Chapter 6
Jonnie, when he got into the compound, put Pattie down and went looking for MacKendrick. He found him in the hospital.
"Where's the epidemic?” demanded MacKendrick. “I got your call in the middle of a medical lecture. I brought a whole medical team! And when I get here, I find you've taken off-'
“This time,” said Jonnie, “we're going to do it!"
“Oh,” said MacKendrick. “You mean the capsules. Jonnie, I have tried every way I can think of and there's no getting in those skulls. Too much bone! I thought I showed you!”
The doctor went over to where he'd last left the huge Psychlo skull. He knocked his knuckles on it. “It’s just plain, solid bone! The brain is clear down under the lower back plate. If I drill out enough bone to get to it, you'll just have a dead Psychlo.
“Ah,” said Jonnie. “You used the word 'drill.' I didn't.”
He walked over to the skull and picked it up, all half a hundred pounds of it.
MacKendrick had wired on the joints and Jonnie opened the jaw. “Now watch the earbones." He got a better grip and held it up to the light, an action something like juggling a medicine ball. “Watch.” He opened the jaw again.
The hinge, not the place a Psychlo heard through, but the place where the earbone met the back jawline, opened to show a hole about a thirty-second of an inch in diameter.
“You showed me this once,” said Jonnie, “and explained you couldn't get an instrument through it. But it leads right to the spots where the capsules are embedded in the brain.”
MacKendrick was skeptical. "Jonnie, I got a whole team in there cleaning the place up for a possible operation. I thought something serious had occurred. But as it's no emergency, why don't we just get some sleep-'
Jonnie took the skull over to the table they had used before for dissection and put it down. “It may look like no emergency to you. But the truth is that we don't know how to make a Psychlo motor and we don't know how to work their math. If we don't know those things we could come unstuck. We must have hundreds of planes right this minute that are inoperative. We need consumer products out in the planets and the Psychlo motors are tops. It 's an emergency that'll do for now. But watch!”
Jonnie took a thin insulated wire from his pocket and inserted it in the tiny skull hole. He took the other end of the wire and pushed it through the tiny hole on the other side.
“What are you doing?” demanded MacKendrick.
“Now the question you must answer is, will these wires, pushed in, tear up any jaw or ear muscles?”
“Oh, they might hit some tissue, but the main muscles aren't there. That hole occurs because the jawbone, when extended to the extreme lower position, would have to leave a hole: otherwise there would have to be two additional bone plates and lord knows, there's enough already! I don't think-'
Jonnie reached for the kit he had hastily packed. He drew out a molecular plating gun. “This thing pours a stream of molecules from a rod onto a surface.”
MacKendrick was at sea. “You can't get a gun like that in a head!”
“The gun unit goes outside.” He dug out an electrical terminal plate. “Where is one of those capsules we removed?”
MacKendrick got one of the two half-circles of bronze.
Jonnie snipped off some lengths of insulated wire. He took the molecular
plating gun and connected a length to the electrode that ordinarily fed current to the rod of spray metal. Then he laid the other end on the bit of bronze. He took a second piece of wire and laid it from the bronze to the electrical terminal plate. Then he connected the back of the terminal plate with a long wire to the current input terminal of the gun. He was simply going to substitute the bit of bronze for the gun's usual spray rod and then bypass the spraying component but instead make the molecules flow on a wire to a receiving plate. And just to make sure electrolysis would occur, he was completing the circuit back to the gun.
He pressed the trigger.
The terminal plate began to be plated in bronze.
A tiny hole appeared in the capsule taken from a Psychlo head.
No electrician, MacKendrick said, “It’s disappearing!”
“We're flowing the metal molecules up the wire to the plate. I think it's called 'electrolysis.' We're just not letting the metal molecules spray. We're flowing them onto a plate.”
He adjusted the wires to the bit of bronze so that an inflow hit a different spot and the outflow occurred from a new place.
MacKendrick gawped. “That piece of metal is disappearing!”
“It’s reappearing over on the terminal plate,” said Jonnie. “But that will be outside the head!”
He picked up a new bit of wire and with a small torch melted the end of it round. "If we take the sharp point off, can you wiggle this wire in through that hinge hole, around the various nerves, and touch the bronze bit in the skull? And then do the same thing from the other side?”
This was something MacKendrick knew about. The corded nerves of a Psychlo brain were easy to push around. The cortex, or covering of the brain, could probably be pierced in a couple of tiny places without much damage.
“We'll see!” said MacKendrick, giving up all thought of waiting for morning.
The Psychlo bodies were lying on two mine carts outside the door. Pierre seemed to have vanished. MacKendrick called in two nurses and another doctor and they wheeled the workman Psychlo into the dissection room. It was about five times as much body as they were used to handling, but with everyone helping, they got it on a table.
“It’s probably still frozen inside,” said Jonnie.
“No problem,” said MacKendrick. “You forgot we've been through this before. A couple of times I was all hopeful we could even operate.” He took a stack of microwave emanating pads and plopped them on either side of the head to thaw it out with a quick defreeze.
The room seemed awfully populated. Mr. Tsung was giving Jonnie a white coat and a pair of lens less glasses. Jonnie wondered what they were for and put them in his pocket. He was about to order a repositioning of the body when the singing button started up. It sang:
Gone are the days,
When my heart was young and gay.
Gone are the days...
The medical team was startled and a bit shocked. The scene was macabre enough without somebody singing a doleful dirge!
Jonnie pushed the button at Mr. Tsung. “Get rid of this thing!”
Pulling other bits out of his kit, Jonnie got to work making a more easily handled setup. Dr. MacKendrick was getting the metal analyzer they used for an X-ray machine in place. He put the head of the corpse on it and tuned the dials so that he had a sharp, clean picture of the bronze capsule. He was testing the jaws of the corpse to see if they were flexible and, finding they were, propped them open with a metal expansion tool.
The other doctor was mopping up water that had run off the cadaver's head and was getting the lower wave-emanation plate wet.
A nurse leaned over to Jonnie and whispered, “I don't think this little girl should be in here during all this.”
Jonnie turned and there was Pattie.
She must have followed him in. She was looking with interest at the bleached skull.
This was the first day in all these months he had seen Pattie noticing her environment. He was not going to suppress her by telling her to get out. “Let her stay,” he whispered to the nurse. The woman was a bit disapproving but she did not push it.
Jonnie had his rig ready. MacKendrick was looking at some sketches he had made of Psychlo brain nerves. He laid the drawings down, took the offered wires, and got to work.