“How come,” he asked as he came abreast, “they had to search for you?”
“Left my pocketphone in my other suit,” Coburn returned briefly. “On purpose—I wanted a little peace and quiet. No luck.”
They worked north and west through the arcades and passages that connected the Union with the Science group, ignoring the moving walkways as being too slow. But when they came to the conveyor subway under Third Avenue opposite the Pottenger Medical School, they found it flooded, its machinery stalled, and were forced to detour west to the Fairfax Avenue conveyor.
Coburn cursed impartially the engineers and the planning commission for the fact that spring brings torrential rains to Southern California, Chamber of Commerce or no.
They got rid of their wet clothes in the Physicians’ Room and moved on to the gowning room for surgery. An orderly helped Huxley into white trousers and cotton shoe covers, and they moved to the next room to scrub. Coburn invited Huxley to scrub also in order that he might watch the operation close up. For three minutes by the little sand glass they scrubbed away with strong green soap, then stepped through a door and were gowned and gloved by silent, efficient nurses. Huxley felt rather silly to be helped on with his clothes by a nurse who had to stand on tip-toe to get the sleeves high enough. They were ushered through the glass door into Surgery III, rubber-covered hands held out, as if holding a skein of yarn.
The patient was already in place on the table, head raised up and skull clamped immobile.
Someone snapped a switch and a merciless circle of blue-white lights beat down on the only portion of him that was exposed, the right side of his skull. Coburn glanced quickly around the room, Huxley following his glance—light green walls, two operating nurses, gowned, masked, and hooded into sexlessness, a ‘dirty’ nurse, busy with something in the corner, the anesthetist, the instruments that told Coburn the state of the patient’s heart action and respiration.
A nurse held the chart for the surgeon to read. At a word from Coburn, the anesthetist uncovered the patient’s face for a moment. Lean brown face, acquiline nose, closed sunken eyes.
Huxley repressed an exclamation. Coburn raised his eyebrows at Huxley.
“What’s the trouble?”
“It’s Juan Valdez!”
“Who’s he?”.”The one I was telling you about—the law student with the trick eyes.”
“Hmm—Well, his trick eyes didn’t see around enough corners this time. He’s lucky to be alive. You’ll see better, Phil, if you stand over there.”
Coburn changed to impersonal efficiency, ignored Huxley’s presence and concentrated the whole of his able intellect on the damaged flesh before him. The skull had been crushed, or punched, apparently by coming into violent contact with some hard object with moderately sharp edges. The wound lay above the right ear, and was, superficially, two inches, or more, across. It was impossible, before exploration, to tell just how much damage had been suffered by the bony structure and the grey matter behind.
Undoubtedly there was some damage to the brain itself. The wound had been cleaned up on the surface and the area around it shaved and painted. The trauma showed up as a definite hole in the cranium. It was bleeding slightly and was partly filled with a curiously nauseating conglomerate of clotted purple blood, white tissue, grey tissue, pale yellow tissue.
The surgeon’s lean slender fingers, unhuman in their pale orange coverings, moved gently, deftly in the wound, as if imbued with a separate life and intelligence of their own. Destroyed tissue, too freshly dead for the component cells to realize it, was cleared away—chipped fragments of bone, lacerated mater dura, the grey cortical tissue of the cerebrum itself.
Huxley became fascinated by the minuscule drama, lost track of time, and of the sequence of events. He remembered terse orders for assistance, “Clamp!” “Retractor!” “Sponge!” The sound of the tiny saw, a muffled whine, then the toothtingling grind it made in cutting through solid living bone. Gently a spatulate instrument was used to straighten out the tortured convolutions.
Incredible and unreal, he watched a scalpel whittle at the door of the mind, shave the thin wall of reason.