Harlan Ellison - Paingod and Other Delusions

The patient sat up, suddenly.

Straight up, with hands rigid to the table. His eyes opened, and he stared down at the ripped and bloodied stumps where his legs had been.

His screams echoed back from the operating room walls.

“Oh, I wanna die, I wanna die, I wanna die …” Over and over his hysterical screams beat at Bergman’s consciousness. The phymech automatically moved to leach off the rising panic in the patient, but it was too late. The patient fainted, and almost instantly the cardio showed a dip. The spark was going out.

The phymech ignored it; there was nothing it could do about it. Organically the man was being handled efficiently. The trouble was emotional … where the phymech never went.

Bergman stared in horror. The man was dying … right out from under the tentacles. Why doesn’t the thing try to help the man? Why doesn’t he soothe him, let him know it’ll be all right? He’s dying, because he’s in shock … he doesn’t want to live! Just a word would do …

Bergman’s thoughts whipped themselves into a frenzy, but the phymech continued operating, calmly, hurriedly, but with the patient failing rapidly.

Bergman started forward, intent to reach the patent. The injured man had looked up and seen himself amputated bloodily just beneath the knees, and worse, had seen the faceless metal entity working over him; at that crucial moment when any little thing could sway the desire to live, the man had seen no human with whom he could identify … merely a rounded and planed block of metal. He wanted to die.

Bergman reached out to touch the patient. Without ceasing its activities, the phymech extruded a chamois-mitt tentacle, and removed Bergman’s hand. The hollow inflectionless voice of the robot darted from its throat-speaker:

“No interference please. This is against the rules.”

Bergman drew back, horror stamped across his fine features, his skin literally crawling, from the touch of the robot, and from the sight of the phymech operating steadily … on a corpse.

The man had lost the spark.

The operation was a success, as they had often quipped, but the patient was dead. Bergman felt nausea grip him with sodden fingers, and he doubled over turning quickly toward the wall. He stared up at the empty observation bubble, thankful this was a standard, routine operation and no viewers sat behind the clearness up there. He leaned against the feeder-trough of the instrument cabinets, and vomited across the sparkling grey plasteel tiles. A servomeck skittered free of its cubicle and cleaned away the mess immediately.

It only heightened his sickness.

Machines cleaning up for machines.

He didn’t bother finishing as assistant on the phymech’s grisly operation. It would do no good; and besides, the phymech didn’t need any help.

It wasn’t human.

Bergman didn’t show up at Memorial for a week; there was a polite inquiry from Scheduling, but when Thelma told them he was “just under the weather,” they replied “well, the robot doesn’t really need him anyhow,” and that was that. Stuart Bergman’s wife was worried, however.

Her husband lay curled on the bed, face to the wall, and murmured the merest murmurs to her questions. It was really as though he had something on his mind.

(Well, if he did , why didn’t he say something! There just is no understanding that man. Oh well, no time to worry over that now … Francine and Sally are getting up the electro-mah jongg game at Sally’s today. Dear, can you punch up some lunch for yourself? Well, really! Not even an answer, just that mumble. Oh well, I’d better hurry … )

Bergman did have something on his mind. He had seen a terrifying and a gut-wrenching thing. He had seen the robot fail. Miserably fail. That was the sum of it. For the first time since he had been unconsciously introduced to the concept of phymech infallibility, he had seen it as a lie. The phymech was not perfect. The man had died under Bergman’s eyes. Now Stuart Bergman had to reason why … and whether it had happened before … whether it would happen again … what it meant … and what it meant to him, as well as the profession, as well as the world.

The phymech had known the man was in panic; the robot had instantly lowered the adrenaline count … but it had been more than that. Bergman had handled cases like that in the past, where improperly-delivered anaesthesia had allowed a patient to become conscious and see himself split open. But in such cases he had said a few reassuring words, had run a hand over the man’s forehead, his eyes, and strangely enough, that bit of bedside manner had been delivered in just such a proper way that the patient sank back peacefully into sleep.

But the robot had done nothing.

It had ministered to the body, while the mind shattered. Bergman had known, even as the man had seen his bloody stumps, that the operation would fail.

Why had it happened? Was this the first time a man had died under the tentacles of a phymech, and if the answer was no … why hadn’t he heard of it? When he stopped to consider, lost still in that horror maelstrom of memory and pain, he realized it was because the phymechs were still “undergoing observation.” But while that went on — so sure were the manufacturers, and the officials of the Department of Medicine, that the phymechs were perfect — lives were being lost in the one way they could not be charged to the robots.

An intangible factor was involved.

It had been such a simple thing. Just to tell the man, “You’ll be all right, fellow, take it easy. We’ll have you out of here good as new in a little while … just settle back and get some sleep … and let me get my job done; we’ve got to work together, you know …”

That was all, just that much, and the life that had been in that mangled body would not have been lost. But the robot had stood there ticking, efficiently repairing tissue.

While the patient died in hopelessness and terror.

Then Bergman realized what it was a human had, a robot did not. He realized what it was a human could do that a robot could not. And it was so simple, so damnably simple, he wanted to cry. It was the human factor. They could never make a robot physician that was perfect, because a robot could not understand the psychology of the human mind.

Bergman put it into simple terms …

The phymechs just didn’t have a bedside manner!

Paths to destruction.

So many paths. So many answers. So many solutions, and which of them was the right one? Were any of them the right ones? Bergman had known he must find out, had known he must solve this problem by his own hand, for perhaps no one else’s hand would turn to the problem … until it was too late.

Each day that passed meant another life had passed.

And the thought cursed Bergman more than any personal danger. He had to try something; in his desperation, he came up with a plan of desperation.

He would kill one of his patients …

Once every two weeks, a human was assigned his own operation. True, he was more supervised than assisted by the phymech on duty, and the case was usually only an appendectomy or simple tonsillectomy … but it was an operation. And, Lord knew, the surgeons were grateful for any bone thrown them.

This was Bergman’s day.

He had been dreading it for a week, thinking about it for a week, knowing what he must do for a week. But it had to be done. He didn’t know what would happen to him, but it didn’t really matter what was going on in their hospitals …

But if anything was to be done, it would have to be done boldly, swiftly, sensationally. And now. Something as awful as this couldn’t wait much longer: the papers had been running articles about the secretary of medicine’s new Phymech Proposal. That would have been the end. It would have to be now. Right now, while the issue was important.