by Thomas Page
The engine coughed while a simultaneous jolt went through the aircraft. Forrester tapped Blackwell, who seemed to wake up and look at him in surprise. Blackwell cried, “What’s the good word, Mr. Forrester?”
The second cough slowed the plane in the air as though power brakes had been stomped. Forrester’s briefcase slid from his lap. “Blackwell, did you feel that?”
“Feel what?”
“All right! Blackwell, turn this thing around and go back to Clayton. The whole setup stinks.” It was all his secretary Emma’s fault for telling him the company plane was booked to Houston that day and this was the only outfit that would make a firm commitment. Blackwell was flying him right into a storm in an airplane that was bored with its own engine.
The engine misfired again, causing a stomach-lurching drop in altitude. Forrester perceived they were in real trouble. “Come on, Blackwell, haul ass or you won’t get paid.”
“Mr. Forrester, take it easy! Everything is tickety-boo.”
Tickety-boo! Blackwell was old, all right, he hadn’t much longer to live anyway. Nevertheless he churned the plane round through the winds until they were headed back to the field. Blackwell was maddeningly, suicidally calm even when the engine choked off again and the plane pancaked down before the engine caught a second time. The grayness outside the windows was motionless. To Forrester it felt as though they were not moving at all but were suspended in some kind of limbo. Only the sound of the motor was earthly.
Blackwell’s sharp face looked straight ahead, his hand making constant, tiny adjustments to the stick.
“Damn,” said Forrester out loud. “I forgot her address. Shit.” He would call Kate as soon as they landed. By his watch it was seven-fifteen. She would be waking up now, taking a shower or sitting before the typewriter, her small face screwed up in concentration. Forrester’s spirits lifted at the thought of seeing Kate again.
Blackwell did not respond to his outburst. He remained settled comfortably in his seat looking satisfied that everything worked perfectly. Forrester decided he was hard of hearing.
The gray shaded rapidly to blackness. Through the windshield the sun was blocked by something in front of them. Forrester peered ahead, hoping it was a thundercloud. “Blackwell?”
“Yes, Mr. Forrester.”
“What’s that up ahead?”
Blackwell adjusted the stick and engine pitch. After a moment he said calmly, “A mountain.” The words came out without any inflection whatever, without even any interest, and his eyes remained sleepy and hooded as he watched it approach.
CHAPTER 4
In the Clayton clinic Bernice McCord was the nurse on duty at the main desk. Bernice and Lawrence Dutton had formed an unspoken alliance. His sin was smoking cigarettes, hers was washing down pizza with lager beer and nibbling chocolate cupcakes to the point where her bulk exceeded two hundred pounds.
That morning Dutton had just swabbed a strep throat and Bernice was poking the last crust of a tuna sandwich into her mouth when the emergency call came through. With an agility truly remarkable for a woman her size, Bernice grabbed the line, made notes, and dashed down the hall to the examination room where Dutton was writing out a prescription. A light plane had crashed three thousand feet up on Mount Pine and paramedics were on the way. “There’s no report of a fire,” she said. “Maybe it’s not so bad.”
Dutton grabbed his bag and pulled on his jacket. “I never heard of anybody dancing away from a plane wreck round here. Get hold of Jones, would you?”
“Yes, sir. And?”
“You guessed it. Prime the LS with type O and plasma and get everybody scrubbed for surgery. I guess that thing’s going to have its acid test.”
“Shall I call Mr. Forrester?”
“He’s gone home by now. But you can try the company. Try to get Bickel if you can. And see if Jameson is back.” Dutton almost knocked Branch over while hurrying to the ambulance. “Plane crash,” he said briefly.
“Who’s picking them up?” asked Branch.
“We are. It went down on the mountain, so we’re closest. I think Jameson is still up north somewhere. He’s been gone all week.” Jameson had left the previous Monday to go duck-hunting. Dutton hoped a giant duck had made off with his beeper to keep her eggs company.
The crash site was only about five miles from the clinic but the road wound through thick woods. A light drizzle and fog had made everything slippery and Dutton saw a storm approaching the mountain from the south. That was probably why the plane went down. God willing, they’d get there in twenty minutes.
As they drove, Dutton heard more specific information on the police band. The paramedics had landed a copter at the site and reported two casualties, both male Caucasians. One was in his early forties, the other, presumably the pilot, was dead. The paramedics reported the passenger had suffered massive blood loss, internal injuries, and broken bones everywhere. He was still breathing but not very well and the prognosis was not encouraging. Nobody wanted to move him till the doctor got there. To Dutton it sounded as if he would not even make it to the clinic alive.
When the van reached the crash site, Dutton could see a group of medics huddled round the victim. It did not look like a plane crash because none of the pieces of debris looked like they came from a plane. Rather it looked as though some celestial brat had spilled his metallic litter over the mountain slope. Bits of motor, slices of bent aluminum, wires, motor fragments, engine cylinders, propeller shaft parts, and gobbets of oil lay all over the swampy dram grass. The pilot’s body was in a zippered bag. The ground was wet and spongy, sucking at Dutton’s shoes as he raced from the van.
The paramedics stood back as Dutton kneeled over the stretcher. The passenger’s clothes were a shapeless, blood-soaked mass of fiber. Bones were visible on the lacerated legs, the chest was smashed in, both arms and legs were crumpled with multiple fractures, and the head had taken a hell of a blow that had knocked the nose and features askew, bending the whole face out of proportion.
As he looked at the face, Dutton felt a sudden sense of spinning terror and pity which he always felt at such times. Even if this guy made it to the hospital, he was no good for longer than four hours, and even if he did survive, the head damage indicated his life would not be very ecstatic. The medics had done an emergency tracheotomy to get air past his congested throat.
Then as he mentally rearranged the shape of the man’s face in his mind, identity surged out of the ruined features and seized Lawrence Dutton like a sadistic jester. This was Daniel Forrester. The light blond hair matted with blood, the smiling mouth with most of the teeth gone, were all too familiar. This was the man who walked with a light, athletic step, who cased a girl in the lodge last weekend and chased him away, who spoke in a resonant modulated voice. The man who had extolled the virtues and deeds of the Stendhal Holmes Life Support System had been selected by some Fate to be the first one in it.
They loaded him into the back of the ambulance. The driver handed Dutton the microphone as they sped back down the road. “Bernice, you won’t believe this. It’s Forrester.”
After the first gasp, Bernice regained her composure and asked, “Didn’t you say he’d gone back home?”
Dutton remembered the girl in the lodge. “He was delayed, I guess. It looks pretty lousy. Did you get through to Stendhal Holmes?”
“Yes. I better call them back though. Jones came in and Dr. Branch got the OR ready.”
“Good. The machine already has Forrester’s body memorized. That ought to give him a shot.”
While Bernice and Nurse Raskin prepared Forrester’s smashed body for surgery, Dutton scrubbed down with Jones and Evan Branch. Jones snorted, “How’s that for poetic justice?”
Evan Branch seemed to be in his sanctimonious-ass mood this morning. His face turned thunderous. He did not like jocular remarks about patients in his clinic. “Jones, I wouldn’t dream
of offending you by suggesting there may be large meanings behind such events as these.”
His pious obscurities no longer intimidated Gareth Jones. As Nurse Raskin slipped his gown over his outstretched arms, Jones replied, “Oh, I believe that, sir. I truly do.” He looked equably right into Branch’s fishlike, Protestant stare.
Now that surgery was imminent, Dutton was dying for a cigarette. “I believe it, too,” he said fervently.
“Do you really, Dutton?” asked Branch as Nurse Raskin snapped gloves over his hands. He watched Dutton’s eyes for some sign of sarcasm.
“Sure I do. Why, I believe there is a Great Power and whoever He or She is is about to lay a brick on all of us right now. Jones, where in the damned, infernal hell is Jameson anyway?”
“Slaughtering fowl, Dutton. Murder most fowl.”
“Why did he leave?”
“For some reason he doesn’t seem to like Forrester. Just as well he isn’t here now, isn’t it? Maybe he’d accidentally leave an oxygen tank inside him or something.”
“I fail to see what personal feelings have to do with Jameson’s duties,” snorted Branch.
“Next time, sir, I’ll tie him up,” answered Jones.
“Next time, send him to me.”
Jones backed out the door, gloved hands in the air. “Let’s go, last one in is a neoplasm head.” Jones made it into the operating room before Evan Branch could gather his thunderbolts together and hurl them at his head.
Anyone who knew the difference between flesh and metal could tell by one look at Forrester’s shattered body that his case was hopeless. Blood leaked into him through IVs and out again from dozens of wounds. Suction equipment drained cataracts of blood and fluid from his chest and abdominal cavity. His pelvis was broken in three places so he would never be able to walk without canes and his blood pressure rose and dropped as erratically as a paper glider in a chimney. The doctors and nurses were in continuous motion picking bone splinters out of organs, snapping ribs into place and sewing up incisions. They filled him full of coagulants to cut down the bleeding and Nurse Raskin pumped the ventilating bag for his lungs. When someone was not cutting, someone was sewing, injecting or sucking out, and it was all for nothing.
They ran an EEG on his head, which revealed that brain activity was feeble. Jones had partially opened the skull to pick out bone splinters and fluid and he left it partly open so the traumatized gray matter could swell without crushing itself against the interior of his head.
At moments like these, Evan Branch became a physician whom Hippocrates might have praised but whom Jones and Dutton could happily have strangled. Branch said, “He’s not dead till his heart stops, gentlemen.”
“Unless he’s already died and his heart just hasn’t got the message,” Jones answered.
Dutton was always amazed by how much expression eyes could convey. All wore surgical masks yet. Branch positively radiated contempt for Jones. “He is not dead, Jones, and he will not die if we have anything to say about it.” He spoke with hard, arctic control.
Dutton answered, “His chest was full of crap by the time I got there. I expect there’s been some brain damage.”
Branch turned to Bernice. “The LS still has records of Forrester’s vital functions, does it not?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Jones?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll get it ready.”
Dutton said as he went out the door, “Set up a program for pneumonia. And we’ll use the head attachment.” Dutton touched several of Forrester’s muscles. They were flaccid. If Forrester’s eyes were open, they would be wide and staring. Daniel Forrester was a two-hundred-pound lump of flesh with a beating heart.
“All right, Lawrence,” said Branch. “Let’s sew him up.”
In the intensive care ward, the canopy of the capsule hissed open. Jones pulled out all the IV lines from their recesses in the side and cleared them. He was lifting out the helmet when the door opened and Forrester’s body was wheeled in. While he was still on the table, they plugged the TVs into his arms, attached the kidney catheters, and hooked the trachael and suction tubes from the helmet into his mouth. Jones smeared jelly onto Forrester’s forehead where the electrodes would be attached. They worked rapidly and a bit fearfully, half hoping Forrester would die before they could get him inside so the machine would not have to be used.
When the helmet was snapped over his head and his chest was covered with the heart monitor strap, they were ready to go. Forrester’s body was umbilically attached to the LS capsule, his body wired and punctured with monitors and IVs. Dutton found himself sweating. The readouts indicated Forrester’s blood pressure was still falling and his brain activity still fading. Anything that happened within his body would be recorded on the green screen, once they sealed him up inside. Dutton said, “I guess we’re going to do it, aren’t we?”
Jones checked off the list of procedures, head nodding at each item until he came to the end. “Everything’s in order. He’s now in the hands of the Stendhal Holmes Corporation.”
They lifted Daniel Forrester off the table and gently laid him in the fluid bed. Entangled with wires, his body floated for a second before becoming still. Evan Branch removed his surgical mask and nodded at Jones. Jones activated the plexiglass canopy. Soundlessly, like a transparent cloud, the canopy closed over Forrester’s body. Oxygen hissed into the capsule and a glare of purplish ultraviolet light bathed the body in an unearthly glow. Daniel Forrester was now sealed off from the world.
On the screen, the scanners recorded the white count as the colonies of bacteria which had invaded his body were hunted down and ruthlessly exterminated by the scanners. Marrow and spleen replaced the red cell loss.
Jones punched out an EEG reading. “Still fading,” he said. “He’s going and he’s not slowing down. The heart’s trying to get more blood to the brain.”
A little cluster of rippling yellow lights and a series of beeps indicated the heart monitor was sorting out the nerve synapses of that organ. Dutton said, “It’s trying too hard. He’s going to arrest.”
“You bet,” Jones replied. He tapped a temperature gauge. “Look. The machine’s cooling him off. There’s some epinephrine activity in one of the IVs. This is going to be interesting.”
The body temperature plummeted, particularly round the helmet. The machine was cooling Forrester to minimize tissue damage when the heart stopped.
As the end approached, Bernice pulled a chair closer to the console. Dutton noticed her eyes were red and she kept wiping them. He patted her shoulder and she sniffled.
The LS console emitted a sharp, squealing howl and a red light blinked. Daniel Forrester’s heart had stopped. In the corner of the screen a digital timer read out the length of the arrest in microseconds. The heart fibrillated briefly, then became still again.
Silence settled on the ward like the blanket of fog that hung round the mountains. The LS capsule was violently active, shooting scanners up and down the length of the body, the readouts reporting oxygen starvation. The ventilator aspirated the lungs. Oxygen went in, oxygen came out. Requiescat in pace, Dutton thought. If he continued like this longer than fifteen minutes, brain death would be total, meaning Forrester’s personality had completely disintegrated.
Jones punched a program out and stared at it. “There it is again.”
“What?” asked Dutton.
“See?” He tapped at a clearing in a maze of numbers. “Magnetism. It’s almost undetectable but it’s right over his forehead.”
Dutton tried to make sense of the computer digits but they looked to him like a gray blur and he could see nothing unusual in them. Jones’s eye was trained for this sort of thing. He was about to ask about it when he noticed something had changed in the room. It was turning cold.
Evan Branch’s eyes were looking round the room. “Is that my imagination?”
> Dutton blew on his hands. “No, sir. I don’t know where it’s coming from, there’s no draft in here.”
It was an unpleasant dampish cold and Dutton thought he smelled some undertone of odor with it.
“Bernice, check the thermostat, would you?”
Bernice looked at the wall gauge. “According to this, it’s sixty-eight degrees in here.”
Jones looked round the room as the cold locked down so tightly they were breathing steam. “What the hell’s going on in here, Bernice?”
“I said the temperature is sixty-eight degrees.”
“Well, shit on that, the whole heating system’s going crackers. It’s practically freezing in here.”
They listened to the ticking of the console and the whisper of the aspirator within the capsule breathing oxygen into Forrester’s lungs. Still the temperature fell. Evan Branch tightened his surgical gown round his chest and Dutton plunged his hands into his pockets.
Bernice began walking toward them. In a corner near her, one of the IV poles she had rolled in with the body toppled over with a vicious crash of broken glass and sticky dextrose.
On the console, they saw Daniel Forrester’s heart explode into life. The sluggish cooled blood began to course through the body and the aspirator picked up carbon dioxide passing out of the lungs. Only one thing was wrong. Daniel Forrester had been without oxygen for seven minutes. His EEG was totally flat. Consciousness had fled his ruined body like a fugitive cat.
The temperature climbed rapidly back to normal. Jones sat back from the console and exhaled, looking over the data. “He can’t take many more like that.”
“How did it start the heart?”
“God knows, Dutton. It tests every nerve fiber round the heart and compares it with other fibers. The memory bank tells it where to send a current. Then if it can’t find a nerve with its own electrical impulse, it puts one in itself. That’s a nutshell explanation. Look at the chemicals it used, digitalis, acids . . .” Jones shook his head in wonder. “There’s been minimal tissue death, mostly at the extremities. The scanners are shooting him full of antibiotics. I don’t think this machine will even let him get gangrene.” He turned to Evan Branch. “Sir? I think we should put a call in to Stendhal Holmes.”