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"Ravi?" croaked the old man. "Is that you?"
Ravi looked up from the chart and saw the intense blue eyes fix upon him.
"Why am I so tired?" Godin asked.
"Your seizures, probably." Godin still suffered from epilepsy caused by his exposure to the Super-MRI.
Ravi walked around the bed and looked down into the slack face. Peter Godin had been one of the most vital men he'd ever known, yet cancer had laid Godin as low as it would any street beggar. Well… that wasn't quite true. No street beggar had Ravi Nara and almost limitless wealth keeping him alive. Even near death, with his hair and eyebrows gone, Godin retained the hawk¬like profile that had made the driven young computer designer so recognizable in the late 1950s, and for five decades afterward.
"Your tumor is very advanced, Peter. There's only so much I can do. It's a battle between keeping you con¬scious and keeping you free enough from pain to func¬tion."
"Damn the pain." Godin clenched one arthritic hand into a fist. "I can stand pain."
"That's not what you said last night. Last night you told me your face was on fire."
Godin shuddered. "I'm conscious now. Send Levin to me."
Zach Levin had led the R amp;D department at Godin Supercomputing in Mountain View until he was brought to North Carolina to run the Interface Team, the group responsible for communicating with the Trinity com¬puter. Levin was a tall, cadaverous man of thirty-five, and prematurely gray. Like his master in his healthier days, Levin seemed to live without sleep.
"I'll send him in," Ravi said.
Godin held up one hand. "What have you heard about Te
"There's been no sign of them since Union Station."
The old man closed his eyes and sighed with a rattle, a hint of what lay in the near future. "The woman shot Geli?"
"They say it was Dr. Weiss, yes."
When Godin frowned, a nest of lines formed in the lower half of his face. Though married to one woman for most of his life, Godin had no children, and he'd always displayed a paternal affection for Geli Bauer. The notion made Ravi's skin crawl; it was like having paternal affection for a cobra.
"How is Geli doing?" Godin asked.
"Remarkably well, I hear. They transferred her to Walter Reed. Her father arranged that."
A trace of a smile touched Godin's lips. "If she'd known that, she wouldn't have gone." The smile van¬ished. "What do you think Te
Ravi wished he knew. For most of the project, the internist had been his biggest headache. Hiding cancer from laymen was easy, but Te
"I have no idea, Peter. It worries me."
As a nurse gave Godin a sip of water, Ravi tried to gauge the time left to the tenacious old man. It wasn't easy. He hadn't worked directly with patients for years, and Godin was well past the mortality tables for his type of tumor. Predicting survival in these circumstances was the kind of augury at which doctors like Te
A buzz and a purple flash made Ravi turn. Through the Bubble's transparent hatch he saw Zach Levin stand¬ing in the UV decontaminator.
Levin spent most of his time in the concrete womb of Containment, but he always seemed to sense when Godin had regained consciousness. Levin and his techni¬cians were like a priesthood, tending their master as he died and his creation as it was born. Priests of science, Ravi thought. What a contradiction in terms. He waved to Levin and thought, You get on my last bloody nerve-
"There's Levin now," he said, and forced a smile.
"How long will I be conscious?" Godin asked.
"Until the pain gets unbearable."
"Send Levin in on your way out."
Ravi suppressed his anger. He'd been a wunderkind all his life, but for the past six months he'd felt more like a royal physician tending the bed of a king. The whims of a tyrant ruled his days. He stepped on the button that opened the hatch and walked out of the Bubble.
Zach Levin nodded from the decontaminator. Tech¬nically, Levin and his team were Ravi's subordinates. But the hardware and software of the Trinity computer were so complex that Ravi could not hope to lead Levin's peo¬ple in any meaningful way, except where the brain itself was concerned. Even when they approached him with neurological questions, he felt more used than listened to. They swam like piranhas through his mind, devour¬ing what they needed for their excursions into the labyrinthine neuromodels-
"How's he doing?" Levin asked loudly. The UV decontaminator buzzed and shut down.
"He's awake," Ravi said. "Lucid."
"Good. I have some exciting news for him."
But not for me, Ravi thought bitterly. "Have you put any more questions to Te
Levin seemed to consider his reply. "I dumped Dr. Te
"At this point," said Levin, "bringing Trinity to full operational status is more important than any damage Dr. Te
Ravi felt the same way, but he didn't want the engi¬neer to know that. "How does dumping Te
"Peter thinks some of the problems we're now experi¬encing could have a quantum etiology. He thought per¬haps Andrew Fielding might be able to help us."
"Fielding? You mean you've loaded Fielding's neuromodel into the prototype?"
"That's right."
"Do you really think his model can help you solve your remaining problems?"
"To tell you the truth, I don't see why his model should perform any differently than Dr. Te
Ravi shivered. Levin spoke as if Fielding were still alive. "What do you think that means?"
The engineer shrugged. "Maybe nothing. But Peter's intuition has been accurate too many times to ignore it. And it was the work stored in Dr. Fielding's crystal that brought us this far. If the processing areas of his model perform at a higher efficiency level than Dr. Te
Ravi's heartbeat quickened. "What are the odds of that happening?"
Levin didn't answer.
Ravi felt like slapping the taller man's face, but the implications of what he'd learned drove such thoughts from his head. "Well, carry on."
Levin's arrogant smile told Ravi just how little weight his words carried now.
Ravi walked out of the hangar, climbed aboard his ATV, and gu
As he rode back toward his office, he glanced at the Con¬tainment building. Half-buried in sand, the concrete block exuded a sense of power he had felt nowhere else in the world. He'd experienced unease standing in nuclear power stations, but the danger in a nuclear reactor was quantifi¬able. Even the worst-case scenario was predictable, because nuclear fuel, however dangerous, obeyed natural laws.