Дэймон Найт - Orbit 5

Great suffering God, Sturbridge thought, another committee. A committee to decide if you were dead. Not dead dead. Just dead enough.

Loomis came in with coffee. He poised there for a moment like a startled old seagull. “Gotta get back,” he said.

“Can you take a minute,” Sturbridge asked, “and tell me about Rowalski?”

“Gruber here knows him better. I just see him in the elevator, but Gruber here, his wife and Rowalski’s wife, both nurses here one time. About four years ago when he had the valve job done, looked like he was going to be fine, and he and this nurse fall for each other. Nice girl, she was. Got two kids, ain’t they?” He looked at Gruber, who nodded. “Sure hope he does well tonight.” He tottered off toward his elevator.

Sturbridge lit another cigarette. Gruber didn’t smoke. “When does the committee get in on a business like this?” “Been in close to an hour,” Gruber said. “Five of them. They cover everything. All kinds of electrocardiograms and electroencephalograms, and down on the second floor there’s a special little lab for tests.”

Sturbridge looked at his feet. That was how it was done, he thought. Sitting in the middle of all this data, they were pretty certain just how alive a fellow like Tanker was. The tough part was to decide how little alive Tanker needed to be in order to be dead enough to be legal. Committee members allied with the surgical transplant teams, with millions of dollars in malpractice insurance standing between them and any finger-pointers, might see death come earlier than others.

He looked at Gruber. “You wait until they make up their minds?”

“For the final green light,” Gruber said, “but our spies tell us when it’s getting close.”

“So it’s not close now?”

“No. If it was, that little light would be blinking sevens instead of fours. If it started on seven I’d be out of here like a bullet. I’m going back up anyhow, Mr. Sturbridge. Would you like to come up and see a little bit of what getting ready is like?”

Leaving the service elevator, they stepped over a recent litter of empty cartons and bottles. Gruber opened a small door and eased Sturbridge in. The place was like a gigantic airplane cockpit with the odor of intricately processed wire and metal, smelling like nothing else whatever, and he breathed this in like fresh air on a mountain-top. His gaze swept across the precise confusion of this array of dials, lights, meters and gauges, blended into that incredible symmetry possessed only by things that somehow worked. Gruber moved along the panel with a technician’s certainty. He pushed a button. “Is everything all right. Miss Lord?” he said.

“Fine, Mr. Gruber, but Dr. Lutz wants the temperature of the liver tank raised one degree.”

“O.K., Miss Lord, I’ll take care of it.”

He was busy for a minute adjusting dials. Then he beckoned. Standing beside him, looking through the plate-glass viewing port, Sturbridge could see the entire operating room. Doctors and nurses, masked, gowned and gloved, stood ready.

The waiting men and women reminded Sturbridge of a painting of communicants at some ancient rite. Here they stood, patiently, many barely out of childhood, with years spent in training, eager to wield the instruments and say the words which are the incantations of their modern magic. Their faith had saved and would save again. In his mind Sturbridge saw other men and women gathered in remote rooms the world over, communing with those powers whose force they respected, waiting, waiting for someone like Tanker. The idea was so overwhelming that his mouth would only say something silly. “What if someone has to take a leak?”

“No problem. Someone is always scrubbing. They go to the john, drink coffee, yak a little, the young ones may get in a little necking, and then they scrub and gown up again. It may go on for hours.” He smiled. “You know, my wife was a nurse here, and my brother is one of the doctors out there somewheres. I get it from all sides.”

Christ, Sturbridge thought, this transplantation business was how Gruber made a living. He liked it. I bet the first thing he'll tell his wife will be how he raised the temperature one degree on the liver tank.

A door slammed on the other side of the partition behind them. “What do you mean visible, you goddamned fool?” a gruff voice said. “That polymyograph they hooked onto him is so damned sensitive, it would give a higher reading hooked onto an old horse turd than it’s giving hooked onto Tanker. You scientific hotshots give me a pain in the ass.”

There was a pause before a softer, smoother voice replied, “If that boss of yours wasn’t so damned anxious to get a new kidney into that worthless son of old man Krillus so he can nick him about twenty thousand, you wouldn’t be breathing down all our necks to pronounce this poor devil dead.”

“You miserable hypocrite. Would you play God and pass judgment on Krillus’ boy just because he had a little tough luck, and deny him a chance to live? We’ve had both his kidneys out for a week now.”

“I’m not hypocrite enough to say this man’s dead when a student nurse can look at the dials and see he’s alive.”

“Dials, my butt. Pull that damn plug out of the wall, and that whole show will stop in two seconds. We’ve got seven operating rooms ready to go up here, with nurses and doctors killing time playing with each other until you make up your feeble mind this man is dead.”

Gruber smiled. He walked along checking the panel, humming happily. “Things always get a little tight in the committee at the end,” he said.

Committees were committees, Sturbridge thought. When the high priests of Egypt got together in a back room of the temple, they probably had things to say to each other. He said, “Tell me about Rowalski.”

“Good man, always trying. We both studied electronics, and took some courses together. He’s a solid technician. After he had the valve job and got married, things looked good for a while and he thought some of getting a job with us here.”

“So what does he do?”

“He has a little radio and TV repair shop at home. Picks up a few dollars but not a living. The agencies help him out.”

“Not much of a life,” Sturbridge said.

“He lost his gumption after the valve job went bad, and hasn’t been the same Rowalski. His wife has the jitters and takes four kind of tranquilizers and smokes three packs of cigarettes a day. She can’t sleep, so things have been going to hell. There’s a lot of us wishing him luck tonight.”

Sturbridge nodded. “I never thought of it from Rowal-ski’s point of view. Just Tanker’s.” He rose. “You’ve been kind,” he said, shaking hands, “and thanks, but I better get out of your way now.”

Back on Recovery, Sturbridge tried to mix in and get inside Tanker’s room for a quick look, but a nurse spotted him and shooed him away. He sat in a phone booth trying to reach his paper and heard outside, “John, for Christ’s sake, old man, we’ve been set up there for over three hours. Good God Almighty, how long is it going to take you to convince these stupid bastards—” The doctors moved away.

They were working men with a job to do, Sturbridge thought. They knew Tanker’s goose was cooked. They had all these cases in here needing transplants, and ever since Tanker was tagged It, they’d been going. Taking blood out of Tanker for matching as fast as they ran it in. How did they know they were matching against Tanker and not some skid-row bum who had swapped his blood for a few dollars? Probably did the best they could. In ancient days they robbed graves so they could study bodies. Now, upstairs, they waited, poised like a suspended shot on television, aiming to cheat death when they started. He was an alien standing there: still he could sense the pressure as it seeped down the stairways and down the elevator shafts and flowed into Recovery.