Georgia on My Mind and Other Places (22 page)

Matlock breathed deep, inhaling the clear mountain air. At least a million dollars a year in upkeep down there, according to the rumor mills. But that was less than a quarter of the interest, according to those same mills, on Miriam Greenwood’s estate. Lifestyles of the rich and reclusive.

He finally nodded. “All right. Anytime.”

The car nosed forward, down the long slope and on until it came to heavy steel grilles that swung half-open at an electronic signal from the driver. A uniformed guard walked forward, peered in, checked Thomas Matlock against something he held in his hand, and signaled to open the gates the rest of the way. The car moved on inside the fence, proceeding toward the main house at a sedate ten miles an hour.

Security procedures were stricter inside. Three guards waited there. Matlock had to produce his hospital ID, and watch while his fingerprints were checked electronically. At last he was allowed in through a second set of doors, saw his TV image matched to a stored template on a color screen, and could finally walk on to inspect Miriam Greenwood’s private domain.

The entrance to the mansion had kept its original appearance, oak-paneled walls and polished floors of black-and-white square tiles. Expensive rugs dotted the forty-by-forty expanse. Matlock and his two escorts passed over them, traversed a short, dark corridor, and came to the transition. Decor moved from early twentieth century dry rot to modern sterile; no carpets; walls tiled as well as floors. They walked on. The room that Thomas Matlock was finally ushered into was as antiseptic and lacking in character as any lab at the hospital.

Miriam Greenwood was sitting in an electric wheelchair, behind a desk furnished with a clock, a pad of paper, and a single telephone. She differed from her pictures in only two minor respects: the sparse gray hair was covered with a soft woolen skullcap, and she was not smoking a cigarette. She inclined her head to Matlock, inviting him to sit on the chair opposite.

“Five thousand dollars were deposited in your bank account when you entered the door of this house.” Miriam Greenwood’s voice was rusty, but still strong. She inclined her head again, this time toward the telephone. “Check, if you wish to do so. Otherwise, we can proceed to business.”

“It is not necessary to check.”

“I agree. That deposit was designed only to capture your attention.” Greenwood sat up straighter. “So watch, and wait.”

She pressed a control in the arm of the wheelchair. There was a delay of maybe half a minute, then a door to Matlock’s left opened. A woman in a nurse’s uniform looked through.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“I would like orange juice. For me, and also my visitor.”

“Yes, ma’am.” She nodded, and retreated.

Miriam Greenwood gestured at the clock. “Twenty-nine seconds. Adequate. Two seconds better than usual. On the other hand, this is the day shift. Response is slower at night.”

Thomas Matlock kept his face expressionless. “I’ve done timing comparisons at the hospital. The mean time between a call and a nurse’s response to it is eighteen minutes. Twenty-three minutes at night.”

“But your patients are not promised fast, exclusive, twenty-four hour, continuous care. That’s what I’m paying for.” A thin hand lifted and stabbed a finger at Matlock. “And I’m not getting it! Twenty-nine seconds. A person could die in that much time. I’ve had two heart attacks already. Who knows when there might be another one?”

She paused and checked the desk clock again, when the nurse reappeared and placed full glasses and a pitcher of orange juice on the desk. As the nurse was leaving, Greenwood gestured to the two men behind Thomas Matlock. “I’ll signal you if I need you. Stay close.”

She picked up a glass, took one tiny sip, and waited until the others were out of the room. “Forty-four seconds, from the order for orange juice until its appearance. More than a minute from the time I first called. Do you think the response would have been any quicker if I were seriously ill? I can answer that for you. It wouldn’t.”

Miriam Greenwood leaned forward. The lines on each side of her mouth deepened. “Dr. Matlock, I’m eighty-nine years old. I’m fragile. I’m going to die someday. You know that, I know that, and I don’t expect miracles. But I’m going to fight like hell for every second. There’s no way I’ll die sooner than I have to. And I’ve studied the statistics. Get to a trauma patient soon enough, and their survival chances go up dramatically.”

“They do. But I’ve never heard of a health care system with a mean service time of less than a minute. What you have is incredibly good.”

“It may be. It’s the best that money can buy. But it’s not good enough.”

“I don’t see how you could get a better one.”

“You can build me one.” Greenwood’s withered lips offered a faint smile. “Ah, you don’t think you can, eh? But listen to me.” She paused for a long, shallow breath. “Give me five minutes of your time.”

“You bought four hours of it.”

“I want to buy more than that. Hear me out.” She touched one of the controls on her wheelchair, and the back moved to a deeper reclining angle. “One nice thing about having a bit of money, people come to you, instead of you having to go to them. Now, you might think that must be to my advantage, but funnily enough, it’s not. Not always. One month ago, the director of your hospital called, to tell me that the new wing I’d financed was going to be opened, and would I like to be there for the ceremony. I hadn’t left this building for over a year, because my doctors were advising against it. But I decided I was going. I didn’t know why. I think my subconscious did. All my life I’ve played hunches. I said I was going, and I told Ronson—my head doctor—to shut up. If I dropped dead while I was out, that would be my own dumb fault. So they wheeled me out, and they propped me up in the limo, and took me down to Georgetown.” She sighed, the weak, chesty sigh of a sixty-year smoker. “I saw the new wing, but I saw more than that. I saw the equipment in the wing. And I saw OPEC—the On-line Patient Experimental Clinic. Your own lab. Telemetry feeds, direct from patient to computer. Feedback within ten milliseconds.”

Greenwood lifted her head, and chuckled at the expression on Matlock’s face. “That’s it. Finally know why you’re here, don’t you? If you could do it for them, you could do it for me.”

But Thomas Matlock was shaking his head. “You only saw the director’s demonstration project. It’s based on my lab, but it’s bogus.”

Miriam Greenwood creaked upright. “Bogus?” Her voice was no more than a thin whisper. “Are you saying Livingstone set out to fool me? If he did . . .”

“No, no. Not the way you think.” Thomas Matlock saw a vision of wealth appear and disappear. He didn’t want that. “The telemetry feeds from the patient to the computer are near-instantaneous, just the way you said, and the computer analysis of patient condition takes only a few milliseconds. But a physician always approves the treatment before it’s given. The director cut that step out of the demo to make it go faster and used cases where approval for treatment had already been given. So it wasn’t so much
bogus
—I shouldn’t have used that word—it was oversimplified.”

“Ah.” Miriam Greenwood was relaxing again in her chair, eyes closed. “I see. But it wouldn’t have to work that way.”

“Really, it would.”

“You said the computer does the analysis, the computer decides the treatment. So cut out the physician, and the computer could start a treatment in a couple of heartbeats. Ronson’s a pretty good doctor, but he’ll never compete with a computer for speed. Use on-line feedback of medication. You know how to do it, build an expert system that incorporates the best medical knowledge in the world into the computer code. And you can hook up all your sensors directly to me—permanently, if you have to. Hell, I
live
in this damned chair. The catheters and sensors could be built right into the seat and arms.”

“No.” Matlock hesitated. “We couldn’t do that,” he said at last. “You see, a physician
has
to be there—physically present—to give approval before treatment begins. It’s illegal any other way.”

“Ah. Illegal.” Miriam Greenwood sighed, and her dark eyes blinked open. “Is that all? I thought for a horrible moment you were going to tell me it wasn’t
feasible
.”

* * *

Thomas Matlock rolled down his car window and waited patiently as the ID checks were performed. Even though the guards all knew exactly who he was, and why he was here, it made no difference. They went through the whole nine yards with him each time.

“Thanks, Jack. Be back in a few hours.” He grinned at the guard as he was finally waved through. The man wasn’t to blame. He was reflecting Miriam Greenwood’s personal paranoia. Matlock drove his Lamborghini up to the circular driveway, parked, and submitted cheerfully to the second set of identification checks before he was allowed in.

To an outside observer, the changes in the past year had been negligible. Miriam Greenwood sat in the same chair, in the same study. A compact box, located under the wheelchair seat in the same place as the batteries, was the only visible addition. Greenwood herself was a little thinner, a little frailer. She nodded at Matlock as he moved to sit across from her.

“You said I’d reach the point where I wouldn’t even notice it happening, and I think we’re almost there.”

“Let’s take a look.” Matlock whipped his hand toward her eyes, stopping a couple of inches short. She flinched, then nodded. “There it is. I don’t feel a thing, but if you listen hard you can hear the pump starting. It’s balancing the adrenaline now. The whole thing is perfect.”

Matlock nodded and waited. By now he knew Miriam Greenwood.

“Or
nearly
perfect,” she went on. “I was talking yesterday on the telephone to Livingstone, over at Georgetown, and he mentioned there’s a new drug, xanthyl, being used as a beta-blocker. I queried the computer here”—a minute nod downward to the base of the wheelchair—“and there’s no mention of it. Ronson had never heard of it, either.”

“There’s a good reason for that.” Matlock shrugged. “Xanthyl is being used in European tests, but it’s not yet FDA-approved. Most online databases don’t have it in them, because it might be dangerous.”

“Or it might be a lifesaver.”

“I can’t take that sort of risk.”

“What risk? I haven’t asked you to do anything yet.”

“You will.”

“Tom, it’s a very simple request. I want two things, and you can’t possibly object to the first one. I’d like the on-line patient care computer in my wheelchair hooked up to the main household computer. In fact, I’d like to slave the main computer to this one, so that I have an override from here if I ever need it. Would you do that for me?”

“That doesn’t sound too bad. What’s the second one?”

“Tom, you’re getting paranoid. How old are you, thirty-seven? You shouldn’t be suspecting everybody for another forty years.”

“What’s the second one?”

“Nothing terrible. I don’t want to die before my time, that’s all. You gave me an expert system, but it’s not expert enough. It uses the best existing know-how, but it lags behind the real edge. I don’t want that. If any new treatments are coming down the pike, I have to know about them—soon. I want my household computer hooked direct into the big centers and information systems—the Mayo, and Sloan-Kettering, and the Medline system at the National Institutes of Health. Not shared modems, either, I want dedicated lines. Then we’ll have a
decent
system. And anytime I want to browse through and look at new treatments or experimental drugs, I can do it here without bothering anybody.”

Matlock stood up and stared down at the frail figure in the wheelchair. “Do you realize what that would take? This house would have to be defined as a full-fledged medical research facility. There would have to be a validation process, certification of staff, data-handling procedures, drug-handling procedures . . .”

He paused. Miriam Greenwood had moved her chair forward and skimmed an envelope across the desk.

“Open it, Tom, before you tell me it’s impossible.” She was wheezing, a rare sign of emotion. “My life is my life. My money is only my money. I’ll trade one for the other. That check is all for you. Take it, and tell me how much more it takes to deal with anyone else we need.”

[sep]l

The rule had been established in the first few weeks: Miriam Greenwood did not want to talk to Matlock over the telephone. If he needed to communicate with her, he would come to the estate.

He broke that rule once, early in the second year. It took ten impatient minutes of hard talk and threats to push the house staff into putting him through to her, and when the connection was at last made he insisted on a video channel. He wanted to see Greenwood, see how she reacted.

“You lied to me,” he said, as soon as the TV was active.

“Did I?” Her lined face was calm. It seemed his call was no surprise.

“You know you did.” He shook his finger furiously at the camera. “When I arranged for your computer to be hooked into the information systems, our agreement was completely clear.”

“Quite true. It was.”

“Your medical facilities would be defined as a full research center, but you would get only information. No supplies. No screened labs—and no experimental drugs!”

“That is correct. Are you resigning?”

The cool question was like a splash of ice water. Matlock paused.

“Because if you are,” went on the quiet voice, “I certainly can’t stop you. But I want to remind you what that will mean. Nine-tenths of your income. The home on St. Kitts. The ownership interest in the casino. Sylvia, too, unless my judgment is badly in error—yes, of course I know all about her and the apartment, just as I know how much you have in each of your bank accounts. Would you like to know what
her
background is? I suppose not—you’re too obsessed with her. But it’s not at all what she told you, Tom.”

He shook his head in an abrupt shivering motion. “Experimental drugs, from all over the world. My signature splashed all over the applications, certifying their uses. If anything were to happen at the house, I’d be ruined. Totally ruined.”