If Dr. Radhakrishnan were to take certain doctrines of his religion absolutely literally, he would not be allowed to have any contact with either Mr. Easyrider or Mr. Scatflinger. Yet today he was going to carve great holes in their skulls and implant fresh biochips. Of course he was wearing gloves, so technically speaking he wasn't coming into contact with them. But this was a technicality.

Anyone who adhered, at least nominally, to any religion that was invented millennia ago by people who ran around in burlap and believed that the Earth was built on the back of a turtle - that is, any of the major religions - ran into little dilemmas like those on a regular basis. The Christians practiced ritual cannibalism. When­ever he flew between the West and India there was always at least one Muslim on the plane who had to get out the in-flight magazine, check out the route map on the back page, triangulate against the position of the sun, and try to figure out in which direction Mecca lay. And when the ambulance had brought a Chiricahua Apache in to the Elton State University hospitals with a severe brain bleed that needed emergency surgery, Dr. Radhakrishnan had not had time to consult all of the religious authorities in order to figure out whether Hinduism allowed him to touch an Apache. He just gloved up and dove in there. At a certain point one had to just shrug, stop looking over one's shoulder theologically, and get on with life. Perhaps in some later life, at some more mystical plane of existence, Dr. Radhakrishnan would find out whether or not he had broken any cosmic rules by touching an Apache in New Mexico, or by touching Messrs. Easyrider and Scatflinger here in Delhi. In the meantime, like everyone else, he had to translate the arcane precepts of his ancient religion into a somewhat looser and vaguer set of rules called ethics, or values.

"I am waiting for the biochips," he said into the telephone. "Waiting and waiting and waiting."

There was a brief silence on the other end of the line, or what passed for silence. Indian telephones had a sort of organic quality. Not the sterile silence of American fiber-optic linkups. On one of these phones, one felt that one was plugged into the electro­magnetic fabric of the entire universe; the phone system just one huge antenna picking up emanations from other telephones, tele­vision and radio stations, power lines, automobile ignition systems, quasars in deep space, and stirring them together into a thick sonic curry. This is what Dr. Radhakrishnan listened to while he was waiting for Zeldo to come up with another excuse for not being ready.

"There's just one more bug that we really ought to get rid of," Zeldo said. "Twenty of the best guys in the business are going over this code line by line."

"Twenty? You only have four people there!"

"Most of the work is being done in California. Over a satellite link," Zeldo said.

''Well," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, "while your team is sipping espresso in Marin County, my team is standing in a hallway here at AIIMS with two brain-damaged patients on gurneys, waiting."

A long silence, the sonic curry poured forth from the telephone. "I don't know what to tell you," Zeldo said. "It's not quite ready."

"Did you hear about the programmer's wife?" Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "She is still a virgin. Her husband just sits on the edge of the bed every night and tells her how great it's going to be."

Zeldo did not laugh. Dr. Radhakrishnan was beginning to get that tingly feeling in his hands.

He stuck his head out of the office and looked down the hallway. Mr. Scatflinger was lying on the gurney, quiescent, his head freshly shaved, blue lines drawn on his scalp like the rhumb lines of an ancient navigator.

"Can you or can you not reprogram this thing remotely, after implantation?"

"We can modify the software. That's how we're programming it as we speak. It's sitting in the culture tank and we're talking to it over the radio."

"It's finished."

"No."

"Put the culture tank into the truck and get it over here now. That is an order."

The chip consisted of a silicon part - the part that Zeldo was responsible for - surrounded by an inert teflon shell, connected on either end to brain cells that had been grown in a tank in Seattle. The only way to keep those brain cells alive was to supply them with oxygen and nutrients. The biochip sat in a tank full of a care­fully pH-balanced, temperature-regulated, oxygenated chemical solution that Zeldo and the other Americans referred to as "chicken soup." The soup gave the brain cells everything they needed to stay alive, except for intellectual stimulation. The chip was only a couple of centimeters long in its entirety and so the tank itself wasn't that large, just a few liters in size. But it was attached to a variety of machines to keep it properly balanced and regulated, so the apparatus as a whole ended up being roughly the size of a vending machine. It rolled around on oversized rubber wheels, and it had enough built-in backup battery power so that it could be unplugged from the wall for up to half an hour. All of this portability was needed, for the time being, because of the far-flung nature of this enterprise. The chips had first been incarnated in Seattle, placed into this tank, and then rolled on board a specially chartered GODS jet, where the support systems had drawn power from the airplane's generators. From the Indira Gandhi Inter­national Airport, the whole mess had been transported to the Barracks for debugging. Now it had to be shipped down the road to AIIMS for the actual surgical procedure. Each time it was trundled from one place to another it had to survive on battery power for a few minutes.

Zeldo and his cohorts referred to the apparatus as the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. They hauled it around in the back of a truck. The truck poked its way slowly down the Delhi Ring Road, pulled off into the parking lots of AIIMS, and backed up to a loading dock.

The back door flew open and there were Zeldo and his hackers, surrounding the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, all blinking lights and bubbling tubes.

There was an interval of half an hour or so, during which the patients were prepared for surgery, the operating room people got scrubbed and gloved, and Zeldo and his crew got the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari transferred across the hospital to the operating theater, leapfrogging from one power outlet to the next, down hallways and up elevators. Then Dr. Radhakrishnan just had to perform a couple of operations.

It was strange, and possibly ludicrous, to be doing both Mr. Easyrider and Mr. Scatflinger at the same time. Each operation was a major event in itself. But there were many strange and ludicrous things about the way the Radhakrishnan Institute was currently functioning. As they went over the plans for this day, they had all shared a creepy, unspoken feeling that they were extending them­selves years beyond where they really ought to be, and that many things might go wrong.

The operations were conceptually simple. Incisions were made along the lines that had been drawn on the patients' shave heads. Flaps of scalp were peeled back and the bleeding was cauterized or clamped off. When the actual skull was exposed, Dr. Radhakrishnan cut through it with a bone saw.

A polygon of skull, a trap door of sorts, was cut into the side of the head and saved for later use. Still, the brain itself was not exposed; they looked through the hole at a tough inner membrane, the brain's final layer of protection. When this was flapped out of the way, they were looking at actual brain matter.

"It was a debacle. I am personally ashamed. I will never do anything like that again. The level of incompetence makes me physically ill. I may shoot myself," Dr. Radhakrishnan was saying.

"Have a drink," Mr. Salvador said. This was easy to arrange because they were sitting in the bar of the Imperial.