James Gunn - The Immortals

“I know, Dad,” Flowers said, his voice high and a little frantic. “I want to be a doctor. I want to—”

“Then bow down, boy. Bow down!”

But why should he think of Leah’s father? Why should the memory of something that had probably never happened make him think of Russ?

Was it what the dying man had said: “Some empty time…”

What time could be emptier than this?

Too many doctors and not enough healers! That’s what the old man had said. Absurd. It was like so many meaningless phrases that seem portentous because of their vagueness. It reminded him of arguments with other medics.

In the darkness the hospital incense seemed to drift to him—anesthetic and alcohol. The good smells. The reverent smells. Anyone who criticized medicine just didn’t know what he was talking about.

He remembered standing by the dormitory’s bullet-proof window, staring out at the block of houses being razed to make room for the two new wings, geriatrics and the premature section of obstetrics. It seemed to him that the twin processes of destruction and construction never stopped. Somewhere on the Center’s periphery there were always new wings growing over the old ruins.

How many square blocks did the Center’s walls enclose? Forty? Forty-five? He had forgotten.

He must have said it aloud, because Charley Brand answered from his desk. “Sixty and three-fourths.” Brand was a strange person, an accretion of miscellaneous information waiting to be mined, a memory bank awaiting only the proper question. But he lacked something; he was cold and mechanical; he couldn’t synthesize.

“Why?” asked Hal Mock.

“No reason,” Flowers said, vaguely irritated. “I went on a call a few days ago—into the city.”

“ ‘Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,’ ” Brand quoted, not looking up from the desk where he flipped the frames in the viewer, one every second. Mechanical, mechanical.

“What does that mean?” Flowers snapped.

“Sometimes,” Mock mused, “I wish something would happen to a few medics in our class. Like getting sick—not seriously, you understand—or breaking a leg. The school can only graduate so many, you know. It has a quota. But we’re all so healthy, so careful. It’s disgusting.” He brooded over it. “Think of it. Seven years of torture, grinding my brains to a sharp point, and the prize depends on the right answers to a few stupid questions. It makes me sick to think about it.”

Brand shifted uneasily and changed the subject. “What are you going to specialize in, Ben? After you graduate.”

“I don’t know,” Flowers said. “I haven’t thought about it.”

“I have,” said Brand. “Psychiatry.”

“Why be a head-shrinker?” Mock asked scornfully.

“Simple economics,” Brand said. “The incidence of mental disease in this country is sixty-five point three percent. Almost two out of every three persons needs the services of a psychiatrist during his lifetime. On top of that are the neuroses and the stress diseases like stomach cramps, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, duodenal ulcers, hypertension, heart disease, ulcerative colitis. And life doesn’t get any simpler. You can’t beat those figures.”

“How about geriatrics?” Mock asked slyly. “The incidence of senescence is one hundred percent. That’s the well that never runs dry.”

“Until they bring out the elixir in quantity!”

“They’ll never do that,” Mock said shrewdly. “They know which side—”

Flowers listened intently in the darkness. Was that a noise on the other side of the door? A rattling, clanging sort of noise?

He sprang to his feet, but the noise—if it had been a noise—wasn’t repeated. There was no use taking chances. He felt his way into the corner, behind the door, and leaned against the wall, waiting.

“There’s more to medicine than money,” he repeated softly.

“Sure,” Mock said, “but economic facts are basic. Ignore them and you can’t do an acceptable job at your profession. Look at the income tax rate: It starts at fifty percent. On one hundred thousand a year, it’s eighty percent. How are you going to pay for your bag, your instruments, your library? You can’t practice medicine without them. How are you going to pay your dues in the county medical society, in the AMA, special assessments… ?”

“Why are the income taxes so high?” Flowers demanded. “Why are instruments so expensive? Why are a hundred million people without adequate medical facilities, condemned to a lingering death in a sea of carcinogens, unable to afford what the orators call ‘the finest flower of medicine’?”

“It’s the cost of living,” Mock said, curling his lip. “Whatever you want, you have to pay for. Haven’t you figured it out?”

“No,” Flowers said savagely. “What do you mean?”

Mock glanced cautiously behind him. “I’m not that foolish,” he said slyly. “You never know who might be listening. Some medic might have left his recorder turned on inside his desk on the off chance of catching somebody with his ethics down. I’ll say this, though: We can be too healthy!”

“Nuts!” Flowers muttered in the darkness of the concrete cell. He let himself sink down the wall until he reached the floor.

They were all wrong, Mock and Russ and Leah and the rest of them who hinted at dark things. In another age they would have been burned at the stake. He had seen Dr. Cassner refute them brilliantly in a beautiful three-hour display of microsurgical virtuosity.

It began as an ordinary arterial resection and transplant. The overhead shadowless light was searching and cold on the draped body of the old man. The assistant surgeons and nurses worked together with the exquisite precision that is the result of years of training and experience.

The air conditioners murmured persistently, but sweat beaded Cassner’s broad forehead and trickled down beneath his mask before the nurse could mop it away with sterile cotton. But Cassner’s hands never stopped. They were things in motion, disembodied, alive. His fingers manipulated the delicate controls of the surgical machine with a sureness, a dexterity unmatched in this part of the country, perhaps anywhere. Genius is incomparable.

Flowers watched with a hypnotized fascination that made time meaningless. The scalpels sliced through the skin with unerring precision, laying bare the swollen old arteries; deft metal fingers tied them off, snipped them in two, accepted a lyophilized transplant, and grafted the healthy young artery to the stump of the old; the suture machine moved swiftly after, dusting the exposed area with antibiotics, clamping together the edges of the incision, sealing them with a quick, flattening movement…

Cassner’s eyes flickered from the patient on the operating table to the physiological monitor on the wall behind it, absorbing at a single glance the composite picture of the patient’s condition: blood pressure, heartbeat, cardiography, oxygen content, respiration…

The microsurgeon saw the danger first. The operation was, comparatively, a speedy thing, but there were disadvantages. The area involved was large, and even the chlorpromazine-promethazine-Dolosal cocktail and the chilling could not nullify the shock entirely. And the heart was old.

It was impossible to transfer the instruments to the new area swiftly enough. Cassner took the scalpel in his own fingers and opened up the chest cavity with a long, sure stroke. “Heart machine,” he said in his quick, high voice to no one in particular.

It was pumping within thirty seconds, its tubes tied to the aorta and the left atrium. Two minutes later a new heart was in the old chest; Cassner grafted the arteries and veins to it. Ten minutes after the monitor had signaled the heart stoppage, Cassner pulled out the old heart and held it, a dead thing of worn-out muscle. He motioned wearily for his first assistant to inject the digitalis and shock the new heart into action.