Дэймон Найт - Orbit 5

He yawned. Despite the air conditioning, his clothes were sticky. He needed a shave. Most of all he was tired, tired really of being an onlooker, sneaking peeks through keyholes and unshaded windows.

Perhaps he could see Rowalski, he thought. He dialed the hospital. The central desk said no. Maybe he’d gone up.

Back in the Visitors’ Room, he found the little light but now it was flashing three. They weren’t on top yet, he thought. He went through his coat, tie, shoes and cigarette routine like an enfeebled actor, condemned forever to rehearse an unsatisfactory and misunderstood role. He pulled out a notebook and did the one thing he knew how to do.

He took off his glasses to rub his eyes, lit a fresh cigarette, and felt sorry for himself. The little light was flashing sevens. So now it was close. Upstairs the last cups of coffee were being drunk, last visits to the john were being made, sleepers were being awakened. Around the high sinks it was scrub, scrub, scrub, as each crew’s reinforcements moved up, kidding and joking to ease the tension of the hours ahead, like troops, in the last hour before dawn, moving up to the line of battle.

He didn’t try to get close to Recovery. Outside Tanker’s room three doctors stood in a small, tired, and solemn cluster. Soon there was a fourth. It was 4:15. Sturbridge wondered if all the patients waiting for Tanker were already on seven, or if they were now saying goodbye to their tearful families. Near him an elevator came up and was locked with open door. Aides appeared with long low carts and reels of electric cable.

Then Sturbridge felt a surge of pity and understanding for the fifth man on that committee, who now must be excruciatingly aware that his own squeamishness, conscience, or sense of fitness had condemned him to be the one who finally said Tanker was dead enough. Sturbridge could picture him dragging himself from one dial to another, staring at one group of flashing lights and then another, hoping to find there some mechanistic magic that would relieve him of his burden. For he must know full well that by now University Hospital waited on him.

Sturbridge saw him come out. Hours earlier, he must have been called from a dinner party. Now in his disheveled suit he resembled a sad and bedraggled penguin. He stepped toward the other four and with an oddly appealing gesture threw up his hands.

The long low carts, the reels of cable, more doctors, more nurses, moved into Tanker’s room and soon, as if moved by a will of his own, Tanker’s bed appeared, still covered and surrounded by tubes and needles, tanks and flashing lights. It moved, in what seemed to Sturbridge a poignantly solemn procession, past the tormented five and into the waiting elevator. The door closed.

Sturbridge heard the nurse. “Desk,” she said, “this is Recovery. Patient John Phillpott Tanker expired four thirty-seven a.m.”

Sturbridge called his paper and gave them the time of death. Driving through the early dawn, he thought it would be nice to get home where he could take off his clothes and be comfortable.

When he had typed about half a page, the smell of frying bacon overwhelmed him. God, he hadn’t realized he was that hungry. As he ate, he told Maisie all about it. Then he fell asleep over the typewriter. Maisie let him doze a little while, then woke him and he finished the piece. He called it “The Night John Phillpott Tanker Died,” and Maisie took it down to the paper while he went to bed. ?

Even Lawrence Jennings went out of his way to flatter him. “They keep telephoning, Walter. They like it. We need some more. Can you keep them coming?”

Gruber’s brother, other doctors, and a lawyer friend coached him. He explained the problems so the ordinary man could see them. He called his second article “Legal Death.” Letters poured in screaming, “A man is dead when he’s dead and any fool knows that.” Others showed more understanding.

He visited families made wretched by their burdens: invalids who neither died nor recovered nor adjusted. Instead they lived with the hopes and monstrous despairs of the near-dead, bound to life by an umbilical cord woven by modern science. He knew these families well. He wrote and wrote, and called it “The Hopeful Supplicants.”

All supplicants might not be equally deserving. In Gruber’s control room, the night Tanker died, he had heard the name Krillus. Faintly he recalled a scandal, but could not pin it down. One of the regular reporters, Hank Coggins, filled him in.

“That boy Krillus is a completely no-good son of a bitch. Not just raping three teenage girls and killing two people with his car. Let’s face it, some kids are pretty wild. A young boy, full of piss and vinegar, he can do a lot of rough things, but eventually, if he grows up a decent sort of man, people forgive him. But this Krillus boy, Tony they call him, he’s just a mean bastard. Always has been. Gutted cats. Beat up small kids. His daddy’s money bought him out of everything. But he got sick and ended up with lousy kidneys. They got infected, and a week or so before Tanker died they either had to take his kidneys out or he was going to die. And they took them out.”

Sturbridge nodded. “I’ve seen the artificial kidney machine they used to keep him alive until Tanker showed up.”

“That right? Well, Krillus only had this one boy. His wife’s dead years now. He’s just a contemptible old fart himself, no self-respecting doctor would put his kidney in anything but a dirty pickle jar, and anyhow he’s too old and they had to wait.” Hank paused to light a cigarette. “Early that morning when Tanker died, they put one of his kidneys in Tony Krillus and it just worked fine. He takes medicine and some kind of treatment, but three weeks after they put it in, he was running around like you and me and has been ever since.”

Sturbridge tried to interview Rowalski, who was doing well, but the hospital would permit no visitors. He drove out one day to see Rowalski’s wife. The heat wave had broken; there had been rain and the trees and fields were green. Rowalski’s lawn was a litter of bottles, papers, old tires, discarded plastic toys, and a broken cart struggling valiantly to hide the rampant weeds. The iron gate hung awry from a broken hinge. Beyond the cracked and pitted concrete, the porch door stood ajar.

To the left a bench, some tools, and a few disemboweled and dust-covered television sets marked the limits of what had once been Rowalski’s shop. A battered baby carriage, a cot, a small basket filled with apples, another filled with tomatoes now intruded on these. On the cot a huge yellow tiger cat Hashed green eyes filled with suspicion at Sturbridge, but collapsed into purrs when petted.

He heard the house door open, and turned. The cat repaid this neglect by sinking two large claws into his hand. He made his peace and introduced himself. There were no chairs, so he sat with the cat. Mrs. Rowalski brought out the baby which she put in the carriage, a small child which she sat on the porch, a coffee percolator and the necessary things, a bottle for the baby, cigarettes, and finally a camp stool for herself. She was only about twenty-five, he thought, but he could see how the grinding years had etched her face. They sat there enjoying their smoke, the nice afternoon, the quiet children, and waited for the coffee.

Her hair was brushed back and tied with a piece of candy-box ribbon. She was clean but unadorned. He asked her about her childhood.

Her pregnant mother had fled Germany while the rest of the family were on the way to the gas chambers, and died in Brooklyn of tuberculosis when the little girl was four. From orphanage to foster home to foster home had been the child’s dreary round until she became a student nurse at University Hospital.