"The Origin Of The Species" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

When the cap of bone was off and the rough outline of the boy's brain showed under the thin dura, it looked wrong. I was afraid.

For a half a moment I stood, while a professional entertainer continued to hold the boy's sleepy attention by making shadow pictures with his hands. I stood there, and without any move that might betray my reaction to the assisting doctors, I reproached myself bitterly for spoiling the pleasure of perfect health the boy at least had had by giving him metal plates in his head where the safe, solid bone should be. Even if I closed it up immediately without going further. . . . The outline of the surface of his brain looked wrong, different, unworkable. The boy was naturally feeble-minded, I thought, and was glad that the movie cameras were not watching this operation, glad that I had decided not to use this operation on a "healthy, contented child" as an example for others of what to do. Now there would be no record of a mistake.

He had been happy the way he was. I reached for an instrument to begin closing the opening, admitting the mistake.

But then the shape of the boy's brain began to look clearer to me under the obscuring layer, the differences having a form of their own, assuming a shape I could not quite believe.

I turned from the instrument I had been reaching for, took one that would cut the dura, cut it and turned it back.

He had not been happy!

God knows what thoughts were passing through that living, functioning brain as I looked down at it. Thoughts far past any following of mine. Perhaps his thinking had withdrawn from reality in order that reality could have no influence on the body it inhabited; or perhaps he was conscious and pretending, behaving like a two-year-old infant because it was too incredibly difficult to behave just like a twelve-year-old boy. He probably understood where he was and what was happening and apparently did not care.

From the central cleft, like wings just beginning to grow, an extra pair of lobes folded back and down over the surfaceЧlobes like nothing I had ever seen before! They were alive and operatingЧI had seen their electrical pattern recorded by the electroencephalograph, had noticed the odd pattern without understanding it. The lobes were thinking. The brain was the brain of a different species, one beyond genius!

I had to decide what to do.

The tray of instruments was waiting, and on it lay the wire-edged cauterizing knives that were used to take out a tumor.

I had not hesitated long enough for the observers and students around me to wonder why I had stopped. I don't think any of them remember clearly what they saw or understand it.

I am a surgeon; my habit and training is to remove that which is causing the trouble. I must have moved rapidly (the observers complimented me afterward on the unusual speed and sureness of the operation), but to me those moments lasted forever. I can remember the horror, and the thought as I touched itЧIt knows what I am doing!

Dawn is beginning to grey the sky, and a bird has let out a few sleepy twitters and dozed off again. Animals are so happy, jack, so well-adjusted to their environment.



The boy is normal now, the way his parents wanted him to be. He is an average twelve-year-old boy, not much better nor much worse than the other boys he'll go to school with, talk with, play baseball with. He'll be all right now, but I can still see the blood and the cut nerves and the strange lobes. And I wish I could sleep.