Interface

"When I am tense I bite my lip. Today I think I have swallowed half of my own blood supply."

"Think of it as opening day for a new business venture," Mr. Salvador said. "It's always a debacle."

"Even debacle does not do justice to this day," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "It was an apocalypse."

Mr. Salvador shrugged. "That's why we make mistakes, so we can learn from them."

"One gets very impatient, doing research for years and years. The pace is so gradual. After a while you say, "I wish I could just get on with it and put one of these things into a human brain and see what happens. But this business today reminds me of why we take years and years to get ready for these things."

"The patients are both alive. All's well that ends well."

A waiter came by and gave Dr. Radhakrishnan another drink. Mr. Salvador tossed some rupees on to the table. "Why don't you take that with you?" he said. "I have something to show you."

"What?"

"Let's go for a spin."

The former site of the Ashok Theatre had been surrounded by a barricade twenty feet high. In places it consisted of chain-link fence with tarps stretched across it. In places it was pieced together with scraps of wood. In and of itself the fence was a considerable invest­ments; the materials that went into it could have housed thousands. Things did not become much clearer after Mr. Salvador and Dr. Radhakrishnan had gotten past the guard at the gate. Most of the site was filled with a scaffolding. It was just a dense three-dimensional web of steel, with some parts of it additionally shored up with wooden beams. So far most of the work was being done in iron; the scaffolding was intertangled with another web of reinforcing rods.

The density of activity was incredible. The site seemed to con­tain several workers per square yard, all doing something as fast as they could. Several cranes were active, moving giant prefabricated constructs of reinforcing rod into place.

"All reinforced concrete. So it looks like hell until we pour," Mr. Salvador said.

Dr. Radhakrishnan would have gotten lost in a second, but Mr. Salvador knew his way through the tangle. He led him fearlessly into a passage that cut through the heart of it, straight in toward the center, brushing past workers the entire way. He noticed along the way that he was now walking on planks. Looking down between gaps, he could see straight down one or two stories. The place was extraordinarily well lit with thousands of electric lights strung on long yellow cords. Hundreds more workers were down below them, bending more steel rods into place. Large amounts of concrete had already been poured down there.

As they approached the middle, Dr. Radhakrishnan could see glimpses of more concrete through gaps in the scaffolding. It was a sort of squat concrete obelisk, rectangular in cross-section, rising straight up out of the foundation below them, up to a height of three stories above their heads. It was large enough, perhaps, to put a volleyball court on each level. The walls had a few rectangular openings on each level where, presumably, this part of the building would later be co

The obelisk was co

"This, of course, is the essential core of the operation," Mr. Salvador said. "The only part that you will really need in order to continue your research. It will be ready to use in a week. As long as you don't mind walking through an active construction site in order to reach it, that is."

"Not at all," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

15

Merely scooping out a hole in a man's brain and dropping in a biochip was not enough. It was like assaulting a supercomputer with a Skilsaw and then throwing in a handful of loose silicon chips.

The biochip had to be co

Brain cells didn't grow. But the co

As soon as it had seemed like it was a safe bet that Mr. Easyrider and Mr. Scatflinger were going to live for while, they were trans­ferred back to the Barracks in a specially equipped ambulance. They were laid side by side in a separate room that had been built onto one end of Building 2. They were co

In the center of the area outlined by the surgical scar, a bundle of lines was plugged into the patient's head. It passed through the middle of the flake of skull that had been neatly sawed out by Dr. Radhakrishnan's bone saw. While Dr. Radhakrishnan had occupied himself with implanting the biochip, a lesser surgeon - more of a technician, really - had drilled a few holes through the disembodied chunk of skull and implanted a plastic co

When the operation was finished, this co