“A little too presumptuous for a teenager. I think I’ll settle for Doc.”

Snaresbrook’s beeper signaled and she looked at the message on its screen. “You rest for a few minutes, Brian. I’ll be right back.”

Benicoff was waiting for her outside — and looking most unhappy.

“I have just been informed that General Schorcht is on his way over here. He wants to talk to Brian.”

“No, that’s impossible. It would interfere too much with what we are doing. How could he have known that Brian is conscious? You didn’t tell him—”

“No way! But he has his spies everywhere. Maybe even your office bugged. I should have thought of that — no, a complete waste of time. What he wants to know, he finds out. As soon as I heard he was coming here I got on the phone, went right to the top. No answer yet so you will have to help me. If he gets this far we need a holding action.”

“I’ll get my scalpels!”

“Nothing quite that drastic. I want you to stall. Keep him talking as long as possible.”

“I’ll do better than that,” Erin Snaresbrook said, reaching for the phone. “I’ll use the same trick he pulled, send him to the wrong room…”

“No you won’t. I’m in the right room now.”

General Schorcht stood in the open doorway. The slightest smile touched his grim features, then instantly vanished. A Colonel was holding the door open and there was another Colonel at the General’s side. Snaresbrook spoke without emotion, the tone of the surgeon in the operating room.

“I’ll ask you to leave, General. This is a hospital and I have a severely ill patient close by. Kindly get out.”

General Schorcht marched up to the woman and stared down at her coldly. “This has long ceased to be humorous. Stand aside or I will have you removed.”

“You have no authority in this hospital. None whatsoever. Mr. Benicoff, use that phone, get the nurse’s station. This is an emergency. I want six orderlies.”

But when Benicoff reached for the phone the Colonel placed his hand over it. “No phone calls,” he said.

Dr. Snaresbrook stood firmly with her back against the door. “I will place criminal charges against you for these actions, General. You are in a civilian hospital now, not on a military base—”

“Move her aside,” General Schorcht ordered. “Use force if you have to.”

The second Colonel stepped forward. “That would be unwise,” Benicoff said.

“I’m removing you from this investigation as well, Benicoff,” the General said. “You have been uncooperative and disruptive. Get them both out of here.”

Benicoff made no attempt to stop the officer when he stepped by him and reached for the doctor. Only then did he clasp his hands together into a joined fist — that he swung hard into the small of the Colonel’s back over his kidneys, knocking him gasping to the floor.

In the silence that followed this sudden action the sound of the telephone ringing was sharp and clear. The Colonel who had his hand over it started to pick it up — then turned to General Schorcht for instructions.

“This is still a hospital,” Dr. Snaresbrook said. “Where telephones are always answered.”

The General, radiating cold menace, stood motionless for long seconds — then nodded his head.

“Yes,” the Colonel said into the phone, then stiffened, almost coming to attention.

“For you, General,” he said, and held out the phone.

“Who is it?” General Schorcht asked, but the Colonel did not answer. After an even briefer hesitation the General took it.

“General Schorcht here. Who?” There was a long silence as he listened, before he spoke again. “Yes, sir, but this is a military emergency and I must decide that. Yes I do remember General Douglas MacArthur. And I do remember that he overstepped his orders and was removed from command. The message is clear. Yes, Mr. President, I understand.”

He handed the phone back, turned and walked from the room. The officer on the floor climbed painfully to his feet, shook his fist at Benicoff, who smiled back happily, before he went after the others.

Only when the door had closed behind them did Erin Snaresbrook permit herself to speak.

“You pulled some long strings, Mr. Benicoff.”

“The President’s Commission is making this investigation — not that military fossil. I think he had to be reminded who was his commander in chief. I liked that reference to MacArthur and the expression on General Schorcht’s face when he remembered that President Truman fired the General.”

“You have made an enemy for life.”

“That happened a long time ago. So now — can you tell me what is happening? How is Brian progressing?”

“I will in just a moment. If you will wait in my office, I’ll finish up with him. I won’t be long.”

Brian looked up when the door opened and the doctor came in.

“I heard voices. Something important?”

“Nothing, my boy, nothing important at all.”

“Feeling fine today, are we?” Dr. Snaresbrook asked as she opened the door, then stood aside as a nurse and an orderly rolled in the heavily laden trolleys.

“I was — until I saw that hardware and that double-ended broom with the bulging glass eyes. What is it?”

“It’s a commercially manufactured micromanipulator. Very few have been made.”

Snaresbrook kept smiling, gave Brian no hint that this was part of the machine that Brian had helped her develop. “At the heart of the machine is a parallel computer with octree architecture. This enables it to fit it on a single and rather large planar surface. Wafer-scale integration. This interfaces with a full computer in each joint of the tree-robot.”

“Each joint — you’re putting me on!”

“You’ll soon discover how much computers have changed — particularly the one that controls this actuating unit. The basic research was done at MIT and CMU to build those brooms, as you call them. It is a lot more complex than it looks at a distance. You will notice that it starts out with two arms — but they bifurcate very quickly. Each arm then becomes two—”

“And both of them smaller, by half it seems.”

“Just about. Then they split again — and again.” She tapped one of the branching arms. “Just about here the arms become too small to manufacture, tools get too gross — and assembly would have to have been done under a microscope. So…”

“Don’t tell me. Each part is standardized, exactly the same in every way — except size. Just smaller. So the manipulators on one side make the next stage on down for the other.”

“Exactly right. Although the construction materials have to change because of structural strength and the volume-to-size ratio. But there is still only a single model stored in the computer’s memory, along with manufacture and assembly programs. All that changes with each stage is the size. Piezoelectric stepping motors are built into each joint.”

“The manufacturing techniques at the lower end must really be something.”

“Indeed they are — but we can go into that some other time. What is important now is that sensors in the small tips are very fine and controlled by feedback from the computer. They can be used for microsurgery at a cellular level, but now they will be used for the very simple job of positioning this connection precisely.”

Brian looked at the projecting, almost invisible, length of optic fiber. “Like using a pile driver to push in a pin. So this gets plugged into a socket in my neck, as you told me — and the messages start zipping in and out?”

“That’s it. You won’t feel a thing. Now — if you will just roll over onto your side, that’s fine.”

Dr. Snaresbrook went to the controls and when she switched the unit on, the multibranching arms stirred to life. She guided them to a position close behind Brian, then turned over control to the computer. There was a silken rustle as the tiny fingers stirred and separated, dropped slowly down, touched his neck.