"The actual operation."

"Yes."

"Tell me about that."

"We identify the dead portions of the brain and remove them cryosurgically. It's rather like a dentist drilling out a cavity, cutting away damaged material until he hits a sound part of the tooth."

Mr. Salvador winced exquisitely.

"When we do this on baboons, we do it in a specially con­structed operating room here that is not sterile. It is not even minimally fit for humans. So in order to do this operation on a human, it would be necessary to build a specially designed operating theater from scratch. The operating room would prob­ably cost more than this entire building in which we are sitting."

This last statement was intended to scare Mr. Salvador off, but it seemed only to bore him. "Have you ever got to the point of drawing up plans and specifications for such a facility?"

"Yes, in a speculative way." Anyone who knew the first thing about grantsmanship always had that kind of thing lying around, to demonstrate the need for far greater amounts of money.

"May I take a copy with me?"

"The plans are on disk. You'll need a fairly powerful Calyx system just to open them up."

"Is that some sort of computer thing? Calyx?"

"Yes. A parallel operating system."

"It is something that one could buy?"

"Yes, of course."

"Who makes it?"

"It's an open system. So there are many such machines on the market - mostly aimed at engineers and scientists."

"Who makes the best sort of Calyx machine?"

"Well, it was invented by Kevin Tice, of course."

Mr. Salvador smiled. "Ah, yes. Mr. Tice. Pacific Netware. Marin Country. Superb. I shall see if Mr. Tice can supply us with a nice machine that will run his Calyx operating system."

Dr. Radhakrishnan assumed that Mr. Salvador was employing a bit of synecdoche here. But he was not entirely sure. "If you do get access to a Calyx machine, with the proper CAD/CAM software, these disks will run on it."

"Then I would be delighted to take a disk with me, with your permission," Mr. Salvador said. Without further discussing that issue of permission, he continued, "Now, what happens after the operation?"

"Once the implantation had been performed, if the patient did not die in the process, there would be a period of a few weeks in which we would keep him on antirejection meds and monitor him closely in order to make sure that his body did not reject the implant. Assuming it worked, he would then have to be retrained. The patient tries to move the paralyzed part of his body. If the movement is correct, then we instruct the chip to remember the pathway taken by the signals from the brain into the nerve. If it is incorrect, we instruct the chip to block that path. Gradually, the good paths get reinforced and the bad ones get blocked."

"How do you instruct the chip? How do you give it feed-back, as it were, once it is implanted inside the patient's head?"

"It includes a miniaturized radio receiver. We have a transmitter that simply broadcasts the instructions directly into the patient's skull."

"Fascinating. Utterly fascinating," Mr. Salvador said, sincerely enough. "And what is the range of this transmission?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Well, how far away from the transmitter can the patient be?"

Dr. Radhakrishnan smiled the same smile he had used with Jackman. "You misconstrue me," he said. "We do not use radio transmission because we need to talk to the patient's biochip from a distance. We use it because this enables us to communicate with the biochip without using an actual wire through the skull into the brain.

"I see, of course," Mr. Salvador said dismissively. "But radio is radio, isn't it?"

Dr. Radhakrishnan smiled and nodded. He could not find any way to disagree with the statement "radio is radio."

Aaron Green faked it for a whole week, throwing his IMIPREM into the trunk of his rented Dynasty every day and hawking his wares up and down the length of Wilshire Boulevard. Then he got up one morning, rummaged through his briefcase, emptied out the pocket where he stuffed people's business cards, and pulled one out. Plain black ink on white paper: CY OGLE -President - Ogle Data Research, Inc.

Ogle was the guy. The man who had taken one quick look at his IMIPREM, in the least auspicious circumstances, and recognized its value. A guy as smart as Ogle didn't need any sales pitch. No fancy presentations.

Aaron had known ever since their conversation on the plane that he would eventually make this phone call. But he had forced himself to stick to the original plan for a week anyway.

Enough of that. The card listed offices in Falls Church, Virginia, and Oakland, California. Hardly auspicious. Aaron dialed the number in Oakland, steeling himself for a lengthy round of telephone tag.

"Hello?" a man's voice said.

"Hello?" Aaron said, caught off guard. He had been expecting a secretary.

"Who's this?"

"Excuse me," Aaron said, "I was trying to reach-"

"Mr. Green!" the man said, and Aaron recognized him as Cy Ogle himself. "How are you doing down there in Holl-ee-wood? Are you having a fabulous time?"

Aaron laughed. He had assumed, on the plane, that Ogle must have been drunk. But now he sounded the same. Either Ogle was drunk all the time, or never.

"I don't think I'll be putting my handprints in cement anytime soon."

"Had many interesting conversations with those big media moguls?" Aaron decided to test Cy Ogle. "They're all teflon golems."

"And all of your scientific arguments just slide right off their high-tech, nonstick surface," Ogle said without skipping a beat.

'What's going on?" Aaron asked. "You answering your own telephone now?"

"Yup."

"It's just that I figured, being president of your own company and all, you'd have a secretary or something." "I do," Ogle said. "But she's a real good secretary, so I'm not going to waste her time having her answer the phone.

"Well," Aaron said, "I don't want to waste your time. You must be busy."

"I'm busy pushing on the gas pedal and keeping this old gas-guzzler between the white lines," Ogle said.

"Oh. You're driving?"

"Yeah. Going to Sacramento to sell the Governor a bill of goods."

"Oh. Well as long as you and I were on the same coast-"

"You thought we should get together about your IMIPREM."

"Exactly," Aaron said. He was pleased that Ogle still remem­bered the acronym.

"Let me ask you one question," Ogle said. "Could you make it small?"

"The IMIPREM? What do you mean?"

"It's big now. Bigger than a breadbox, as we used to say. Got a big old power supply built into it, I would guess. Is there any intrinsic reason you couldn't miniaturize it? Make it portable? Say, Walkman sized, or even smaller, like wristwatch sized?"

"It would be a major project-"

"Stop trying to be a business executive," Ogle said. "I don't want your opinion of this from a major project point of view. I want you to do what you do best. Now, a V-8 engine can't be small; it won't work. But a calculator can be small. Is the IMIPREM a V-8 engine or a calculator?"

"A calculator."

"Done. Now stop worrying about all this business shit. Go to Disneyland."

"Huh?"

"Or the Universal Studios tour. Or something. I won't be back until tonight."

"Okay."

"This afternoon, before traffic gets screwed up, go to LAX and take a shuttle up to San Francisco and a car will meet you. Bring everything."

"Gotcha."

"We got a new project underway, since I last talked to you, that you are going to just love," Cy Ogle said. "You are just going to love it."

Then Ogle hung up the phone.