The Corrections

and swerve vertiginously through a graphical space representing the inner-sea world of the intracranium. Kelpy ganglia and squidlike neurons and eellike capillaries began to flash by.
    “Originally conceived as a therapy for sufferers of PD andAD and other degenerative neurological diseases,” Eberle said, “Corecktall has proved so powerful and versatile that its promise extends not only to therapy but to an outright cure , and to a cure not only of these terrible degenerative afflictions but also of a host of ailments typically considered psychiatric or even psychological. Simply put, Corecktall offers for the first time the possibility of renewing and improving the hard wiring of an adult human brain.”
    “Ew,” Denise said, wrinkling her nose.
    Gary by now was quite familiar with the Corecktall Process. He’d scrutinized Axon’s red-herring prospectus and read every analysis of the company he could find on the Internet and through the private services that CenTrust subscribed to. Bearish analysts, mindful of recent gut-wrenching corrections in the biotech sector, were cautioning against investing in an untested medical technology that was at least six years from market. Certainly a bank like CenTrust, with its fiduciary duty to be conservative, wasn’t going to touch this IPO. But Axon’s fundamentals were a lot healthier than those of most biotech startups, and to Gary the fact that the company had bothered to buy his father’s patent at such an early stage in Corecktall’s development was a sign of great corporate confidence. He saw an opportunity here to make some money and avenge Axon’s screwing of his father and, more generally, be bold where Alfred had been timid .
    It happened that in June, as the first dominoes of the overseas currency crises were toppling, Gary had pulled most of his playing-around money out of Euro and Far Eastern growth funds. This money was available now for investment in Axon; and since the IPO was still three months away, and since the big sales push for it had not begun, and since the red herring contained such dubieties as give non-insiders pause, Gary should have had no trouble getting a commitment for five thousand shares. But trouble was pretty much all he’d had.
    His own (discount) broker, who had barely heard of Axon, belatedly did his homework and called Gary back with the news that his firm’s allocation was a token 2,500 shares. Normally a brokerage wouldn’t commit more than five percent of its allocation to a single customer this early in the game, but since Gary had been the first to call, his man was willing to set aside 500 shares. Gary pushed for more, but the sad fact was that he was not a big-time customer. He typically invested in multiples of a hundred, and to save on commissions he executed smaller trades himself online.
    Now, Caroline was a big investor. With Gary’s guidance she often bought in multiples of a thousand. Her broker worked for the largest house in Philadelphia, and there was no doubt that 4,500 shares of Axon’s new issue could be found for a truly valued customer; this was how the game was played. Unfortunately, since the Sunday afternoon when she’d hurt her back, Gary and Caroline had been as close to not speaking as a couple could be and still function as parents. Gary was keen to get his full five thousand shares of Axon, but he refused to sacrifice his principles and crawl back to his wife and beg her to invest for him.
    So instead he’d phoned his large-cap contact at Hevy & Hodapp, a man named Pudge Portleigh, and asked to be put down for five thousand shares of the offering on his own account. Over the years, in his fiduciary role at CenTrust, Gary had bought a lot of stock from Portleigh, including some certifiable turkeys. Gary hinted now to Portleigh that CenTrust might give him an even larger portion of its business in the future. But Portleigh, with weird hedginess, had agreed only to pass along Gary’s request to Daffy Anderson, who was Hevy & Hodapp’s deal manager for the IPO.
    There had then ensued two maddening weeks during which Pudge Portleigh failed to call Gary back and confirm an allocation. Online buzz about Axon was building from a whisper to a roar. Two related major papers by Earl Eberle’steam—“Reverse-Tomographic Stimulation of Synapto-genesis in Selected Neural Pathways” and “Transitory Positive Reinforcement in Dopamine-Deprived Limbic Circuits: Recent Clinical