The Touch Read Online Free Page A

the Chief of Sales argued, “it won’t matter. The public is emotional. We’ve had record profits—”
    â€œâ€”that we’ve earned through medical breakthroughs! Lara, obviously you’re going to have to settle this. Lara . . . ? Lara.”
    She glanced toward her executives, then stared out the window again. To them it seemed she had heard nothing of what they had been discussing. Then she said, “We trust the doctors.” Everyone at the table tried to catch up with her thinking, and they were still sitting there blinking when she added, “Most doctors in this country do work they never bill for. And they know which patients have insurance and which don’t. For anyone who can’t afford the device, we provide it free—through their doctor. We also make a donation from our charity budget to a victims’ fund, and host a fund-raiser.”
    â€œWe’re off the hook,” the Chief of Sales said. “We look great.”
    â€œAnd we make a profit,” Finance agreed and whispered, “Why didn’t we think of that?”
    Sales whispered back, “Because we don’t own the company.”
    A breathless, excited Malcolm appeared at the conference room door. “Lara!” he called. “You’ve got to see this!”
    Lara immediately left the meeting and followed Malcolm down a long corridor of cubicles to the stairway—Malcolm hated elevators—and they headed down two flights to the lab, while Lara’s assistant Juliet called from the upper landing, “You have a financials conference in five minutes!”
    â€œAnd I need your approval on the new graphics for the AMA Journal!” pleaded the copywriter who was waiting outside the boardroom. Lara and Malcolm disappeared into The Egg—the lab floor, where their new projects hatched. Malcolm struggled to contain his excitement. “For the last two years we’ve been beating the bushes looking for exceptional degrees of micro-manual dexterity to help with the Roscoe project. One of our scouts came across something at an art museum.”
    â€œAn art museum?”
    â€œI know what you’re thinking, our scouts shouldn’t be wasting time looking at art, and I wish I could tell you it was part of our master plan to expand into unconventional areas to find unconventional talent, but the truth is, the guy was traveling around from one university hospital to another and kept being told time after time that the surgeon capable of the microscopic manipulations we’re looking for just doesn’t exist. So he took a break and walked into an art museum. And there they had an exhibition called ‘The Grandeur of the Small.’”
    â€œHe just stumbled onto it?”
    â€œFell face first into it.”
    They stopped outside a windowed laboratory where several researchers worked. The activity inside was modern Bride of Frankenstein: high-tech instruments with an inventor’s disarray. Malcolm couldn’t explain further, he had to show her. He pushed open the airlock door and led her into a room bright with white enamel and chrome. His briefcase—Lara gave it to him on his birthday, the first year she took over the company after her father’s death—was lying on one of the lab tables. The briefcase was the company’s version of a safe; anything Malcolm put into it was not to be touched. Malcolm flipped open the brass latches and withdrew a protective box of polished chrome. He opened the box. It appeared to be empty.
    Malcolm lifted a pair of tweezers, and used them to withdraw an almost invisible object and place it on the slide of a microscope station. The microscope there was capable of sweeping views of the object on the slide. Malcolm dialed in adjustments—he was both physician and engineer, as her father was—then stepped back; Lara moved to the microscope.
    She looked through the eyepiece, stepped back,