Three times a nurse wiped sweat from the surgeon’s face.
Wax performed its function. Vitallium alloy replaced bone, dressing shut out infection.
Huxley had watched uncounted operations, but felt aga in that almost insupportable sense of relief and triumph that comes when the surgeon turns away, and begins stripping off his gloves as he heads for the gowning room.
When Huxley joined Coburn, the surgeon had doused his mask and cap, and was feeling under his gown for cigarets. He looked entirely human again. He grinned at Huxley and inquired, “Well, how did you like it?”
“Swell. It was the first time I was able to watch that type of thing so closely. You can’t see so well from behind the glass, you know. Is he going to be all right?”
Coburn’s expression changed. “He is a friend of yours, isn’t he? That had slipped my mind for the moment. Sorry. He’ll be all right, I’m pretty sure. He’s young and strong, and he came through the operation very nicely. You can come see for yourself in a couple of days.”
“You excised quite a lot of the speech center, didn’t you? Will he be able to talk when he gets well? Isn’t he likely to have aphasia, or some other speech disorder?”
“Speech center? Why, I wasn’t even close to the speech centers.”
“Huh?”
“Put a rock in your right hand, Phil, so you’ll know it next time. You’re turned around a hundred and eighty degrees. I was working in the right cerebral lobe, not the left lobe.”
Huxley looked puzzled, spread both hands out in front of him, glanced from one to the other, then his face cleared and he laughed. “You’re right. You know, I have the damndest time with that. I never can remember which way to deal in a bridge game. But wait a minute—I had it so.firmly fixed in my mind that you were on the left side in the speech centers that I am confused.
What do you think the result will be on his neurophysiology?”
“Nothing—if past experience is any criterion. What I took away he’ll never miss. I was working in terra incognito, pal—No Man’s Land. If that portion of the brain that I was in has any function, the best physiologists haven’t been able to prove it.”
Chapter Two Three Blind Mice
BRRRNNG!
Joan Freeman reached out blindly with one hand and shut off the alarm clock, her eyes jammed shut in the vain belief that she could remain asleep if she did. Her mind wondered.
Sunday. Don’t have to get up early on Sunday. Then why had she set the alarm? She remembered suddenly and rolled out of bed, warm feet on a floor cold in the morning air. Her pajamas landed on that floor as she landed in the shower, yelled, turned the shower to warm, then back to cold again.
The last item from the refrigerator had gone into a basket, and a thermos jug was filled by the time she beard the sound of a car on the hill outside, the crunch of tires on granite in the driveway. She hurriedly pulled on short boots, snapped the loops of her jodphurs under them, and looked at herself in the mirror. Not bad, she thought. Not Miss America, but she wouldn’t frighten any children.
A banging at the door was echoed by the doorbell, and a baritone voice, “Joan! Are you decent?”
“Practically. Come on in, Phil.”
Huxley, in slacks and polo shirt, was followed by another figure. He turned to him. “Joan, this is Ben Coburn, Doctor Ben Coburn. Doctor Coburn, Miss Freeman.”
“Awfully nice of you to let me come, Miss Freeman.”
“Not at all, Doctor. Phil had told me so much about you that I have been anxious to meet you.” The conventionalities flowed with the ease of all long-established tribal taboo.
“Call him Ben, Joan. It’s good for his ego.”
While Joan and Phil loaded the car Coburn looked over the young woman’s studio house. A single large room, panelled in knotty pine and dominated by a friendly field-stone fireplace set about with untidy bookcases, gave evidence of her personality. He had stepped through open french doors into a tiny patio, paved with mossy bricks and fitted with a barbecue pit and a little fishpond, brilliant in the morning sunlight, when he heard himself called.