The Corrections

Progress”—appeared in Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine within days of each other. The two papers received heavy coverage in the financial press, including a front-page notice in the Wall Street Journal . Analyst after analyst began to flash strong Buys for Axon, and still Portleigh did not return Gary’s messages, and Gary could feel the advantages of his insiderly head start disappearing hour by hour…

1. HAVE A COCKTAIL!
    “… Of ferrocitrates and ferroacetates specially formulated to cross the blood-brain barrier and accumulate interstitially!”
    Said the unseen pitchman whose voice had joined Earl Eberle’s on the video sound track.
    “We also stir in a mild, non-habit-forming sedative and a. generous squirt of Hazelnut Moccacino syrup, courtesy of the country’s most popular chain of coffee bars!”
    A female extra from the earlier lecture scene, a girl with whose neurological functions there was clearly nothing in the slightest wrong, drank with great relish and sexily pulsing throat muscles a tall, frosty glass of Corecktall electrolytes.
    “What was Dad’s patent?” Denise whispered to Gary. “Ferroacetate gel something-something?”
    Gary nodded grimly. “Electropolymerization.”
    From his correspondence files at home, which contained, among other things, every letter he’d ever received from either of his parents, Gary had dug out an old copy of Alfred’s patent. He wasn’t sure he’d ever really looked at it, so impressed was he now by the old man’s clear account of “electrical anisotropy” in “certain ferro-organic gels” and hisproposal that these gels be used to “minutely image” living human tissues and create “direct electrical contact” with “fine morphologic structures.” Comparing the wording of the patent with the description of Corecktall at Axon’s newly renovated Web site, Gary was struck by the depth of similarity. Evidently Alfred’s five-thousand-dollar process was at the center of a process for which Axon now hoped to raise upward of $200 million: as if a man didn’t have enough in his life to lie awake at night and fume about!
    “Yo, Kelsey, yuh, Kelsey, get me twelve thousand Exxon at one-oh-four max,” the young man sitting to Gary’s left said suddenly and too loudly. The kid had a palmtop stock-quoter, a wire in his ear, and the schizophrenic eyes of the cellularly occupied. “Twelve thousand Exxon, upper limit one zero four,” he said.
    Exxon, Axon, better be careful, Gary thought.
2. PUT ON A HEADSET & TURN ON THE RADIO!
    “You won’t hear a thing—not unless your dental fillings pick up ball games on the AM dial,” the pitchman joked as the smiling girl lowered onto her camera-friendly head a metal dome reminiscent of a hair dryer, “but radio waves are penetrating the innermost recesses of your skull. Imagine a kind of global positioning system for the brain: RF radiation pinpointing and selectively stimulating the neural pathways associated with particular skills. Like signing your name. Climbing stairs. Remembering your anniversary. Thinking positively! Clinically tested at scores of hospitals across America, Dr. Eberle’s reverse-tomographic methods have now been further refined to make this stage of the Corecktall process as simple and painless as a visit to your hairstylist.”
    “Until recently,” Eberle broke in (he and his chair stilldrifting through a sea of simulated blood and gray matter), “my process required overnight hospitalization and the physical screwing of a calibrated steel ring into the patient’s cranium. Many patients found this inconvenient; some also experienced discomfort. Now, however, enormous increases in computing power have made possible a process that is instantaneously self-correcting as to the location of the individual neural pathways under stimulation …”
    “Kelsey, you da man!” young Mr. Twelve Thousand Shares of Exxon said loudly.
    In the first hours and days following Gary’s big Sunday blowout with Caroline, three weeks ago, both he and she had made overtures of peace. Very late on that Sunday night she’d reached across the demilitarized zone of the mattress and touched his hip. The next night he’d offered an almost-complete apology in which, although he refused to concede the central issue, he conveyed sorrow and regret for the collateral damage he’d caused, the bruised feelings and willful misrepresentations and hurtful imputations, and thus gave Caroline