The Face

conversation between this individual and another person.”
        “What other person?”
        “I don’t know.”
        “He’s in a coma.”
        “Yes.”
        Frowning, Ethan said, “Then how is he talking to anyone? By telepathy?”
        “Do we believe in telepathy?” O’Brien asked.
        “I don’t.”
        “Neither do I.”
        “Then why couldn’t this be a malfunctioning machine?” Ethan wondered.
        O’Brien accelerated the data flow until the brain-wave patterns disappeared from the screen, replaced by the words DATA INTERRUPT.
        [363] “They took Whistler off the EEG, the one they thought must be malfunctioning,” the doctor said. “They connected him to a different machine. The switchover took six minutes.”
        He fast-forwarded through the gap, until the patterns appeared once more.
        “They look the same on the new machine,” Ethan said.
        “Yeah, they are. Beta waves representing consciousness, lots of anxiety, and with subsets suggesting vigorous conversation.”
        “A second malfunctioning machine?”
        “There’s one holdout who still thinks so. Not me. These wave patterns ran nineteen minutes on the first EEG, apparently for six minutes between hookups, and then thirty-one minutes on the second machine. Fifty-six minutes total before they abruptly stopped.”
        “How do you explain it?” Ethan asked.
        Instead of answering him, O’Brien worked the keyboard, calling up a second display of data, which appeared above the first: another moving white line on the blue background, spiking from left to right. In this case, all the spikes were above the base line, none below.
        “This is Whistler’s respiration synchronized with the brain-wave data,” O’Brien said. “Each spike is an inhalation. Exhalation takes place between spikes.”
        “Very regular.”
        “Very. Because the ventilator is breathing for him.”
        The physician tapped the keys again, and a third display shared the screen with the first two.
        “This is heart function. Standard three-phase action. Diastole, atrial systole, ventricular systole. Slow but not too slow. Weak but not too weak. Slight irregularities, but nothing dangerous. Now look here at the brain waves.”
        The beta waves were doing the earthquake jitterbug once more.
        Ethan said, “He’s terrified again.”
        “In my opinion, yes. Yet there’s no change in heart function. It’s the same slow, somewhat weak beat with tolerable irregularities, [364] exactly his deep-coma pattern ever since he was first admitted to the hospital almost three months ago. He’s in a state of terror… yet his heart is calm.”
        “The heart’s calm because he’s comatose. Right?”
        “Wrong. Even in a profound coma, Mr. Truman, there isn’t this complete disconnect between the mind and body. When you’re having a nightmare, the terror is imagined, not real, but heart function is affected just the same. The heart races during a nightmare.”
        For a moment, Ethan studied the violently jumping beta waves and compared them to the slow, steady heartbeat. “After fifty-six minutes of this, his brain activity returned to the long, slow delta waves?”
        “That’s right. Until he died the next morning.”
        “So if it’s not two machines malfunctioning, how do you explain all of this, Doctor?”
        “I don’t. I can’t. You asked me if there was anything unusual in the patient’s file. Specifically, something… uncanny .”
        “Yes, but-”
        “I don’t have a dictionary handy, but I believe uncanny means something not normal, something extraordinary, something that can’t be explained. I can only tell you what happened, Mr. Truman, not a damn thing about why .”
        Tongues of rain licked the windows.
        With snuffle, growl, and keening petition, the wolfish wind begged entry.
        Across the fabled city rolled a low protracted rumble.
        Ethan and O’Brien looked toward the windows, and Ethan supposed that the physician, too, had envisioned a terrorist attack somewhere, women and babies murdered by the fascistic Islamic radicals who fed on wickedness and crawled the modern world with demon determination.
        They listened to the sound slowly fade, and finally Dr. O’Brien said with relief, “Thunder.”
        [365] “Thunder,” Ethan agreed.
        Thunder and lightning were not common