly senseless, completely incredible, because anaesthesia works from the
higher neural centers down, not vice versa. Deadening a certain area of the parietal lobe could kill
sensation in the radial nerve and the hand, but a hypo in the radial nerve wouldn't knock out the parietal
lobe of the cerebrum, because the parietal organization was neurally superior. Analogously, anaesthetizing
Ruy Jacques' hump shouldn't have deadened his entire cerebrum, because certainly his cerebrum was to
be presumed neurally superior to that dorsal malformation.

To be presumed...

But with Ruy Jacques, presumptions wereтАФinvalid.

So that was what Bell had wanted her to discover. Like some sinister reptile of the Mesozoic, Ruy
Jacques had two neural organizations, one in his skull and one on his back, the latter being superior to,
and in some degree controlling, the one in his skull, just as the cerebral cortex in human beings and other
higher animals assists and screens the work of the less intricate cerebellum, and just as the cerebellum
governs the still more primitive medulla oblongata in the lower vertebrata, such as in frogs and fishes. In
anaesthetizing his hump, she had disrupted communications in his highest centers of consciousness, and in
anaesthetizing the higher, dorsal center she had apparently simultaneously deactivated his "normal" brain.

As full realization came, she grew aware of a curious numbness in her thighs, and of faint overtones of
mingled terror and awe in the giddy throbbing in her forehead. Slowly, she sank into the bedside chair.

For as this man was, so must she become. The day lay ahead when her pineal growths must stretch to
the point of disrupting the grey matter in her occipital lobes, and destroy her ability to read. And the time
must come, too, when her dorsal growth would inflame her whole body with its anguished writhing, as it
had done his, and try with probable equal futility to burst its bonds.