Read Online My Brother's Keeper by Charles Sheffield - Free Book Online
Authors: Charles Sheffield
Tags: Science-Fiction
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it was her week for night shift—and had needles into me two minutes later.
It was four days before I felt back to normal. Long before that I had decided to tell the whole truth, so far as I knew it, to Sir Westcott.
I did it when I was in physiotherapy, and he had come along to see how the exercises to strengthen the left side of my body were coming along. He was particularly interested in watching movements that called for integration between right and left. I swung Indian clubs for a while, then passed a rubber ball rapidly from hand to hand, behind my back. Sir Westcott looked quite pleased—until I started to tell him about what had happened at the Zoo, and about my experience in Soho.
When I got to the end of it (even I thought it came out sounding very odd) he walked out of the room without speaking. I went on with the exercises, and in a quarter of an hour he was back.
"Pack that in for a minute," he said. "Come and sit your backside on the bench here."
I followed him to the side of the gymnasium. It was filled with the products of Sir Westcott's unique ideas for rapid physical recovery from nervous system injuries. The walls and floor were an obstacle course of mats, rubber tires, ropes, trestles, hoops, and bars, across and through which we unfortunate patients were supposed to hop, crawl, roll, swing, and stagger, under his unflinching eye.
He looked at me moodily as we sat down, rubbing at his fat jowls. It was late afternoon, and the gymnasium was deserted except for the two of us.
"I had three calls made down to Soho." He sniffed. "There was no report of a fight there on Tuesday night—nobody saw or heard a scuffle near Charlotte Street—no reports from any hospital of two men coming in with hand and eye injuries like the ones you described. All right? I'll take your word for it you had jugged hare at Bertorellis, we didn't check that. But we did call the American Embassy. There's no report of anybody called Valnora Warren in the U.S. State Department. No visitor with that name here on any sort of U.S. Government business, an' nothing on the Passport List."
"But suppose she was with one of the intelligence services?" My suspicions had blossomed further.
"Suppose she wasn't there at all?"
"She was."
"You think she was. I'll admit that all right, but it's not the same thing."
He lifted one fat paw, a hand with manual skills that put mine to shame. "Hold on, before you start getting excited again. We've got to face something unpleasant, Lionel, an' it's something I've been putting off, and hoping would never come up."
"She was there , and so were the men." Despite his good advice, I could feel my pulse pumping harder. "I'm not inventing any of this."
"Listen for a minute, then think again. Let's have a go with Occam's razor. You've had one hell of an operation, an' there's things going on inside your head that we can't even guess at. The CAT scans look pretty good, but they don't tell us anything about your thinking. Einstein has a brain that looks no different from your Aunt Matilda's when it comes to X-rays and physiological tests."
"I know all that. But don't forget I'm looking at this from the inside—I know what I'm thinking."
"You don't—any more than the rest of us know what we're thinking." He snorted. "You're underestimating the human brain, my lad. The only thing we know for certain is that you've got Madrill's technique to stimulate nerve cell regeneration going on inside your head. There's an electrical storm brewing when all those little cross-connections cuddle up to each other. It's more than we can comprehend. You're going to experience perceptual anomalies, sure as I'm sitting here."
I stood up. "You've told me all that. I'm going to have synesthesia—"
"That's an easy one." He picked up an Indian club and sighted along it. "There's things a lot harder to pick up. It's easy to know there's something off when you play Mozart and get rows of green beetles crawling up your
It was four days before I felt back to normal. Long before that I had decided to tell the whole truth, so far as I knew it, to Sir Westcott.
I did it when I was in physiotherapy, and he had come along to see how the exercises to strengthen the left side of my body were coming along. He was particularly interested in watching movements that called for integration between right and left. I swung Indian clubs for a while, then passed a rubber ball rapidly from hand to hand, behind my back. Sir Westcott looked quite pleased—until I started to tell him about what had happened at the Zoo, and about my experience in Soho.
When I got to the end of it (even I thought it came out sounding very odd) he walked out of the room without speaking. I went on with the exercises, and in a quarter of an hour he was back.
"Pack that in for a minute," he said. "Come and sit your backside on the bench here."
I followed him to the side of the gymnasium. It was filled with the products of Sir Westcott's unique ideas for rapid physical recovery from nervous system injuries. The walls and floor were an obstacle course of mats, rubber tires, ropes, trestles, hoops, and bars, across and through which we unfortunate patients were supposed to hop, crawl, roll, swing, and stagger, under his unflinching eye.
He looked at me moodily as we sat down, rubbing at his fat jowls. It was late afternoon, and the gymnasium was deserted except for the two of us.
"I had three calls made down to Soho." He sniffed. "There was no report of a fight there on Tuesday night—nobody saw or heard a scuffle near Charlotte Street—no reports from any hospital of two men coming in with hand and eye injuries like the ones you described. All right? I'll take your word for it you had jugged hare at Bertorellis, we didn't check that. But we did call the American Embassy. There's no report of anybody called Valnora Warren in the U.S. State Department. No visitor with that name here on any sort of U.S. Government business, an' nothing on the Passport List."
"But suppose she was with one of the intelligence services?" My suspicions had blossomed further.
"Suppose she wasn't there at all?"
"She was."
"You think she was. I'll admit that all right, but it's not the same thing."
He lifted one fat paw, a hand with manual skills that put mine to shame. "Hold on, before you start getting excited again. We've got to face something unpleasant, Lionel, an' it's something I've been putting off, and hoping would never come up."
"She was there , and so were the men." Despite his good advice, I could feel my pulse pumping harder. "I'm not inventing any of this."
"Listen for a minute, then think again. Let's have a go with Occam's razor. You've had one hell of an operation, an' there's things going on inside your head that we can't even guess at. The CAT scans look pretty good, but they don't tell us anything about your thinking. Einstein has a brain that looks no different from your Aunt Matilda's when it comes to X-rays and physiological tests."
"I know all that. But don't forget I'm looking at this from the inside—I know what I'm thinking."
"You don't—any more than the rest of us know what we're thinking." He snorted. "You're underestimating the human brain, my lad. The only thing we know for certain is that you've got Madrill's technique to stimulate nerve cell regeneration going on inside your head. There's an electrical storm brewing when all those little cross-connections cuddle up to each other. It's more than we can comprehend. You're going to experience perceptual anomalies, sure as I'm sitting here."
I stood up. "You've told me all that. I'm going to have synesthesia—"
"That's an easy one." He picked up an Indian club and sighted along it. "There's things a lot harder to pick up. It's easy to know there's something off when you play Mozart and get rows of green beetles crawling up your
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