“I’m overjoyed.”
“You should be. The femur, as I’m sure you know, is built like a hollow cylinder. You’re an engineer, Steve. You can appreciate a design that’s cross-hatched internally. It can take two tons of pressure per square inch, even more at times, because the hatch lines within the bone will actually shift depending upon external pressure. The bone is alive. Not many people realize that. With everything we can do in here,” he gestured to include both the bionics and cybernetics laboratories, “we haven’t found a way to improve on the thigh bone. In your case, fortunately, we needed to repair only certain elements of the ball in the socket.”
“Jesus, doc, you sure got a bedside manner about you. You make me feel like a goddamned Oldsmobile.”
“All set for the next thrilling chapter?”
“Shoot.”
“Five of your ribs were crushed.” He studied Steve, the blank look the other man gave him.
“They knitted, I assume,” Steve said slowly.
“No.” Wells shook his head. “They were literally crushed. Splintered. Bits and pieces, Steve. But they did what they were supposed to do by keeping you alive. The thorax, your rib cage, collapsed where the ribs themselves failed, but they functioned long enough as a cage, a barrier, to protect the organs inside—the heart, lungs, liver, spleen. You took some damage there, as you know, but not enough to write you off.”
“You said the ribs didn’t knit? Then what . . .”
“We built you new ribs of vitallium and joined them with artificial tendons. Your metal ribs are as flexible as the originals and considerably stronger, and almost impossible to break. They’ll bend more than double before they give way. We used what we call memory vitallium by giving them a magnetic memory so that after bending, or other movement, they always return to their original curvature. In the front of your body we used silastic, a form of silicone rubber, to join the ribs to the breastbone.”
Steve took this in silence. Rudy Wells didn’t feel that it was the time to tell Steve Austin his new ribs had more than magnetic memory. They were also embedded with extremely fine wire and could function as part of an electrical system through an external power source. His ribs were an excellent radio antenna. But that would come later.
They spent several days in this fashion, Rudy Wells reinforcing his explanations with X-rays, detailed photography from the operating room, films showing the special materials of vitallium, silastic, and cerosium in their development and undergoing stress tests. Wells wanted Steve to have as extensive a working knowledge as possible of the alterations already performed upon and within his body. The hope was that as he went more deeply into the details Steve Austin would come to accept, as naturally as he accepted the electrodes he had worn as an astronaut, the modifications to his own system. Wells wanted them to be common to Steve’s sense of his own body. Samples of the materials they’d used to modify his skeletal and internal systems were left with him, tossed about casually on a worktable with samples of bones and tissues, preserved in large jars. It became “a bit ghoulish,” as Steve said one morning to the doctor, but the deep association had been planted for the future.
Steve learned of repairs—his own term now after picking it up from constant usage by Rudy Wells—to his skull. Wells had Jean Manners discuss the various operations with Steve, feeling that she would be a welcome change. The nurse went into exhaustive detail about Steve’s cranium, explaining its function as a powerful defense for the brain—armor plate made up in eight sections.
“That must have been some crackup,” Jean observed, studying the films with Steve of the lifting plane’s last moments. They had watched the scene a dozen times and were now running it once more in slow motion, with the exaggeratedly deliberate breakup of the machine.
“Must have been.” He shook his head. As the accident unfolded once more, Jean explained that his skull repairs had been made not with metal or ceramics, but with human bone fitted surgically into place. “Then,” she said briskly, “over the cranium bone went a thin layer of silastic to act as an extra buffer. It also works as a cushioning element beneath the skin, where it’s been heavily repaired and grafted, along the top of the head.” A manicured finger tapped the side of his skull. “Like, right there,” she told him.
“How are you so sure?”
“I was the OR nurse.”
“You mean . . . you were there the whole time?”
“Why not? If I could take care of your body functions for months, what’s wrong with taking a look inside your head?”
Wells hoped the association with Jean Manners would have another important effect—help Steve to recognize this woman’s acceptance of him as a man. Kathy Morris had her part to play, too.
If only Steve would pay more attention to her . . .
They tried to assure Steve that the loss of his limbs had not affected the pumping and circulatory system. The normal body—in healthy shape, as nature created it—has some sixty thousand miles of tubes moving outward from the heart. Most amputees feel that anything substantially interfering with this mass circulatory system will be disastrous. Every day the adult heart pumps ten pints of blood through a thousand complete circuits. “That’s about six thousand quarts of blood every twenty-four hours,” Wells explained. “It’s changed with you, of course. But instead of the circulatory system being all screwed up, as you seem to believe, your system is to a great extent simplified. Just the opposite of what you believe. Thousands of miles of ducts in both directions have been eliminated. Your blood requirements have been reduced. But your heart still has the same pumping capabilities as before. In effect, under stress this will raise your blood pressure, as your body needs it. It also improves oxygenation in the brain, where you need it most under stress and, something even closer to home for you, it makes you more resistant to acceleration. Your g-tolerance has actually improved instead of being reduced. I’m not suggesting you be grateful. But at least you might as well know the few plusses along with the minuses.”
Wells went on, explaining that Steve’s fist-sized heart, no more than a pound of muscle, was able to increase its output to eight times normal, to twelve gallons every minute. “And if the demand persists,” he said, “the heart chambers enlarge and it can actually double its size to increase blood flow. But essentially all this is to increase many times the oxygen saturation of your system. So in effect you are now somewhat superior in circulation, pressure, and oxygen saturation than you were before the crash.”
Wells flicked the lights in the room back to bright after projecting a film on system circulation. “Steve, it’s not always easy to remember just how extraordinary your body is. And in your particular case we have not been fighting nature. We’ve worked with it. That’s our purpose here in these labs. When you lost your three limbs you lost, of course, thousands of miles of capillaries. And yet everything still works perfectly where circulation is concerned, and without our help. The body reroutes, changes currents, adapts its systems of valves in order to compensate for its new conditions. Your system shifted whatever was necessary to a new—well—call it the new network of traffic. Everything works perfectly. We’re not guessing about this, Steve. No one is doing any handholding. We know. You have been studied more intensively than any human being I know of, with every instrument and device known to science.
“Including,” he added with a wry smile, “an old-fashioned faith healer.”
She brought the tray to his bed, then sat at his side. “Do you mind if I stay here a while, Steve?”
He studied her expression. She watched him in return. She bent low over him, fussed with him. He ignored it all.
“No, I don’t mind.” She settled herself in the chair, waiting, making certain she didn’t stare while he ate. She wanted to stare. She wanted him to stare. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you,” he said in the abrupt manner they’d all become accustomed to. Could he finally be—?
“Of course,” she said, leaning f
orward.
“You do the lab work on my case, right? Okay, then. Doc Wells was talking about something I don’t understand, and I thought I’d bring it up while I had it in mind.” She nodded, trying not to show her disappointment. To hell with her lab work . . . “Rudy,” Steve continued, “said something about millions of blood cells dying all the time in the body. Is that true? I mean, is this normal?”
Well, she thought, if you can’t beat ’em . . . “Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” She laughed lightly to hide the disappointment. “But it’s true.”
“Million of cells?”
“Let me think a moment. Gotta remember the books.” She looked up. “Okay, the recall is working. It’s millions, all right.” She nodded vigorously. “In fact, it’s about eight million blood cells that die every second.”
“Eight mil—” He stared. “Every second?”
“Know what it works out to? Every single week something like five trillion blood cells die in the body. It’s sort of spread out. The distribution, I mean.” She was rattling off numbers and details as if Wells had suddenly inhabited her mind. “Most of the work goes on in the bone marrow, the lymph glands, and lymphoid tissues. These are all shoved into your intestines, tonsils, spleen, and the thymus. In your case, despite the, well, the—”
“Dammit, Kathy, it adds up to two legs and an arm. For God’s sake, this is no time to get uptight.”
“I’m not the one who’s uptight, Colonel Austin.”
He couldn’t believe the outburst, the way she suddenly turned away from him. He started to reach out his hand, drew it back.
“What the hell is the matter with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Dammit, look at me.”
She turned and he was stunned by the sight of tears.
“You want your numbers? All right, I’ll give them to you. You have twenty-five trillion red corpuscles in the bloodstream and you’ve got thirty-five billion white blood cells and nearly two trillion platelets, and everything is always dying and being reborn all the time, and your heart pumps like mad, but the only thing wrong with it is that it’s colder than hell!”
For the first time, as she ran out of the room, he noticed she had a well-rounded ass. Now why the hell, he wondered to himself, did I think about that now?
“You wanted to talk to me, Steve?”
He nodded, working the small control stick on the right arm of the wheelchair, gliding into Wells’s office. He spun the chair about and slammed the door in the face of Wells’s secretary. “Damn biddy,” Steve muttered.
Rudy Wells looked at him with sudden concern. “Anything wrong?”
Steve motioned him to relax. “Nothing’s wrong. It’s just that I’ve been noticing things, that’s all.”
“What sort of things?”
“It’s not important. Crazy broads,” he muttered. Wells made a mental note to check with Jean Manners and Kathy Morris as soon as Steve left.
“I want to discuss my eye. Or rather, the eye I don’t have any more.”
“All right, Steve.”
“Don’t patronize me with that syrupy voice, you belly-thumping old bastard. I know your routine by heart.”
“Shot down in flames,” Wells said. “Okay, let’s have it.”
“Tell me straight out, Rudy. Can I get back my vision?”
“No. We can never hope to replace the eye you lost. We can’t even begin to try. Despite how far we’ve come, in so many areas, at this stage of the game the eye remains far beyond us. It’s so incredibly complex. The male adult eye is normally about an inch in diameter, in the shape of a complex sphere. It’s extraordinarily well protected, and—”
“But it wasn’t in my case. Why not?”
“You took the equivalent of a spear thrown into your face,” was the immediate answer. “The nerve endings of the retina lie at the back of the eye, where they’re insulated within a deep, bony socket. Except for diaphragm openings for protection against severe glare, this system is the way the eye protects itself. The metal—most likely a piece of the canopy—tore through the soft part of the eye, slammed into the bony socket and crushed the nerves there. We’re helpless to restore your sight, Steve.”
“No favorite theories?”
“No theory, I’m afraid. Your eyes contain something on the order of a hundred million neurons, which are layered in the retina at the back of the eye. What happens back there we still classify as a miracle—”
“You keep using that damn word. Why?”
“Because with all we know, we can’t tell you how it all works. We simply don’t know. We know that the light from the front of your eye focuses at the retina. But how do the neurons in the retina convert light waves into electrical signals? We haven’t any real idea. We know they send an electronic-signal interpretation of a light wave to the brain. There, again by some unknown process, the signal gets translated into what the brain accepts as a visual image. We know about the cones that define colors and the rods that aid in seeing in dim or scarce light, and we can tell what the eye does and the process it follows, but not why. No one can explain how the rods of the eye can pick up light as faint as a trillionth of a watt.
“There’s nothing we can do to replace that vision. Oh, we can build microwave receptors, or infrared sensors and all sorts of wonderful things, but we cannot give you vision where you lost your eye. Of course, you still have superb vision in your right eye. Twenty-fifteen, in fact, and you’ll learn quickly to compensate for the depth perception you miss so much at this point.”
“That’s a crock and you know it,” Steve said with sudden heat. “There’s a world of difference, between depth perception for the ground, and what a man needs to fly a . . .”
Wells kept his voice gentle. “Steve, I’d like to make a promise to you. If you’ll work with me, with Dr. Killian, I can promise you something.” He paused, the spacing of his words deliberate. “In six months you can fly again.”
On Steve’s face a mixture of desire to believe, and bitter disbelief. Then he slumped again. “Only a son of a bitch would make a statement like that,” he said at last.
“Then consider me a son of a bitch. But if you want to, you can fly in just about six months from now.”
CHAPTER 10
“He’s under.”
Dr. Killian nodded. He studied the oscilloscopes and glanced back to Dr. Wells. “Under, but not really out. Look at the wave. The subconscious is working overtime.”
Wells studied the glowing scope. “He’s got a lot to think about.”
“We all do,” Killian said.
“I wonder if that was a wise decision, Michael.”
“Taking him into the cryogenic chamber?”
“Yes. It seemed to upset him, seeing pieces of himself laid out like so many parts of an automobile.”
“It had the shock effect we wanted.”
“You playing psychologist this morning?”
“Don’t we always?” Killian glanced at the unconscious form of Steve Austin. “The next several months are going to be trying—for him, for all of us. Austin will spend much of his time reflecting on what’s happening to him. There’s no way he can avoid chewing over the fact that foreign objects now hold him together. You were absolutely correct in making certain he understood what had been done to him. Now he knows we’re patching him together with himself. That will go deep. It was the right move. It will help.”
Rudy Wells looked down at Steve’s face. A muscle in the right cheek twitched. “I hope so,” he said. “He’ll need all the help he can get.”
Never heard anything like that before. The way he brought it up. Didn’t understand. Whole thing’s impossible. Dream, that’s all. One more nightmare on top of another. Christ. Too much to hope for. Gotta face it. All there is to it. Face it, Stevie, old boy. No legs. Both of them right above the knees. They’re playing God. No other way to do what they’re talking about, right? Hey, God, you listening? Ol’ Doc Wells is all mixed up. Thinks he�
�s you. You listening up there? You better listen. Doc Wells is gonna push you right out of your job. Him and the other one, Killian. They both think they’re you . . .
He drifted, formless, no legs or arms or even a body, only one eye, a cyclopean view of everything and nothing, an infinite spiral winding downward. Voices came to him, and faces materialized from a space different from anything he’d known, even on the trip to the moon. He saw the face of his friend and doctor; and Rudy Wells’s voice drifted down the spiral after him, circling him until it hovered before him, held him prisoner until Wells’s face could catch up to them both, and the face and the voice joined, and the scene came to him again . . .
“You lost both legs. Fact.”
Steve looked at him from the bed. The strict diet of medicinal liquids for a week had him on the thin edge. He didn’t need nonsense cooked in philosophical crap. It was all rather grotesque. He didn’t answer. One hardly needs conversation with a gargoyle, he decided.
“Now, then,” Wells continued, “a question. How long should the legs of a man be?”
“You’ve flipped, Doc. You’re hypoxic. Better have Jean bring some oxygen.”
Wells shook his head. “A long time ago, Steve, someone gave the only real answer to that question. His name was Abraham Lincoln. He said the legs of a man should be long enough to reach the ground.” Steve would be unconscious for two weeks to a month. No way to tell yet. Better to get as much said now as possible. Killian was right. Give him the answers before the questions clog his mind.
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