Once the pipe was taken out and some of the mess cleaned up, assuming that Singh did not get infected, which was simply a question of antibiotics, he was going to be an ideal candidate for therapy.

"Not a whiner," Mr. Salvador said, when he came by later to inspect. "Robust. Positive attitude, as far as I can tell. Willing to try just about anything. He reminds me of the chap in the States."

"What chap?"

"Whom you heard on the tape. Whose scans you looked at."

"Ah, yes."

A thrilling sensation suddenly washed over Dr. Radhakrishnan's body. A wave of adrenaline seemed to be rushing through his circulatory system like a chemical tsunami. He opened his eyes a little wider and blinked a few times as though he had just stepped out into bright warm sunlight after a long winter in Elton, New

Mexico, and his body rocked from side to side just a little bit, its stance and balance changing as he stood up straighter, breathed a little deeper. The jet lag vanished. He looked around him, suddenly taking in the room with the frighteningly intense glare of a raptor soaring on a mountain thermal. His hands tingled, almost as if the saw and the drill were already there, buzzing away, slicing heedlessly through bone, penetrating into the core of some other human being.

Mr. Salvador could take his Gyrfalcon jet and his cars and his institutes and his hotel suites. He could take them all back to America. It wouldn't matter. This was the feeling that Dr. Radhakrishnan V.R.J.V.V. Gangadhar lived for.

All of the nurses and orderlies in this part of the barracks had risen uncertainly to their feet. "What are you waiting for!?" he snapped.

"This poor man has a pipe through his head! Let's get it out."

"I'm going to be real straight with you," Mel said.

"Somehow I'm not surprised," Mary Catherine said. They were sitting together at a corner table in an old-fashioned family-type Italian restaurant. The restaurant was across the street and down the block from the hospital where Mary Catherine had spent most of the last four years. When families of stricken patients had to eat, they gathered around the big circular tables here and glumly plunged their forks into deep, steaming dishes of lasagna, like surgeons around an operating table.

"You dad is not a happy camper right now," Mel continued. "And it's going to get worse in a week or two, when we have to come out and tell the public that he has suffered a stroke. I don't know how he's going to react."

She slapped her menu down on the table and stopped even pretending to read it. "Enough, enough," she said. "What the hell are you saying?"

"Your dad would rather die than live the way he is now," Mel said.

Mary Catherine kept looking and listening for a few seconds, until she finally realized that this was all there was to it. If Mel had been talking about anyone else, "he would rather die" would have been a figure of speech. But not with Dad. She could just imagine him, sitting down there in Tuscola, making the executive decision that it was time to die, and then formulating his plan. "That's enough," she said. "That's all you have to say." Then she closed her eyes and silently let tears run down her face for a half a minute or so.

She opened her eyes, rubbed her face with her napkin, blinked away the last tears. Mel was sitting with his hands folded together, patiently waiting for her to finish. Out of the corner of her eye she could see a hefty waitress loitering with her pad and pen. The help here knew how to deal with grief. The waitress was trying to figure out -when it was okay to approach the table.

"Okay, I'm ready to order," Mary Catherine said, louder than she had intended.

The waitress approached. Mel hurriedly snatched up his menu and began to scan it; he wasn't ready. Watching him, Mary Catherine suddenly felt a lot of affection for good old Mel, trying to pick out an entree, any entree, because Mary Catherine was ready to order.

"I'll have the fettucine with pesto and a club soda," Mary Catherine said.

"Some kind of baked noodle thing without any meat," Mel said. "Lasagna? Manicotti?" the waitress said. But Mel could not be bothered with details; he didn't hear her. "And a glass of white," he said, "You want a drink, Mary Catherine?"

"No thanks, I'm working," she said. Finally the knot went out of her throat and she felt better. She took a couple of deep breaths. "All clear," she said.

"You're handling it well," Mel said. "You're doing a good job of this."

"I suppose he has a little plan all worked out." "Yeah. The den. Sometime when there's no kids out in front of the house, I would guess."

"He'll probably use the big shotgun from Vietnam, right?" Mel shrugged. "Beats me. I'm. not privy to all his decisions." "You know, James and I always used to get into trouble when Patricia was babysitting us as a kid. And Mom and Dad would come home and be just shocked." Mary Catherine laughed out loud, blowing off tension. "Because Patricia was such a nice girl and why were we being so mean to her?" Mel laughed. "So now I'll have to go home and give Dad a hard time for wanting to shoot himself while Patricia's babysitting him." She heaved a big sigh, trying to throw off the aching feeling in her ribs. "But it's really hard to talk to him when he's in that - that whole situation he's in now."

"See, he's acutely aware of that. And that's why he made this decision."

"So why are you here?" she said. "Is this an official message from Dad?" Mel snorted. "You kidding? He'd kill me if he knew I was telling you this."

"Oh. I thought I was being given one last chance to go down and talk to him before he did it."

"No way. I think I caught him in the act. Lining up his shot," Mel said. "Now he's too embarrassed to actually do it for a while."

"Well ... of course I want him to live. But I have to admit killing himself now would be a lot more true to his nature."

"Absolutely," Mel said. "And it would give him a chance to get in a last dig at Patricia, which is incentive enough." Mary Catherine laughed. "But he's not gonna do it," Mel said.

"Why not?" It was unusual to think of Dad making up his mind to do something, and then holding back.

"There's one possibility we are investigating. A new therapy that might bring him back to where he was."

"I haven't heard of any such thing," Mary Catherine said. Mel set his briefcase up on the table and snapped it open. He pulled out a manila envelope and handed it to Mary Catherine.

Inside was a stack of a dozen or so research papers, mostly reprints from technical journals. On top was an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph of a rakishly modern, high-tech structure on a bluff above the ocean. "What is this place?"

"The Radhakrishnan Institute. They do heavy-duty neurological research. Those papers describe some of the work they've been doing."

Mary Catherine set the photograph aside and began to flip through the research papers.

"I thought you might be interested in seeing some of that stuff. It's all gibberish to me," Mel said.

Mary Catherine frowned. "I'm familiar with these papers. I've seen them. All in the last three years."

"So?"

"Well, the stuff described here is all fairly basic research. I mean, in this one here, they're talking about a technique to grow baboon brain cells in vitro and then reimplant them in the baboon's brain."

"So?"

"So the date on the paper is three months ago. Which means it was probably written sometime last year."

"So?" Mel would continue to asking this question until hell froze over or he understood what she was getting at.

"So, it's like these guys just invented the wheel last year, and now they're claiming that they can make a car."