by Thomas Page
Under Bickel’s precise voice was a tremor of panic. He was still dazed by the news of the crash and had to struggle to think coolly and impartially about the machine’s operations. “We were going to have lunch today. I . . . Did you say he was gone for seven minutes?”
“Yes,” Jones answered. “His EEG is dead. His brain is gone.”
“I see.” Bickel exhaled a quavering breath.
“Unless the EEG is malfunctioning.”
Bickel was silent for a moment before saying, “I wish I could say the LS is not functioning. God, that’s the first time I ever wished that, but it is functioning. If the EEG is flat, it means Dan’s brain is dead.”
They were talking in Branch’s office over a speaker phone so that all could participate. Dutton could hear Bickel riffling pages. Jones said, “Forrester is breathing on his own right now. Can you tell me exactly what the machine is doing?”
Bickel said, “It sounds to me like it’s doing everything it’s designed to do. Only I’d say it’s doing it better than it was designed to do. Our situation is kind of like testing a miracle drug. We knew it would work well but no one’s quite certain how.”
Jones’s eyebrows rose to crested points and he made some notes on a pad. “You mean to tell me you don’t know what the LS system is doing?”
“We stacked backup systems on top of backup systems in the design stage . . .”
Jones interrupted by firing off a series of pointed questions at Bickel. How good are the computer tracks that scan the heartbeat? What about the IV system—did it get the goodies into the patient exactly as the console said? Wasn’t there a two- or three-second lapse? Who made the quartz crystals in the system? Were they tested?
Dutton followed the gist if not the details of the conversation. That was technology for you. Crystallography alone had opened up such complex vistas, designers felt they made systems as mysterious as living organisms themselves. It was obvious that no single mind at Stendhal Holmes or maybe anywhere on earth could understand everything the machine did.
Jones finished his questions and tapped his pencil eraser against his teeth. “We’ve gone a wee bit past questions of clinical or tissue death. How long must Forrester be in arrest before the machine gives up?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You mean to tell me there’s no way of knowing if the patient has died or not?”
“Dr. Jones,” Bickel snapped in a surprising burst of testiness, “that’s why the device is being tested.”
“I know it’s just a machine, but does it know what death is?”
“Phrased that way,” said Bickel, “death is a theological concept and not applicable to the LS system.”
“How’s that again?” rumbled Branch.
“You are looking at the LS system with the wrong attitude. Necessity governs its actions. It doesn’t know or care what death is, as Jones suggested. It will only do everything necessary to get the heart started again. That is its purpose. Frankly, we don’t know how great its capabilities are with this. We know they’re greater than any other known equipment but it cannot work miracles and it will inform you if it can’t revive Dan.”
“I’m wondering about miracles,” mused Jones. “Do you know why it would pick up a small magnetic field over Forrester’s forehead? According to the printouts, the same thing happened to Mrs. Cody.”
“You always have magnetism with electrical currents.”
Jones became thoughtful and doodled some more with the pencil. “It’s not connected with the machine, I think. It’s keeping tabs on all of Forrester’s bodily functions we know about. I wonder if it isn’t watching a few we don’t know about.”
“I beg your pardon, Dr. Jones?”
Jones suffered a sudden attack of discretion. “Never mind. I think you people left one circuit out of this erector set.”
“What’s that?”
“You left out a circuit that would tell us if and when Forrester’s soul has departed for good. Now I have a little plan of action here. I propose we wait for three days and see how the machine copes with his arrests.”
“Why three days?”
“Why not?”
Bickel sighed. “All right. Fair enough.”
“After that, I think we should have Forrester and the machine transferred. I think the body should also be examined by outside observers. Can Forrester be moved?”
“Dan will be dead in three days,” Bickel said bluntly. “He’ll be moved directly to a mausoleum.”
“The question is whether he’ll stay dead. I expect a few thousand medical schools would like to see this system in operation. We’re not equipped for long-term care of comatose patients.”
“I repeat, he will be dead in three days so the whole question is academic.”
After Jones hung up, he avoided their eyes as though embarrassed in a pleased way, like a child who’s just scored a hundred on a test.
“Dr. Jones,” said Branch. “I do not like the way you throw the word death around.”
“Sorry, sir, I meant no disrespect.”
“That’s good advice about other observers,” Branch continued. “I shall make a few calls.”
Jones said, “I’d like to take Jameson’s shift tomorrow night. In case he’s not back again. In fact I’d like to watch Forrester for all three days.”
Bernice spoke, surprising them all. They had forgotten she was in the office. “I sure wish I knew why that IV pole fell over.”
At three-thirty that afternoon, Daniel Forrester’s heart stopped again, this time for ten minutes. That evening it stopped beating for twenty-one minutes, thus besting the record set by the Ohio system. Each time the machine brought it back to work with Herculean though obscure efforts.
Bernice manned the console at the main desk down the hall from the ward. During the last arrest, she looked over the vital signs on her screen and said to Dutton, “He sure looks dead to me.” Dutton had to agree with her.
The place Katherine Burnham called home was an apartment tower on the border between Santa Monica and Venice overlooking a stretch of beach. Two of these towers faced each other. On lonely nights she could look down at the swimming pool and shops dividing them or into the windows of the building opposite hers and see what the other occupants were doing.
When she arrived from Clayton, she checked her mail in the lobby. Bills, invitations to vegetarian seminars, and one thick envelope whose masthead read alumnus society, st. helen’s college, class of 1962. Out fell an invitation to a college reunion at a Sheraton Hotel in Los Angeles. The reunion was scheduled for the end of the week.
Mr. Fudd yowled happily when she picked him up from the girl living at the end of the hall. “He’s a perfect pussycat,” the girl breathed. “Not a flea anywhere and he poo-pooed into the sand.” Fudd was a tiger tabby with yellow eyes. He curled and writhed with feline ecstasy in her arms.
Kate looked her apartment over. The plants needed watering, it smelled like dust and rust, but the furniture was still there. Kate always expected Steve to get up from the flowered sofa and greet her, but that was just a reflex.
Naturally the phone rang the minute she set her bags down. Naturally it was Steve. “Welcome back, Kate.”
“Hi. How’s your stomach?”
“We’re back on speaking terms. I wanted to invite you somewhere this weekend.”
“Uh-oh.”
“It’s all very innocent. There’s the annual Hare Krishna parade in Venice on Saturday—live elephants, free food if you dig tree bark, games, and enlightenment. How about it?”
“Is Diane coming, too?”
“Er . . . yes. The fact is, she wanted to meet you.”
“Now that’s ridiculous! A man, his wife, and his girlfriend all going to a Hare Krishna picnic. Steve, you are downright surrealistic.”
>
“I knew you’d bite. See you Saturday morning.”
“I didn’t say I’d go.”
“One look out your window at those elephants and you will.”
Kate fixed a drink, stretched out on the sofa, and kicked off her shoes. She looked over the reunion invitation and found herself thinking of Hadley.
Dear old Hadley. Kate and Hadley had been pinned in their senior year. He was the only man she had ever loved whom she addressed by his last name as often as his first, which was George. Hadley had been ahead of his time. He had worn bow ties in the early 1960s.
On a whim Kate riffled her closet boxes until she came up with a college yearbook. There was Hadley, wearing his tweed jacket and a wide, shapeless, toothy smile that slipped around his face like a croissant round a buttered hot plate. It was the grin that youth flashes to show eager idealism. That tweed jacket had been three years old when they met. Dear Hadley never did learn how to dress. In those days the boys wore thin ties—Hadley wore bows because he never learned to tie Windsor knots—and pegged pants so tight it looked like their legs had been dipped in black ink. Not Hadley. He looked as if he had accidentally wandered into his clothes on his way to the john. Kate had actually lost her virginity to him, figuring he would be sensitive. He was. He was also clean, and his mind was set on a career in public administration as a Republican. He did not view the world as a conquest so much as a puzzle, and he did not threaten suicide when she told him the marriage was off. Hadley had admitted to thinking along those lines himself.
Kate examined the photo in critical appraisal. Another problem with dear Hadley was that he was short. When making love, she had feared smothering him.
Kate decided to go to the reunion after all. She finished her drink, washed her glass, and fell on top of the bed with Mr. Fudd purring contentedly at her feet.
Fog.
Only it was not fog, it was smoke.
Only it was not smoke; it was gray and it shifted but it was odorless.
In life there are occasions when dreams come between sleep and wakefulness. The dreamer realizes they are dreams and knows that if he concentrates on any one detail the dream will evaporate and he will wake up. Kate lay still and let the dream happen.
“Kate, where are you?” Daniel Forrester’s voice was near her elbow, quavering with fear.
Surprised, she answered, “I’m right here, Daniel.” When she turned to speak to him he was gone and the grayness covered all.
Again came the voice, this time ahead of her. “Kate, where are you?”
“You know perfectly well where I am.”
In reaching out her hands, Kate was startled to find the limbo was solid. Forrester was in it somewhere, looking for her.
“Kate, help me.” Within his cry was a primal, crushing despair. She could sense him in the gray, pulsating gloom like a wounded animal, coming close and then withdrawing from her.
She tried to see him. “I’m with you, Daniel.”
His emotional state was anarchic in its power, flickering from terror to fury to joy, one mood change after the other like an infant. She sensed him circling round her. Then he seemed to have pinned her down and she felt him rushing toward her. She did not want him to find her; she deliberately woke up.
It was one in the morning. Water dripped from the kitchen faucet, someone in the other building had the TV on too loud, and a late-night couple giggled their way down the hall. Kate lay inert until her pounding heart calmed down. Mr. Fudd looked brightly at her, ears up, eyes sharp with concern. She nudged the cat with her toe.
“What the hell was that all about, Fudd?” she asked.
CHAPTER 5
Nurse Raskin was Dr. Jones’s kind of nurse. She was practical to the point of stolidity, she was precise and nimble with emergencies, and she was uncommunicative. She said nothing as he filled her in on the LS capsule. “Essentially you do nothing,” he said. “Just watch the power readings on the cables and put in whatever drugs it calls for.”
“I’m a registered nurse, not a union electrician,” she grumbled.
Jones patted her shoulder. “You can read and that’s what’s really important.”
“What do I do if he arrests?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
Nurse Raskin listened to the LS capsule and decided the strangest aspect of it was the continuous sounds it made. A multitude of ticks and beeps emanated from both the capsule and the consoles. The scanning hoops moved steadily up and down the body like roving bloodhounds. As she watched, one of the hoops paused over the chest, generating a flurry of soft clicks. The screen informed them a tiny bacterial culture was growing in an elbow joint. The scanner had picked up its heat. A needle emerged from the arc of the hoop and fired a tiny measure of antibiotic directly into the skin.
“This thing uses up a lot of antibiotics,” said Jones, punching out a long scan. “See? Clean as a whistle, no mucus anywhere.” He paused. “Nurse Raskin. Do you believe things converge?”
“Such as what, Dr. Jones?”
“Destiny I suppose you’d call it. That we live our lives in kind of a line that leads us to a juncture with another line. That people cannot rush their futures or slow them down but that the world propels us to them at its own speed. Do you believe that?”
After a moment’s thought, she answered, “Yes.”
“There are laws governing coincidence you know. Synchronicity. For example, I’ve often wondered how I wound up in the Clayton clinic. I had an offer to go to Phoenix and didn’t take it. I don’t know why, call it an instinct. A hunch. A little birdie told me my life was meant to be here rather than in a city.”
“Why, Doctor?”
Jones scratched his chin and gazed at the capsule. “I wonder if it isn’t because Daniel Forrester is here.”
“Sir?”
“Megalomania, Nurse Raskin. I’m indulging myself in it.”
Sometimes Nurse Raskin felt the strangest tension when she was around Jones. Since she was orderly in her habits, she disliked the feeling. She gave the doctor a cold smile to discourage further hubris. “My instructions, then, are to ignore this patient completely. Even if he arrests.”
“That is correct. However, if you see anything unusual happen, let me know, would you?”
“You mean with the power readings?”
Irritation cracked Jones’s facade, though Nurse Raskin could not understand what she had done to offend him. “Anything! Do you understand? Anything that strikes you as way out of line.”
“Sir if this capsule lifts off the ground and flies, I wouldn’t know if that were unusual enough.” Glad that her duty was simple and spelled out, Nurse Raskin seated herself at the main desk while Jones went to attend a pneumonia patient.
At eight-fifteen, Nurse Raskin watched the lines on the console scope quiver into ragged peaks as Forrester’s heart began to arrest. After a short beep, a Christmas tree of lights clicked on the console. The patient’s body was cooling off and the lung aspirator was pumping oxygen into his system. Jones’s instructions had been quite clear, though Nurse Raskin did not like them. Do nothing.
She tried to concentrate on a magazine but she was mad. She was a registered nurse. Sitting at a desk with a magazine while a patient’s heart stopped struck a wrong note so deep in her conscience that she could not focus on anything but Forrester. She was mad at Jones for telling her to be useless, mad at the LS system, mad in a purposeless, suspicious way at how the world was going. She was supposed to help that patient. The LS barricaded her from him.
Nurse Raskin did not love her work. She had wanted to be a mechanic like her father but in those days women simply did not do that and her husband would not hear of a wife who worked. Her life had been exhausting, especially after her husband got sick and her seventeen-year-old son died in a car crash. Funny how people encapsulated their lives bef
ore making a decision like hers to become a nurse at the age of forty-two . . . it was kind of like being a mechanic. . . . Land sakes! Maybe that was what Dr. Jones had meant by things converging.
“Yes,” Jones answered over the phone.
Nurse Raskin said, “Mr. Forrester has just arrested.”
“Very well. Is everything in order?”
“I think so. I wanted to say you were right about things in life converging.”
Pleased that she had praised him, Jones wanted to say something courteous in return. “Why don’t you run in and take a look at him, Miss Raskin. These machines are all very well but it’s best to have a nurse on hand. Give me your impressions, would you do that?”
“Yes, sir,” she answered crisply, hanging up and pushing back from the desk.
She opened the ward door and stopped dead, blinking at the capsule. Her first impulse was to ring all kinds of buzzers and sirens but she controlled herself.
From out of the capsule canopy arched a long white cable about an inch and a half thick. The cable rose through the air, crossed the room and disappeared into the wall. Nurse Raskin thought it glowed in the dim light.
She followed it to the wall. There was no outlet for it, it sank into the paint. This close she realized the cable was not solid but a cloudy, translucent white. It was made out of light.
How perfectly peculiar!
Through it she could discern the other wall as though the cable were plexiglass. She reached her fingers toward it. It was cold. Some sort of faint vibration emanated from it like an electrical current passing from the machine to the wall. Nurse Raskin decided some kind of laser function which Jones had neglected to tell her about was built into the machine. She did not want to touch the light, not because of fear of injury but because of some very profound reaction within her.
Nurse Raskin tiptoed to the capsule. The cable originated squarely in the center of the helmet where Mr. Forrester’s forehead would be. It was not surrounded by bolts, connectors, terminals or wiring of any kind. It rose out of the helmet, passed through the canopy and arched over the room to the wall.