Stone 588 Read Online Free

begun.
    Her suprarenal glands, those two that sit cocked like floppy Robin Hood hats atop the kidneys left and right, had already been influenced to stop overproducing adrenaline. The hormone those glands had already sent into her bloodstream was offset, brought down from an incited level. Normally, the excess adrenaline would have been expelled over a dozen or more hours with no experienceable change such as the calming hush Janet had felt come over her. It was understandable, of course, that she thought it her choice when she surrendered to the hushing. Although, in fact, by then she was well infected with compliance.
    Vibrations.
    Vibrations of a magnitude more subtle than might be thrown from the glint of a prism from the angle of a crystal goblet were entering her. Gentle and too slight for our ways of measuring, yet they entered her with purpose. They seemed to know her weU, traveled the courses of her inner systems as though having been over them countless times, going by a perfect master pattern. Around and around with her blood, throughout the circuits of her nerves, to the finest farthest ends.

    Each of her organs was explored and assessed. As were the integrants of each organ. All the way down to the microcosmic landscape of her cells.
    The cause of Janet's mental disorder was determined.
    A concentration of nerve cells in two areas of the hypothalamus of her brain were abnormal, malformed. They had axons too short. That made the gaps across to other cells twice as wide as they should have been.
    At times that were almost a schedule, the chemical neurotransmitter called norepinephrine accumulated at the ends of each of those short axons, like traffic jams at bridges that are out. The more the secretions of this substance ganged up, the more hell they raised.
    As a result Janet experienced mania, phases of belligerence, and, ultimately, violence.
    At other times the chemical neurotransmitter acetylcholine brought its inhibiting qualities to the brinks of those abnormally wide gaps and collected there in unmanageable batches. Overdoses of its squelching influence got to the mental system. Janet was then overwhelmed by a phase of depression, her every thought and action stifled with dark ingoingness.
    A bipolar disorder of a major affective disorder.
    That was the diagnostic label the doctors put on what Janet had. Manic and depressive to extremes. The doctors had no way of knowing that malformed axons in the hypothalamus were behind it all. And even if they had known, there was nothing they could do about it. Brain cells don't change or repair. How ironic that the great suffering of Janet was the penalty of such an infinitesimal mistake, a matter of a few millionths of an inch. Born with it, she was stuck with it.
    Now, restrained on her bed in her room at High Meadow, she lay absolutely still, compelled to stillness for some reason. She was unaware of the energy oscillating within her. It traveled now as though in response to a call, gathered in her brain and then, more specifically, in the domain of her hypothalamus. Concentrated, it focused upon the malformed axons.
    The changes that took place within Janet's brain during the next two hours would have been impossible for the unaided eye to notice. Perhaps even the most powerful scanning electron microscope might not have picked them up.
    Changes on the molecular level.
    The defective axons, all the millions of them, were ever so gradually perfected—increased in length, five millionths of an inch. Just enough to perfect the width of the gap from cell to cell. Within a short while the neurotransmitters, acetylcholine and norepinephrine, were gotten into line. Secreted in tiny quantas, they began firing across the gaps at a nice, normal rate.
    Altogether, the Righting of Janet took four hours.
    Which would be about average.

    For Janet it was a lifting of miasmas. Layer after layer of all the old interposing mists and overcasts were dissipated. Diffusion gave way