The Touch Read Online Free

She’s killed you again.” Brenda wore her hair long, curly, and unkempt—she claimed the static electricity of brushing was bad for the brain—and now she shook her wild curls and made a face, bugging her eyes behind her round glasses.
    Lara shot her a stiff look. But if it weren’t for Brenda’s laughter, turning one more failure into just another bump in the road, Lara didn’t know how she’d keep going. Even with her encouragement, with Malcolm and all the others—the best in the world—around her, she felt defeat eating her hopes. For the first time in her life she had begun to feel despair.
    * * *
    The conference room of Blair Bio-Medical Engineering, with the view of Lake Michigan outside the high-rise windows and the company logo carved in onyx on the back wall, suggested a company that had seldom known failure—an extremely lucrative company that hadn’t lost the originality of its core business. Drawings of new bio-medical inventions lined the wall spaces; mock-ups of works-in-progress were handy on the cabinet behind Lara’s chair as she took her place at the head of the table.
    Gathered around the long polished mahogany surface in front of her were the company’s lawyers, accountants, and media advisors. All of them wore suits; her engineers, researchers, and the physicians on her staff were the only ones who dressed casually in the Blair Bio-Med Building.
    Lara still wore her medical gear, having just come from the operating simulator. Freed from the cap, mask, and goggles, she was elegant, her dark hair luxuriant and her blue eyes strikingly bright, and yet she had no self-consciousness of her appearance, as if beauty was something she had never had time to consider. She was still dwelling on the failure of their attempt, staring out the window as one of her techs began the post-experiment analysis. He was one of her younger techs, two years out of MIT; Lara’s father had started the tradition of bringing new perspectives into old problems.
    â€œThe difficulty occurs in the turn around the cortex,” the young tech said and paused because he had no idea where the real difficulty occurred; nobody did.
    â€œAnd how many attempts have we made?” Edwards, from Accounting, asked him.
    As the young tech began checking his file to be sure, Lara snapped the answer: “Fifteen.”
    â€œFrom the point of view of strict cost-effectiveness—”
    â€œRetreat is not an option,” Lara said in a voice that allowed no discussion.
    â€œWe’ll reconstruct the event and reformulate the route,” the young tech answered.
    Lara dismissed him with a tiny nod. One of her Finance executives cleared his throat for some new business. “We’ve encountered a serious pricing issue. We spent four years and 12 million dollars to develop our heart shunt. We knew what we’d have to sell it for to make a profit. But Marketing has a problem—”
    â€œIt’s not Marketing’s problem,” her Chief of Sales broke in. “It’s the company’s problem. The national magazines are touting a new study that suggests—”
    â€œSuggests?” Finance shot back.
    â€œWe have to take it seriously! It suggests Hispanics have this condition at an occurrence rate five times the national average. For us to charge—”
    â€œWe’re a business!”
    â€œSo we can’t look like gougers!”
    Lara stood and moved to the windows, still lost in thought as the arguing continued behind her. Only Malcolm and Brenda, in the whole company, believed they could succeed with the project that had failed again that morning. The rest of the executive board was content to let Lara amuse herself as long as she wished, as long as they could keep the profits rolling in from the company’s past inventions.
    â€œSo we explain our costs,” the Finance guy said.
    â€œNo matter how much truth we tell,”