“Meaning?” Winston asked.

“Meaning this guy is suffering an irreparable brain injury,” said the student. “He’s a gork.”

“Very good, we may make a doctor of you yet. Prognosis?”

“Dead by morning,” said the student.

“You’re probably right,” Winston said. “I hope so, because he’s never coming back from this. We’ll give him a CAT scan, though.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s protocol, son. And because I’m curious to see how much damage there actually is while he’s still alive.”

He was still alive seven hours later, when Dr. Annu Singh, ably assisted by Dr. Felix Babineau, performed a craniotomy to evacuate the massive blood clot that was pressing on Brady’s brain and increasing the damage minute by minute, strangling divinely specialized cells in their millions. When the operation was finished, Babineau turned to Singh and offered him a hand that was still encased in a blood-stippled glove.

“That,” he said, “was amazing.”

Singh shook Babineau’s hand, but he did so with a deprecating smile. “That was routine,” he said. “Done a thousand of them. Well . . . a couple of hundred. What’s amazing is this patient’s constitution. I can’t believe he lived through the operation. The damage to his poor old chump . . .” Singh shook his head. “Iy-yi-yi.”

“You know what he was trying to do, I take it?”

“Yes, I was informed. Terrorism on a grand scale. He may live for awhile, but he will never be tried for his crime, and he will be no great loss to the world when he goes.”

It was with this thought in mind that Dr. Babineau began slipping Brady—not quite brain-dead, but almost—an experimental drug which he called Cerebellin (although only in his mind; technically, it was just a six-digit number), this in addition to the established protocols of increased oxygenation, diuretics, antiseizure drugs, and steroids. Experimental drug 649558 had shown promising results when tested on animals, but thanks to a tangle of regulatory bureaucracies, human trials were years away. It had been developed in a Bolivian neuro lab, which added to the hassle. By the time human testing commenced (if it ever did), Babineau would be living in a Florida gated community, if his wife had her way. And bored to tears.

This was an opportunity to see results while he was still actively involved in neurological research. If he got some, it was not impossible to imagine a Nobel Prize for Medicine somewhere down the line. And there was no downside as long as he kept the results to himself until human trials were okayed. The man was a murderous degenerate who was never going to wake up, anyway. If by some miracle he did, his consciousness would at best be of the shadowy sort experienced by patients with advanced Alzheimer’s disease. Yet even that would be an amazing result.

You may be helping someone farther down the line, Mr. Hartsfield, he told his comatose patient. Doing a spoonful of good instead of a shovelful of evil. And if you should suffer an adverse reaction? Perhaps go entirely flatline (not that you have far to go), or even die, rather than showing a bit of increased brain function?