by Thomas Page
Considering the fact that so many of its patients were cardiac cases, the Clayton County Medical Center was built at about two thousand feet higher an elevation than it should have been. It was a spanking new L-shaped facility, constructed and funded through the bequest of a converted Mafioso who became entranced with the Rocky Mountains and the concept of forgiveness for the sin of blasting some thirty-seven rivals. He had been converted in Clayton by a physician named Evan Branch who suffered a heart attack after his wife passed away. The Mafioso put Branch in charge of the clinic which was built on a mountain slope. Since Branch himself was over seventy, he was unable to summon the energy to convince the man to build the clinic closer to Aspen where there were more prospective patients. The mobster had insisted isolated mountain countries needed medical facilities more than cities did. He instructed Branch on the honor of his Episcopalian soul—the Mafioso was technically Catholic but Branch convinced him Episcopalians were just Catholics from the good side of the tracks—to equip it with the finest machinery and staff available and provide service to the poorest people in the mountains.
Evan Branch was thus the senior physician in the clinic. Branch had gray hair as thick as cables and a face that looked weathered because of the density of the skin and the depth of the lines in it. His steel-rimmed glasses hardened the impression of fierceness. Give Branch a beard and he could have stepped from the Old Testament shouting invectives that would topple fortresses.
Branch could die at anytime. He could die during his afternoon nap, he could die in the bathtub, on the road home, on the telephone, or at his desk. To Branch, death was no longer a winged, monk’s-hooded giant with a scythe. Death was so familiar a daily presence to him that Branch was honestly not afraid of it anymore.
Three staff doctors and a group of part-time nurses comprised the staff of the Clayton facility. Arnold Jameson was a moon-faced land speculator who dabbled in surgery to finance his own plane, shotgun collection, and brokerage fees. Nobody liked Jameson, not even Branch, and all welcomed the day when he would either depart or be torn asunder by a duck he failed to shoot. Unfortunately Jameson was a good doctor. Fortunately he took many hunting trips to Canada.
By unanimous consent Gareth Jones was the brainiest man in the place, maybe in the state of Colorado. Jones was thirty-seven and before he went into medicine he had been a software designer for a company much like Stendhal Holmes. His nimbleness with the most baffling equipment was dazzling. He had festooned his cabin with an array of television and radio receivers that could pick up everything from Turkish radio broadcasts to telemetry from the Voyager spacecraft as it passed the planet Saturn. Jones made everything in his basement. He built his own stereo, television, calculator, and oscilloscopes. With all this expertise, everyone figured that a simple uncomplicated human body would be a snap for him. Probably it would have been, had Jones been more interested in humans.
Branch’s favorite doctor was Lawrence Dutton, a black-bearded forty-year-old man who hung out a little too often at the Clayton Lodge singles bar, casing ski visitors. Dutton explained he was not a womanizer, it was just that he got claustrophobic in this place and besides bodies were his business and each assignation taught him a bit more about psyches as well as flesh. When he came to Clayton, he told Branch he would give the place a two-year shot to see how he liked a rural setting. The two years were coming to an end and Branch was afraid they were going to lose him.
That morning Lawrence Dutton’s favorite patient was back—Sam Ford, a seventy-two-year-old alcoholic who was filling up with blood again. Sam lived in a drafty cabin with a woman named Jenny who had bought the place years before on her proceeds from a life as a prostitute. She poured him into a jeep and sloshed him down to the clinic.
As he shot a keg of vitamin B into Sam’s arm, Dutton asked, “Sam, what’ve you been drinking?”
“Vodka and Alka Seltzer. Tastes great, it’s cheap, and I never get a hangover.”
“That’s because you don’t have a stomach. In fact you don’t have any guts at all, they’ve been dissolved by booze. Alcohol goes right from the back of your mouth through that long, echoing emptiness where your digestive system used to be and straight out your peehole. It’s medically impossible for you to get drunk. How old are you again?”
Sam thought it over. “Seventy-something. Jennie’s keeping track. By God, she’s sixty-six and she still goes like a diesel piston. Never thought I’d have so much sex when I got old. Old is hot. How come you ain’t married, Doc?”
“Too many years in the Foreign Legion. There I was in the desert holding the fort when a musketball goes right through my . . .”
Sam spat and wiped his mouth. He had the decency to aim for the trash can. “Nobody in this dump is married.”
“Why get married? We climb the nurses.”
The sound of hammering clattered down the hall, rattling the bottles. Sam roared, “What the frogshit’s all that noise? Is this a hospital or a train wreck?”
Dutton withdrew the needle and patted Sam’s arm with cotton. “We’re installing some equipment. We have been chosen by the mighty Stendhal Holmes corporation’s computer to test one of three life support systems.”
“How come?”
“Because we are a small county clinic, that’s why. One is in Los Angeles, one’s in some town in Ohio, I think, and one is here. The computer told them to test the machine in three demographically different areas and see what the operating costs and patient requirements are.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. How do you feel, Sam?”
“Never felt better!”
This was probably true. Dutton figured Sam’s liver was about the size of an Indian nickel and just as hard. Yet he kept going while thirty-year-old tennis players had cardiacs on the court. Somewhere in there was a moral.
Gareth Jones’s pale face, capped with his single, lank lock of black hair, looked in the doorway. “Branch wants you in the IC ward right now, Dutton. They’re going to demonstrate the LS. Dutton?”
“Yes?”
“This thing is absolutely incredible.”
“How nice.”
“I mean really fabulous. Hurry up.”
Sam slipped off his stool and tried a perfect little jig on the floor. “I’ll run on back home. You guys are too busy for patients.”
To Dutton, the LS capsule looked like a futuristic coffin. He looked through the plexiglass canopy on top. A foot-thick layer of viscous amber fluid lined the bottom of the tub. The liquid would prevent bed sores by distributing a patient’s body weight more evenly. Lining the inner sides were railings which contained IV hoses, suction tubes, and the heart monitor, a two-foot-wide strap quilled with electrodes. Toward the foot of the capsule were more straps equipped with kidney catheters. Set into the recess at the head of the device was a thick plastic helmet containing encephalographic sensors and suction tubes to keep the mouth and lungs clear.
Hands clasped behind his back, Dutton walked round the capsule. “Looks awfully heavy,” he commented.
Irwin Bickel answered smoothly, “It weighs nine hundred seventeen pounds, not counting the consoles and cables.”
“What’s the point?” Dutton asked bluntly.
Daniel Forrester used his flashbulb smile the way some men used a pistol. Without a chip in his grin, he began rattling off reasons. “Cutting staff and operating costs. Nursing costs. Electrical costs. Intensive care can break a national treasury. Diagnostic lab costs go down, the delay in diagnostic lab reports is eliminated, specialized physicians . . .”
“You win,” laughed Dutton.
“. . . not to mention postoperative recovery. Put a patient in here for six hours and the machine will project for two days what treatments you’ll need as well as probable complications.”
“Does it perform surgery?” Dutton meant it as a joke.
Bickel answer
ed seriously. “We’re working on a laser system for minor cysts and growths.”
“It’s quite a device,” Dutton agreed.
“No one has ever died on it yet,” said Bickel proudly.
Because of his heart condition, Evan Branch kept his left leg propped on a chair. “Lawrence, it seems to me this thing will be most useful for burn treatments. That’s the gravest accident we have round here, that and broken bones from the ski lodge. People round here just grow old, gentlemen, like myself. There’s no cure for that.”
Looking at Irwin Bickel and Daniel Forrester, Dutton was struck by how the two men complemented each other. They could have been a comedy team, like Abbott and Costello, with Forrester the handsome straight man and Bickel the hairy, short, zany half of the group. Bickel looked like a perpetual student with a lush swamp of coiffed black hair, a thick beard, and a calculating, introverted expression, the kind of man who codified and pigeonholed reality into exact compartments. He was the brain, Forrester was the personality; Bickel had the substance, Forrester had the style.
Bickel grinned at Forrester. “Daniel? How about doing your death scene?”
Forrester set down his clipboard and took off his coat. As he began unbuttoning his shirt, Jameson asked Bickel, “Wouldn’t it be easier to do this with a dummy?”
“That’s exactly what we’re using,” Bickel replied. To Forrester, who now stood before the doctors in the altogether, he said, “Climb in, dummy.”
Forrester dipped one foot into the sticky fluid like a swimmer testing the water. He had a carefully muscled body, the result of workouts and weightlifting rather than physical labor, and a nicely modulated suntan, even, brown, not too light nor too dark, somewhat like good toast. Forrester lay down on his back in the capsule.
“Point number one,” he said to them. “Never place a patient face down in this thing or he’ll drown.”
Jameson bent over the edge and touched the kidney catheters. “I don’t suppose we could . . .”
Daniel Forrester suddenly snapped his fingers and pointed at Jameson. “St. Louis!” he cried. “Right?”
Jameson jumped, flushed red, and straightened up quickly. “Come again?”
“You were at St. Louis Memorial in 1969, weren’t you? I was up there installing some components for a metabolic analyzer.”
Looking round at the others, Jameson said, “No.”
“You had a mustache then, didn’t you?”
“No,” Jameson said between set teeth, his voice thin.
Forrester shrugged and laughed, “Sorry.”
“Forget it.”
“In the past twelve years I must have met ninety-five percent of the doctors in the old U.S. of A.”
Dutton joked, “And a pretty rum lot they are aren’t they?”
Forrester clamped the chest straps of the heart monitor across his ribs. “This will give you an idea of how the scanning systems work. I don’t feel like sticking needles in me at the moment so we’ll pass on the blood test.” He gave Dutton an impish grin. “Give me a beer and ten minutes and I’ll pee into the urine attachment.”
“That won’t be necessary either.”
Bickel sat at the computer console and hit several switches. They all sensed rather than heard a sound coming from the black tub, a near-subsonic suggestion of power and precision that made them involuntarily step back from the capsule.
Bickel said, “Tell them how it feels, Dan.”
Forrester ran his fingers over the chest straps. “It tickles a bit. Sort of like a massage.”
“I’m closing the top, okay?”
“Do your worst, Frankenstein.”
Soundlessly the plexiglass canopy closed over Daniel Forrester. On the console before Bickel, lights indicating oxygen and carbon dioxide levels came on. From both ends of the capsule, four metal arches rolled out on rails and began methodically crossing Daniel Forrester’s supine form.
After a pause of perhaps twenty seconds, an avalanche of computer data rolled over the computer screen. Instant readouts on Forrester’s skin temperature and perspiration rates were mixed with data on the exact composition of his breath and the kinds of bacteria floating inside the capsule.
Bickel folded his hands in his lap and said, “Now we give it two more minutes until the green light comes on and you’ll see a sight that will knock your bones right out of you. Ask Dan to slip the helmet on, would you?”
Jones leaned over the canopy. Forrester already knew what to do. He grinned at Jones and stuck out his tongue, then he slipped the black plastic helmet out of its recess over his head, taking care not to touch the scanning hoops crossing his body. Now he resembled a medieval knight, nude but for the head gear.
On the console screen, Daniel Forrester’s brain waves marched across the surface. After another green light came on, Bickel punched a series of buttons. In the capsule, Forrester removed the helmet.
On the screen there appeared a perfect ovoid net of tiny, shining white lines, thousands of them bunching into small clumps of white at the edges in intricate tracery, as delicate as needlepoint. Bickel pointed out the clumps and named them. Aural nerves. Optic nerve system. Olfactory nerve junctions. Another button zoomed them into the maze of lines which dissolved to an even finer one that revealed the synapses at the end of each nerve trunk.
Bickel began punching various buttons. In silence the assembled doctors saw a human body’s interior revealed in greater detail than any medical school cadaver. Forrester’s body yielded up its secrets in three dimensions. His circulatory system, his liver, his swelling and closing lungs and the tiny air sacs within them, the palpitating heart, the flow of blood, each picture accompanied by a little spray of print to the side of the screen which informed them of such arcane information as the fungus colonies between his toes, in his teeth, and under his fingernails.
Dutton felt a death knell for his profession and wondered if that were bad. There was not a doctor alive who had not made mistakes. Every function of Daniel Forrester had been scanned and printed into a memory bank, every detail laid out and described for them. For years, it had been suspected that technology could perform a physical examination better than a human. This machine confirmed that and went a step further, into treatment. This machine knew Daniel Forrester better than any of them ever could.
Bickel said, “You realize that with a regular patient, IVs will be checking out blood and urine. Once you map the blood there’s no end to what it can do.”
For several moments they stared fascinated at the green screen. Dutton moved over to the capsule and joined Jones and Jameson there. Forrester lay quietly on the fluid bed, his eyes closed.
Then he opened his eyes and watched them talk in low voices round the capsule. His smile and good humor vanished. At the console, Bickel frowned as the screen recorded a seismic jump in Forrester’s sweat and heart rates. He was not certain if the machine had begun malfunctioning. Then the breathing rate also climbed. Together the three formed the classical symptoms of fear.
Daniel Forrester never told Birkel he detested this part of the routine. The liquid bed stuck in his hair and glued to his back. The sealed capsule made him feel choked, paralyzed, trapped. Imagine being immobile for days, weeks, months, conceivably even years, with nothing to look at but the light fixture and your own little square of hospital-beige ceiling. It was akin to being sealed up forever. Factor in a patient in continuous undiagnosable pain, skewered with needles and probed with electricity, and the LS capsule then resembled an iron maiden, an instrument of endless torture.
All round him, he heard clicks and ticks and hums and buzzes as the scanners moved on their tracks and clean air wafted through the capsule. On the liquid, his weight was so spread out he felt as if he were floating. He sensed the machine had wrapped invisible, clinging tendrils of electricity all around him, thousands of tiny tentacles, sticky and entang
ling. He was a larva in a plastic cocoon.
Forrester thought these people a truly weird bunch of doctors. Branch was a sardonic, half-dead, elderly man whose mind was always elsewhere. Jones was a cold-blooded little snot, and Jameson a liar. He had seen Jameson in St. Louis, he was sure of it. Jameson was hiding from something up here.
But Dutton. Dutton was a good-natured, bearded bear. It was some moments before Forrester pinned down why he didn’t like Dutton. It was the beautiful, luxurious beard. From time to time Forrester had wanted to grow a beard and had never been able to make a proper one. His career had always hinged on his personal appearance. He had always sold things, and he had always known how much of an impact his looks had on other people. In a word, Daniel Forrester was vain.
Damn Dutton’s beard. Forrester’s beard had looked like strands of goldenrod. He bet Dutton had a lot of girlfriends. Sometimes Forrester had the most irrational, jealous thoughts. He was almost disliking Dutton for that lovely beard; he sincerely hoped they would never run into each other outside the clinic. Forrester tried to feel ashamed of himself.
From his angle the faces of the doctors looked goofy, a collection of jaws, throats, and talking nasal hairs. What in hellacious time was the matter with him? He was nervous.
Fun’s fun but let me out, boys.
Forrester caught Jameson looking at him through narrowed, calculating eyes. Quickly the doctor looked away. Gotcha, Doc, I’ll call St. Louis and find out why you’re so shy.
The fluid sucked lovingly at Daniel Forrester’s body.
Another man joined the doctors, standing between Jones and Dutton. He did not join the conversation. Instead he looked through the plexiglass at Forrester. He had blond hair and blue eyes and was wearing a blue blazer jacket.
He looks like me!
It had to be a joke. Bickel had put some sod in a suit and somehow made a mask of Forrester’s face. It was a pretty expensive, elaborate prank and Forrester was not sure if he was supposed to laugh or not.