"That office phone is probably ringing its fool head off. Fred won't hear it from the next room. He's getting a little bit deaf. It's letting up a little."

"Not noticeably."

"There's a roof most of the way, and I've got this plastic."

After she had fashioned it into a cape, she looked solemnly at him and said, "Whatever you want, I hope it comes out okay for you."

"Thanks, Peggy."

He had wanted to say the same sort of thing to her, but before he could word it, she was out the door. The wind helped bang it shut. She trotted along, head lowered, clutching the cape, the used linens under her arm. She went out of sight off to his left and then reappeared heading out the left arm of the 17 toward the office. She ran well, he thought. Lithe and limber.

It happened to people, he thought. Like the little eddies you find in a trout stream, where some leaves get caught there and will go around and around and around until the next heavy rain breaks them free. People have such a reluctance to change their lives even when they know they should try. He could not imagine how great the misery must be for people to spend their entire working life doing something that bored them and irritated them. Maybe, he thought, that was in part the reason for the success of the Eternal Church of the Believer and all the other evangelical sects which had sprung up lately. It was a way out of a life of dreariness and despair. It made them part of some great shiny thing that overshadowed their workday, and gave them a source of both pride and a kind of humble arrogance. I am forever saved and you are forever damned.

Hooray for me.

The Reverend Sister Mary Margaret Meadows sat in the living room of her suite on the third floor of the Manse, listening intently to the specialist on Alzheimer's disease who had flown over from London at her request, and with John Tinker's approval. They had sent one of the Gulfstreams to pick him up at Kennedy the night before, and had brought him back ahead of the storm front and domiciled him in the Manse. He was a tall plump man with a long bald narrow head, a tiny white goatee and glasses with yellow lenses. His name was Winton Narramore, and she had filed the name under the mnemonic clues Winton for Winston, Narramore for Narrow-more. He spoke in a rumbling monotone which made it difficult for her to concentrate.

The room was decorated in pink, white and maroon and the windows looked out toward the slope of the cemetery hill behind the Manse. She was wearing a long white dress patterned with pink, and she reclined on a chaise. He sat on a straight chair near the foot of the chaise.

"What we should do, I think," she said, 'is I will tell you what I think you told me, and you can correct me."

"Of course."

"With various methods you can actually see the plaques and tangles of dead and dying nerves in the brain."

"Yes. In quite a few of the cases, more frequently in the more advanced ones."

"Only five percent of people over sixty-five in this country and England ever get senile dementia."

"Yes, but we have seen Alzheimer's in rare cases in the late thirties and early forties, and we have increasing evidence that there can be some genetic predisposition to the disease."

"Signals go along nerves by electrical means, but where two nerves meet, the signal is chemical. The transmitting nerve releases a package of... of..."

"A packet of neurotransmitters that bind it to the receptors on the nerve nearby. And the nerves specialize, apparently, with some able to dispatch and receive only specific neurotransmitters. One such chemical is acetylcholine."

"All right. I have that. Now then, you said a certain enzyme makes the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. And in autopsies on people like my father, you find the enzyme very, very reduced in the brain tissue."

"Yes."

"And the problem is with the transmitting nerves and not with the receptor nerves?"

"That is correct. Or at least up until now that is what we have come to believe."

"Then why can't you get that enzyme into his brain somehow?"

"Madam, it has been tried in England and in West Germany.

The results have been almost imperceptible. Alzheimer's seems to be the result of the death of the cholinergic nerve cells deep in the brain below the cortex, way down in the medial septal nucleus, the diagonal band of Broca and particularly in the nucleus basal is of Meynert."

"I can't remember all that."

"There's no need for you to remember. What I am telling you is that we have taken the first few tiny steps toward what could be, someday, a solution just as we use L-dopa to improve the production of the neurotransmitter dopamine in Parkinson's disease. It is not my wish to crush your hopes for your father, but I would say, after a brief examination, that he has deteriorated too much for any hope of improvement. The dead nerves will not regenerate. I would guess that fifteen or twenty years from now we might be able to give perceptible help to people in the first stages of Alzheimer's."

"What will happen to him?"

Narramore shrugged.

"Any remaining motivation and drive will decline. There will be a severe blunting of affect, to the extent you may well see a shallow, famous euphoria. It is an atrophic process, and will end with a catatonic lack of response, incontinence and the need for constant nursing care."

"When?"

"From the history you have given me, I would suspect he also has some multi-infarct dementia which has hastened the decline. I would estimate eighteen months to two years before he reaches a total blunting, a vegetative state."

She closed her eyes tightly for a few moments, and then asked him, "Would a million dollars donated to your research efforts enable you to help Matthew Meadows in any way?"

"It's a great deal of money."

The Gulfstream III which brought you down here from New York cost fourteen million dollars, Doctor."

"It would be very difficult for us to put an immediate one million dollars to effective use. We are way out at the far limits of a very esoteric area of research. We are dissecting brains which show a marked atrophy, with dilated ventricles and wide sulci. We use chemical analysis on the neurofibrillary tangles and the senile plaques, and also on those portions of the brain which seem to have remained in reasonable condition. At the same time we are following the progress of the disease in dozens of patients, administering tests, measuring behavior. We do not yet know the most basic fact, why brain cells are being lost. A million dollars would help, yes. It would be tucked away and the interest on it would enable us to train some young interns. But it would not give us any way to help your father. One hundred million dollars would not enable us to slow the destruction of the cells of his brain." He smiled in a sad way." Your generosity makes it very tempting to lie to you."

"When he dies, Doctor, and when it can be made public what he died of, then I will see that you get a sizable grant for your work, provided you use his name in some way to identify it."

"That's very generous. I am grateful."

"I'm grateful to you for your straight talk, Doctor. I think we will be able to keep on taking care of him here."

"He will need nursing care twenty-four hours a day."

"That won't be a problem."

He hesitated.

"I am probably stepping beyond the bounds of proper medical advice, but I can see how deeply this affects you." He tapped his temple with a forefinger.

"The identity of a human being lies inside the skull. His personality, hopes, dreams, capacities for love and affection, everything that makes up the whole person. As the brain dies as his is dying the identity fades. He becomes someone else. When you are with him and try to think of him in the old terms, in the way he once was, you only punish yourself for no good reason, and you confuse that new limited being which has taken over his brain. The father you knew is dead."

"My father will live forever in heaven!" she said in the voice that could fill the Tabernacle.

He gave a little start of surprise and said, "Of course, of course." He stood up.

"I would like to get back as soon as possible."

"Nothing is going to take off in this. Not until late tomorrow, I'd guess. But we'll do the best we can. Thank you again.1 A moment after he left, the lights flickered and she knew that the power had failed and the Meadows Center generators had cut in almost instantaneously. She wept.

Rick Liddy sat behind his big walnut slate-top desk in his small concrete office on the ground floor of Communications and watched Eliot Erskine take off his transparent raincoat and shake the drops off it onto the gray carpet before hanging it up.

"Frog strangler out there," Liddy said.