On, Off. Colleen McCullough

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      “I see you take good care of them.”

      “One cat,” said Dr. Finch patiently, “represents an investment of at least twenty thousand dollars. He has to come with papers that satisfy the various authorities, including the A.S.P.C.A. and the Humane Society. Then there is the cost of his upkeep, which has to be first class or he doesn’t survive. I need healthy cats. Therefore a death is unwelcome, not to say exasperating.”

      Carmine moved on to the third researcher, Dr. Nur Chandra.

      Who took his breath away. Chandra’s features were cast in a patrician mold, his lashes were so long and thick that they seemed false, his brows were finely arched and his skin the color of old ivory. His wavy black hair was cut short, in keeping with his European clothes; except that a master cut the hair, and the clothes were cashmere, vicuna, silk. A buried memory unearthed itself: this man and his wife were known as the handsomest couple in all of Chubb. Ah, he had Chandra now! The son of some maharajah, rolling in riches, married to the daughter of another Indian potentate. They lived on ten acres just inside the Holloman County line, together with an army of servants and several children who were tutored at home. Apparently the swanky Dormer Day School was not swanky enough. Or might give the kids too many American ideas? They enjoyed diplomatic immunity, quite how, Carmine didn’t know. That meant kid gloves, and pray he wasn’t the one!

      “My poor Jimmy,” said Dr. Chandra, voice sympathetic but not oozing the tenderness Cecil’s did when speaking of Jimmy.

      “Give me Jimmy’s story, please, Doctor,” Carmine said, gaze riveted on another monkey, its legs crossed nonchalantly, seated in a complicated plexiglass chair inside an enormous box with its door open. The beast was minus its tennis ball hat, revealing a pink mass of dental cement in which was embedded a bright green female connector. A bright green male plug had been inserted into it, and a thick, twisted cable of wires in many colors ran to a panel on the box wall. Presumably the panel connected the monkey to a lot of electronic equipment in 19-inch racks around the box.

      “Cecil called me yesterday to tell me he’d found Jimmy dead when he went in to see the monkeys after lunch,” the researcher said in the most pearshaped English accent Carmine had ever heard. Nothing in common with Miss Dupre’s or Don Hunter’s accents, different though they were from each other. Amazing that such a tiny country had so many accents. “I went downstairs to see for myself, and I swear to you, Lieutenant [another leftenant], that I deemed Jimmy dead. No pulse, no respiration, no heart sounds, no reflexes, both pupils dilated. Cecil asked me if I wished Dr. Schiller to perform an autopsy, but I declined. Jimmy hasn’t had his electrodes implanted for long enough to have been of any experimental value to me. But I told Cecil to leave him be, that I’d check again at five, and if he hadn’t changed, I’d pop him in the refrigerator myself. Which is what I did.”

      “What about this guy?” Carmine asked, pointing at the monkey, which bore the same expression as Abe when dying for a cigarette.

      “Eustace? Oh, he’s of immense value! Aren’t you, Eustace?”

      The monkey transferred its gaze from Carmine to Dr. Chandra, then grinned ghoulishly. You are one arrogant bastard, Eustace, thought Carmine.

      Chandra’s technician was a young man name Hank, who took Carmine to the O.R.

      Sonia Liebman greeted him in the anteroom, describing herself as the O.R. technician. The anteroom was given over to shelves of stores to do with surgery; it also contained two autoclaves and a formidable looking safe.

      “For my restricted drugs,” Mrs. Liebman said, indicating the safe. “Opiates, pentothal, potassium cyanide, a bunch of nasties.” She handed Carmine a pair of canvas bootees.

      “Who knows the combination?” he asked, putting them on.

      “I do, and it is not written down anywhere,” she said firmly. “If they have to carry me out feet first, they’ll have to bring in a safe cracker. Share a secret, and it’s no secret.”

      The O.R. itself looked like any other operating room.

      “I don’t operate under fully sterile conditions,” she said, leaning her rump on the operating table, which was an expanse of clean linen savers and had a curious apparatus mounted at one end, all aluminum sticks, frames, knobs geared down to Vernier scale. She herself was clad in a clean boiler suit—ironed—and canvas bootees. An attractive woman of about forty, he decided, slim and businesslike. Her dark hair was drawn back in a no-nonsense bun, her eyes were dark and intelligent, and her lovely hands were marred by nails cut very short.

      “I thought an O.R. had to be sterile,” he said.

      “Scrupulous cleanliness is far more important, Lieutenant. I’ve known O.R.s more sterile than a zapped fruit fly, but no one ever really cleaned them.”

      “So you’re a neurosurgeon?”

      “No, I’m a technician with a Master’s. Neurosurgery is a man’s field, and they give women neurosurgeons hell. But at the Hug I can do what I love to do without that kind of trauma. Due to the size of my patients, it’s very high powered neurosurgery. See that? My Zeiss operating microscope. They don’t have one in the Chubb neurosurgery O.R.s, not one,” said the lady with great satisfaction.

      “You operate on what?”

      “Monkeys for Dr. Chandra. Cats for him and Dr. Finch. Rats for the neurochemists upstairs, and cats for them too.”

      “Do they die on the table often?”

      Sonia Leibman looked outraged. “What do you think I am, ham-fisted? No! I sacrifice animals for the neurochemists, who don’t often work on live brains. Neurophysiologists work on live brains. That’s the main difference between the two disciplines to me.”

      “Uh, what do you sacrifice, Mrs. Liebman?” Tread carefully Carmine, tread carefully!

      “Rats in the main, but I do Sherringtonian decerebrations on cats too.”

      “What’s that?” he asked, writing in his notebook, but not really wanting to know—more abstruse details coming up!

      “Removal of a brain from the tentorium up under ether anesthesia. The moment I shell the brain out, I inject pentothal into the heart and wham! The animal’s dead. Instantaneous.”

      “So you put fairly large animals into bags and take them to the refrigerator for disposal?”

      “Yes, on decerebration days.”

      “How often do these decerebration days happen?”

      “It depends. If Dr. Ponsonby or Dr. Polonowski ask for cat forebrains, about every two weeks for a couple of months, at the rate of three to four cats on any one day. Dr. Satsuma doesn’t ask nearly as often—maybe once a year, six cats.”

      “How big are these decerebrated cats?”

      “Monsters. Males about twelve to fifteen pounds.”

      

      Right, two floors down and two to go. Utilities, workshops and neurophysiology done. Now it’s up to see the office staff on the fourth floor, then down to the third and neurochemistry.

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