“Not Kirn, Lacy!” she gasped. Gone now was everything of poise, of insouciance, which had so characterized her a moment before. She who had worked unflinchingly upon all sorts of dismembered, fragmentary, maimed and mangled men was now a pleading, stricken, desperately frightened girl. “Not Kim—please! Oh, merciful God, don’t let it be my Kirn!”
“You can’t be there, Mac.” He did not need to tell her. She knew. He knew that she knew.
“Somebody else—anybody else.”
“No!” came the hot negative, although the blood drained completely from her face, leaving it as white as the immaculate uniform she wore. Her eyes were black, burning holes. “It’s my job, Lacy, in more ways than one. Do you think I’d let anyone else work on him?” she finished passionately.
“You’ll have to,” he declared. “I didn’t want to tell you this, but he’s a mess.” This, from a surgeon of Lacy’s long and wide experience, was an unthinkable statement. Nevertheless: “All the more reason why I’ve got to do it. No matter what shape he’s in I’ll let no one else work on my Kim!”
“I say no. That’s an order—official!”
“Damn such orders!” she flamed. “There’s nothing back of it—you know that as well as I do!”
“See here, young woman . . . !”
“Do you think you can order me not to perform the very duties I swore to do?” she stormed. “And even if it were not my job, I’d come in and work on him if I had to get a torch and cut my way in to do it. The only way you can keep me out is to have about ten of your men put me into a strait-jacket—and if you do that I’ll have you kicked out of the Service bodily!”
“QX, MacDougall, you win.” She had him there. This girl could and would do exactly that. “But if you faint I’ll make you wish. . . .”
“You know me better than that, doctor.” She was cold now as a woman of marble. “If he dies I’ll die too, right then; but if he lives I’ll stand by.”
“You would, at that,” the surgeon admitted. “Probably you would be able to hold together better than any one else could. But there’ll be after-effects in your case, you know.”
“I know.” Her voice was bleak. “I’ll live through them . . . if Kim lives.” She became all nurse in the course of a breath. White, cold, inhuman; strung to highest tension and yet placidly calm, as only a truly loving woman in life’s great crises can be. “You have had reports on him, doctor. What is your provisional diagnosis?”
“Something like elephantiasis, only worse, affecting both arms and both legs. Drastic amputations indicated. Eye-sockets. Burns. Multiple and compound fractures. Punctured and incised wounds., Traumatism, ecchymosis, extensive extravasations, oedema. Profound systemic shock. The prognosis, however, seems to be favorable, as far as we can tell.”
“Oh, I’m glad of that,” she breathed, the woman for a moment showing through the armor of the nurse. She had not dared even to think of prognosis. Then she had a thought. “Is that really true, or are you just giving me a shot in the arm?” she demanded.
“The truth—strictly,” he assured her. “Worsel has an excellent sense of perception, and has reported fully and clearly. His brain, mind, and spine are not affected in any way, and we should be able to save his life. That is the one good feature of the whole thing.”
The speedster finally matched the intrinsic velocity of the hospital ship. She went free, flashed up to the Pasteur, inerted, and maneuvered briefly. The larger vessel engulfed the smaller. The Gray Lensman was carried into the operating room. The anaesthetist approached the table and Lacy was stunned at a thought from Kinnison.
“Never mind the anaesthetic, Doctor Lacy. You can’t make me unconscious without killing me. Just go ahead with your work. I held a nerve-block while the Delgonian was doing his stuff and I can hold it while you’re doing yours.”
“But we can’t, man!” Lacy exclaimed. “You’ve got to be under a general for this job—we can’t have you conscious. You’re raving, I think. It will work—it always has. Let us try it, anyway, won’t you?”
“Sure. It’ll save me the trouble of holding the block, even though it won’t do anything else. Go ahead.”
The attendant doctor did so, with the same cool skill and to the same end-point as in thousands of similar and successful undertakings. At its conclusion, “Gone now, aren’t you, Kinnison?” Lacy asked, through his Lens.
“No,” came the surprising reply. “Physically, it worked. I can’t feel a thing and I can’t move a muscle, but mentally I’m still here.”
“But you shouldn’t be!” Lacy protested. “Perhaps you were right, at that—we can’t give you much more without danger of collapse. But you’ve got to be unconscious! Isn’t there some way in which you can be made so?”
“Yes, there is. But why do I have to be unconscious?” he asked, curiously.
‘To avoid mental shock—seriously damaging,” the surgeon explained. “In your case particularly the mental aspect is graver than the purely physical one.”
“Maybe you’re right, but you can’t do it with drugs. Call Worsel; he has done it before.
He had me unconscious most of the way over here except when he had to give me a drink or something to eat. He’s the only man this side of Arisia who can operate on my mind.”
Worsel came. “Sleep, my friend,” he commanded, gently but firmly. “Sleep profoundly, body and mind, with no physical or mental sensations, no consciousness, no perception even of the passage of time. Sleep so until someone having authority to do so bids you awaken.”
And Kinnison slept; so deeply that even Lacy’s probing Lens could elicit no response.
“He will stay that way?” Lacy asked in awe.
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“Indefinitely. Until one of you doctors or nurses tells him to wake up, or until he dies for lack of food or water.”
“He’ll get nourishment. He would make a much better recovery if we could keep him in that state until his injuries are almost healed. Would that hurt him?”
“Not at all.”
Then the surgeons and the nurses went to work. Since it has already been made amply plain what had to be done to the Gray Lensman, no good end is to be served by following in revolting detail the stark hideousness of its actual doing. Suffice it to say, then, that Lacy was not guilty of exaggeration when he described Kinnison as being a “mess.” He was. The job was long and hard. It was heart-breaking, even for those to whom Kinnison was merely another case, not a beloved personality. What they had to do they did, and the white-marble chief nurse carried on through every soul-wrenching second, through every shocking, searing motion of it. She did her part, stoically, unflinchingly, as efficiently as though the patient upon the table were a total stranger undergoing a simple appendectomy and not the one man in her entire Universe undergoing radical dismemberment. Nor did she faint—then.
“Three or four of the girls fainted dead away, and a couple of the internes turned sort of green around the gills,” she explained to your historian in reply to a direct question. She can bring herself to discuss the thing, now that it is so happily past, although she does not like to do so. “But I held on until it was all over. I did more than faint then.” She smiled wryly at the memory. “I went into such a succession of hysterical cat-fits that they had to give me hypos and keep me in bed, and they didn’t let me see Kim again until we had him back in Base Hospital, on Tellus. But even old Lacy himself was so woozy that he had to have a couple of snifters of brandy, so the shew I put on wasn’t too much out of order, at that.”
Back in Base Hospital, then, time wore on until Lacy decided that the Lensman could be aroused from his trance. Clarrissa woke him up. She had fought for the privilege: first claiming it as a right and then threatening to commit mayhem upon the person of anyone else who dared even to think of doing it “Wake up, Kim dear,” she whispered. “The worst of it is over now. You are getting well.”
The Gray Lensman came to instantly, in full command of every faculty, knowing everything that had happened up to the instant of his hypnosis by Worsel. He stiffened, ready to establish again the nerve-block against the intolerable agony to which he had been subjected so long, but there was no need. His body was, for the first time in untold eons, free from pain; and he relaxed blissfully, reveling in the sheer comfort of it.
“I’m so glad that you’re awake, Kim,” the nurse went on. “I know that you can’t talk to me—we can’t unbandage your jaw until next week—and you can’t think at me, either, because your new Lens hasn’t come yet. But ^ can talk to you and you can listen. Don’t be discouraged, Kim. Don’t let it get you down. I love you just as much as I ever did, and as soon as you can talk we’re going to get married. I am going to take care of you . . .”