Free Hazard by Gerald A Browne Page A

second.
    Obviously Keven’s brain was very hard at work. Relaxed as she was, and alone in that silent room, it was doubtful that she was responding to any external sensory stimulation. At least not to this extent.
    Kersh noted the auxiliary channel that corresponded with the electrodes attached to the corners of Keven’s eyelids. Indications of very rapid eye movement. Her eyes were shifting erratically, as though she were being bombarded by myriad visual attractions. Despite the fact that she was looking at nothing but a blank black wall.
    All the while, the beta waves kept coming from her. Within less than a minute they had doubled again in frequency, voltage and length; were peaking up to a hundred and ten cycles; one hundred twenty-five millivolts, one hundred seventy thousandths of a second.
    Kersh tried to identify with what Keven was experiencing at that moment. By comparative standards her brain was electrocuting itself. Yet she felt no pain.
    The betas went on and up to one hundred thirty cycles, one hundred fifty millivolts, two hundred thousandths of a second. And then, abruptly—
    The betas stopped.
    As though someone had pulled the plug or severed the wires, the monitor that had been registering the beta rhythm indicated no beta response at all. Strange enough, but all the more so because the expected didn’t happen—there was no reversion to an alpha-wave rhythm. The monitor that registered alphas showed no sign of activity. And the eye movement, so prominent before, had suddenly stopped.
    Incredible as it seemed, every monitor relating to Keven’s brain was now presenting nothing. Blank. It appeared that her entire cerebral cortex had shut down. For one, two, three, four, five seconds.
    Then, while all other channels stayed void, there came a distinct pulsating wave of a different sort. It didn’t begin low and build up—it came through full at once. Eleven cycles per second with a very high amplitude of two hundred fifty millivolts. Each wave was extremely short, a mere ten thousandths of a second. Graphically, the pattern being recorded was one of long, sharp, individual spikes, like a symmetrical line of identical inverted icicles.
    It was relatively easy for Kersh to determine from which part of Keven’s brain these waves were coming. He only needed to see which of the keyed depth electrodes on Keven’s scalp was picking up this isolated electrical activity.
    The old brain. That was the point of origin. Deep down past the new bark, inside the old bark where the three earliest brain vesicals had evolved. Just anterior of the brain stem, those three known as the rhombencephalon, metencephalon, and thalamencephalon, also called the hind, mid, and fore sections of the old brain. In the evolution of the human thinking and sensory mechanisms, these three had been the first to develop. However, most of their earlier functions had since been taken over by newer brain parts.
    Kersh suspected that the waves originating in the old brain were possibly the so-called lambda waves that neuroscientists had detected infrequently on the EEGS of certain subjects. It seemed that lambdas showed up with some subjects and didn’t with others. Kersh wasn’t sure they were that unpredictable and generally ignored lambdas, so he arbitrarily called them something else. Psi waves.
    Now, as abruptly as they’d begun, the psi waves coming from Keven cut off. Leaving once again that inexplicable, contrary one, two, three, four, five seconds of blank. Then in proper reversion sequence the recognizable beta waves returned as strong as before. Gradually they subsided to normal range.
    Kersh focused on the monitor that corresponded with the graph, the easel-like electronic apparatus on which, earlier, Keven had drawn a heart.
    Within seconds, there, on the silvery face of that monitor, appeared the image she had chosen to draw this time.
    A circle containing a much smaller circle.
    Kersh