"Quantum Leap - Prelude" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

"Do you really hear me?" Al said, wonderingly.
A muscle twitched again, deep in Sam's face.
"He's coming out of the anesthesia," the nurse said, in practical fashion. Moving around to the other side of the bed, he checked the IV flow and the blinking buttons on another machine Al didn't understand, took a swab out of a box on the table and dabbed lemon-smelling gelatin over the patient's lips.
"Already?" It didn't seem possible that someone could have brain surgery and be awake only hours later.
"Well, he isn't going to be on Jeopardy for a few days," the nurse said, coming around the bed again and making a notation on the chart. "But we don't want him to go into a coma, either. Would you like to talk to his doctor?"
"Hell, yes!"
"Well, please don't let him know you've been in here, okay?"
"Yeah, sure." Al paused, studying Sam for more signs of alertness. "Who did this, by the way? I heard it was a mugging. Did they catch theЧ"
The nurse snorted with laughter. The laughter was quickly stifled when it was clear Al wasn't sharing it. "Sorry, sir. It's just that they never seem to catch muggers. Nobody knows who does this stuff. I heard he wasn't even robbed."
A definite grimace twisted across Sam's features.
"Sam?" Al whispered. "Sam, are you in there? Can you hear me, buddy?"
The nurse was looking anxiously at his watch. "Sir, I'm sorry, butЧ"
"Shaddup!" Al leaned forward, awkwardly. Sam's eyes were opening.
They couldn't have been open for more than a few seconds, and they remained unfocused and glazed with pain. But they were open. Then they closed again. But at least now they didn't look quite so permanently closed.
Al leaned back, weak with momentary relief. "Hey, I better get out of here, huh?" he said, his voice hushed. "Don't want to get you in trouble." He stepped away from the hospital bed, edging back around the visitor's chair, and paused in the doorway. "Better close those curtains," he advised. "He's not going to want a lot of light right at first." As the nurse complied, Al took a quick look at the chart, ignoring the cryptic scribbles to note the surgeon's name, carefully typed in the upper left-hand corner.
With that, he was gone, heading back down the hall to the elevators. He couldn't do anything more right now for his friend.
But he could by God find out everything there was to know about what had happened to him.
The surgeon was Dr. Robert Mikowski, a well-respected neurosurgeon who had years of experience. Al got a summary of Mikowski's qualifications from a starstruck nurseЧ"He even operated on that Nobel Prizewinner they brought in last night!"Чand got the rest of the OR team's names while he was at it.
Mikowski's office was tucked away on the third floor. Al found it by dint of much glaring and well-practiced throwing-around of rank, and caught him as he was getting ready to go home. It was very late by then, and the man was tired; so was Al, and his arm hurt besides, and he didn't give a damn.
Mikowski didn't want to go into details. Al made it clear that he wanted details. Mikowski tried to snow him under with technicalities. Al demanded English.
'There was some brain damage," Mikowski admitted finally. He slumped back in his chair and stretched hugely, settled back again, and picked up a gold pencil from the cluttered desk. His desk was piled with books and journals; he had no window. There wasn't room for a window; the parts of the wall not hidden by bookshelves and diplomas and certificates were covered by some very nice landscapes. Original art, Al was sure. "Some swelling, some bleeding. Bone penetration. But we got it under control fast, and the operation went very smoothly."
"I heard you almost lost him on the table," Al said bluntly.
Mikowski blinked, chagrined. "Where did you hear that?"
"It doesn't matter where I heard it. Is it true?" In fact, he'd grilled the scrub nurse. She was sure he was a reporter for one of the tabloids, and had given Weasel a "heads-up" call to warn him. Mikowski knew better, but recognized in his visitor the same dogged determination to find out.
Mikowski took a deep breath and kept his eyes on the pencil turning over and over between his fingers. "Admiral Calavicci, I don't normally have discussions like this, and I don't believe I'm required to answer your questions. What did or did not happen in that operating room is insignificant beside the fact that Dr. Beckett is now responding very well."
He looked up. "Believe me, Admiral, we are giving Sara Beckett the very best care there is. Nobody in this hospital wants to lose him. Not just because we don't want to see headlines saying, 'Nobel Prize Winner Dies at Our Lady of Mercy.' But because a lot of us know him personally, and we know what kind of man he is. We have doctors here who were in medical school with him."
Al raised an eyebrow. "Were you one of them? Did you know him?"
Mikowski shook his head. "No, I didn't have that privilege. I wouldn't have been the one to operate on him if I did. But I assure you I did the best job any neurosurgeon could do, and the patient's response shows that." He set the gold pencil down on the green felt desk pad and knitted his fingers loosely together. "Will that.be all?"
"You said there was brain damage. Does that mean ..." Al paused, unable to formulate the next thought in words. The image of Sam Beckett living life as a vegetable was more than he could stand.
The surgeon sighed a little. It had to be the fear every patient, every patient's friend and relative had when they spoke to a man who took knives to the brain. "We can't tell at this point," he said. "There was some swelling, yes. But it and the damaged area were in a part of the brain we call 'silent,' meaning we can't identify any particular cognitive function which it controls. In addition, the damage which was sufferedЧwe call it the 'insult'Чwas much less extensive than you may have heard. There may be no aftereffects at all. Certainly motor skills shouldn't be affected, and things like speech, that kind of thing."
"But you don't know where Sam Beckett's genius resides, do you?" Al challenged. "You don't know if he'll still be able to do the kinds of things he did before."
Mikowski pursed his lips, giving himself a more than fleeting resemblance to a ferret or other small predator. "Admiral, we don't even know what the hell genius is. Give me a break here. All I can address is how well the operation went. Yes, we did have a scare, though if you ever tell anybody I said that I'll deny it. I don't know what makes a human being a particular human being, and I don't think anybody else does either. Some of my colleagues think that we're biological organisms, period, and what we call "mind" and "soul" is just a function of the gray cells. If that's true, then there might be changes. There'd almost have to be. But if the human mind is more than the sum of the axons and neurons and proteins and all of thatЧthen you're talking to the wrong kind of doctor. I'm a mechanic, Admiral. I can guarantee you that the engine's going to keep on running, absent any more disasters. It's going to look the same. Whether it is the same, now, that's metaphysical, and if you've got any more questions in that area, the chapel's down the hall."
He set down the pencil with a snap. Al studied him a moment longer, evaluating what he'd just heard, and then got up, thanked him, and left.
Behind him, Weasel Mikowski picked up the gold pencil again and tapped it against his teeth. Maybe the chapel was where he ought to be going, too. He had some questions about that operation himself. The cell cultures now safely residing in nitrogen carriers in the Path lab were among them. Why did he take those bits of bone, anyway? Normally they were just thrown away, biowaste, detritus of human tragedy. Something else had made him preserve it. Some urge to save something of the original Sam Beckett? Zelda had teased him about cloning, butЧnot out of brain cells. He'd read somewhere, in one of the journals sliding off the top of his desk, about some progress in preserving adult brain cells, but they couldn't be coaxed to reproduce yet. Could they?
He dug out the latest Journal of Neurology and Psychophy-siology, curious suddenly, and skimmed the close type of the table of contents.
There was an article. "Some Observations on a Computer Simulation Study on the Preservation of Mature Brain Cells in Specialized Culture Media,"
By Samuel Beckett, M.D., Ph.D.
Mikowski shuddered and pushed the journal away. It was very late, and he was going to go home and go to bed.
Three days later, the Nonluddites had issued a press release about the savage attack on a man who represented the hope of the human race, who had achieved the "present pinnacle of human achievement, without whose unceasing work on technological advances the sum of human happiness would be unacceptably reduced." Al Calavicci read the edited version in the Washington Post and shook his head. Boy, was he going to give Sam all kinds of hell on this one. "The sum of human happiness"? Sam Beckett? The guy who made him swear off boilermakers?
There were other remarks too, some obviously made before the interviewee was quite sure whether Sam would make it or not. They had a distinctly elegiac tone to them.
The word triggered a flood of memory. Al sagged back against the straight-back chair in his temporary quarters and closed his eyes, surrendering to it as he rarely allowed himself to surrender.
"Elegiac." That was a word Sam had defined for him once, poking gentle fun at his engineering vocabulary. "A poem, expressing sorrow or mourning, in classical distichs, with the first line in dactylic hexameter and the second line in pentameter. From Greek, Al. Elegeiakos. Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard. C'mon, Al."
"Give me a break, Sam. If I can't fly it, what do I care?"
And Sam had laughed and listened to him talk about astronaut training. Really listened. Sam could have recited every word of the conversation verbatim a year later, if he wanted to. He had one of those photographic memories. He'd had the funniest-looking office at Project Star Bright; it had no books. None at all. And no reports, no stacks of papers.
Once Al had realized what was different, he'd asked Sam. Sam had been a little embarrassed about it. He didn't need the books and reports, he said. He'd read them. All he had to do was read something once, hear something once, and he could remember it forever.
Al had made him recite six pages of the last budget report verbatim before he'd believed. And for months after that he'd challenge him, try to catch Sam off guard. It never worked.
But one day he'd caught Sam reading a science fiction novel he was sure he'd seen him reading before. It was a collection of short stories by Heinlein.
"That's different," Sam had tried to explain. "I'm not trying to remember it. I'm discovering it again."
He'd tried to explain the storyЧsomething about bootstrapsЧbut Al was too interested in the idea that Sam could turn his memory on and off. Al had done that a time or two himself, and found it very convenient when dealing with angry ex-wives, but Sam shook his head. No. He always could remember. He was just choosing not to.
Al hoped the surgeon was very lucky. The alternative was that Mikowski was wrong about how successful the operation was, and if that was the case Mikowski would be very unlucky. And that would be a real shame, but Al Calavicci had certain ancestral standards that he could draw upon when it came to friendship, and in this case he would.