Ivan Yefremov - Andromeda (A Space-Age Tale)

The Director muttered some apology which the surgeon did not wait to hear.

A portable operating theatre was erected at the foot of the mountain: water, electricity and compressed air were laid on. A huge number of workers offered their services and the building was ready in three hours. Ahf Noot’s assistants selected fifteen doctors from amongst the volunteer builders to service the surgical clinic that had been so rapidly built. Renn Bose was carried under a transparent plastic shield that had been fully sterilized and had had sterilized air blown through it by means of special filters. Ahf Noot and four of his assistants entered the first section of the operating theatre and remained there several hours where they were subjected to waves of bactericides and air saturated with antiseptic emanations until their very breath became sterilized. In the meantime Renn Bose’s body was subjected to deep freezing. Then their swift and confident work began.

The shattered bones and torn blood vessels were joined by means of tantalum hooks and plates that did not irritate the living tissues. Ahf Noot sorted out the injured intestines and stomach: they were quickly freed of the mortified parts, stitched up and placed in a jar of healing solution B 314 that was prepared in conformity with the somatic properties of the human organism. He then started on his hardest job. From under the ribs he removed the blackened liver, pierced with fragments of the rib bones, and, while his assistants held it suspended in position, he confidently treated the fine hairs of the autonomous nerves of the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems and pulled them into position behind it. The slightest harm done to these finer branches of the nerves might lead to serious, irreparable damage. With a lightning-like movement the surgeon cut through the portal vein and joined the tubes of artificial blood vessels to the two ends. Then he did the same with the artery and placed the removed liver in a jar of solution B 314. After an operation lasting five hours all Renn Bose’s injured organs were in separate jars. Artificial blood flowed through his body, pumped by the patient’s own heart and an auxiliary double-heart, a tiny automatic pump. Now they had to wait for the healing of the removed organs. Ahf Noot could not simply replace the liver with another from the planet’s surgical fund because that would require further investigation and the condition of the sick man would not permit of any delay. One of the surgeons stayed with the outstretched body (it looked just like an anatomized corpse) until the next shift of surgeons had undergone their sterilization.

The doors of the protective walls built round the operation theatre opened noisily and Ahf Noot, squinting and stretching himself like a beast of prey awakened from its slumber, appeared in the company of his blood-smeared assistants. Evda Nahl, tired and pale, met him. and handed him Renn Bose’s heredity record. Ahf Noot snatched at it eagerly, glanced through it and heaved a sigh of relief.

“I think everything will be all right. Come on and get some sleep.”

“But… suppose he wakes up?”

“Come along. He can’t wake up. Do you think we are so foolish that we did not take care of that?” “How long must we wait?”

“Four or five days. If the biological investigation is accurate and the calculations are correct we shall then be able to make another operation, putting all the organs back. After that, consciousness….” “How long can you stay here?”

“About ten days. The catastrophe fortunately coincided with a break in my teaching work. I’ll take advantage of the opportunity to have a look at Tibet, I’ve never been here before. It is my fate to live where there are most people, in the inhabited zone!”

Evda Nahl gazed at the surgeon in admiration. Ahf Noot smiled gloomily.

“You’re looking at me in the same way as people used to look at an image of a god. That does not befit the cleverest of my pupils!”

“I really am seeing you in a different way. This is the first time in my life that a person dear to me has been in the hands of a surgeon and I can well understand the emotions of those who have come in contact with your art — knowledge combined with unexcelled skill!”

“All right! Admire us, if you must. I shall have time to perform not only a second but even a third operation on your physicist.”

“What third operation?” asked Evda Nahl, immediately on the alert. Ahf Noot, however, squinted cunningly and pointed to the pathway leading to the observatory. Mven Mass, his head bowed, was hobbling down.

“Here’s another unwilling admirer of my art. Have a talk with him, if you can’t sleep, that is. I must sleep.”

The surgeon disappeared round an irregularity in the hill in the direction of the temporary home of the doctors. From afar Evda Nahl could see how haggard the Director of the Outer Stations had grown and how much he had aged: but then, Mven Mass was no longer Director. She told him everything she had learned from Ahf Noot and the African heaved a sigh of relief.

“Then I’ll go away in ten days’ time.”

“Are you doing the right thing, Mven? I’m still suffering too much from shock to be able to think over what has happened, but it doesn’t seem to me that your guilt is so great as to require such condemnation.”

Mven Mass frowned painfully.

“I was carried away by Renn Bose’s brilliant theories. I had no right to apply all Earth’s power to the first attempt.”

"Renn Bose showed you that an attempt would be useless with less power,” she objected.

“That’s true, but we should have made indirect experiments first. I was insanely impatient and did not want to wait years. Don’t waste words — the Council will confirm my decision and the Control of Honour and Justice will not annul it.”

“I’m a member of the Control of Honour and Justice myself!”

“And apart from you there are ten other people. Since my case concerns the whole planet there will be a decision by the Joint Controls of North and South — twenty-one people besides you.”

Evda Nahl laid a hand on the African’s shoulder.

“Let’s sit down, Mven, you’re weak on your legs. Did you know that when the first doctors looked at Renn they decided to call a death concilium?”

“I know, they were two short. All doctors are conservative, and according to an old rule that they haven’t got down to changing, there must be twenty-two people to decide to give a patient an easy death.”

“Until recently the death concilium consisted of sixty doctors!”

“That is a relic of the days when there was a fear of the right to put a patient out of his suffering being misused; in those days doctors used to condemn the sick to long and useless suffering and their relatives to senseless moral torment, even when there was not the slightest hope and death would have been a quick and easy release. But still, you see how useful tradition has been in this case, they were two short and I was able to get Ahf Noot, thanks to Grom Orme.”

“That’s what I wanted to remind you of. Your own concilium of social death so far consists of only one man!”

Mven Mass took Evda’s hand and raised it to his lips and she permitted him this gesture of great and intimate friendship. She was, at the moment, the only friend of a strong man oppressed by moral responsibility. The only one? And if Chara had been in her place? No… to receive Chara now the African would need great spiritual uplift and he still had not found strength enough for that. Let everything go its own way until Renn Bose recovered and the Astronautical Council held its meeting.

“Do you know what the third operation is that Renn has to undergo?” asked Evda, to change the subject. Mven Mass thought for a moment and then recalled a conversation he had had with Ahf Noot.