Watching the viewplate and checking the sketches he began to work a blunted wire end in. He finally, with a few minor detours, got it to the embedded bronze. Then he got the other wire through to the other side of the metal.
Jonnie verified they were ready and threw the switch.
The exterior terminal plate began to turn bronze.
MacKendrick worked very delicately, feeding in electricity to one side of the plate and taking it from the other. It was, looking at the viewplate, sort of like cleaning up a blot.
The bronze in the skull became less and less. MacKendrick steered the wires around. After about half an hour, he could find no further shadows or traces of the bronze in the skull. He carefully withdrew the wires. “Now to see if we burned nerves,” he said.
The team went into immediate action. They broke out aprons and gloves and a set of instruments including a spinning-disc bone saw.
The nurse leaned over to Jonnie again and whispered “I do really think that little girl ought to go. This is too much for anyone that young. How old is she? Ten?”
Pattie was sitting on a stool, overlooking the proceedings. She was very interested.
Nothing could have made Jonnie banish her. “Leave her alone,” he whispered back.
They removed the viewers and put down pans and cloths. And in a moment the bone saw was whining and screeching into the skull. Shortly, green blood began to flow and the team mopped it up.
MacKendrick had done this so often that it seemed only minutes before they were looking at the place where the bronze had been. MacKendrick mopped up a bit more blood and got out a glass and inspected the nerves.
“The tiniest amount of burn,” he said.
"I’ll reduce the amperage,” said Jonnie. He got busy installing a rheostat in the circuit.
The team was throwing the bits of the dead Psychlo back together. They heaved him off the table and back onto the mine cart and shoved him out in the hall. Two minutes later they had the former executive on the table.
They repeated the molecular flow operation on the bronze and got rid of it.
Jonnie did a test on a silver capsule they already had from times past. MacKendrick consulted his drawings again.
The doctor pulled the wires back and fished them in again on the silver capsule in the cadaver's brain.
It went along all right until they got to the fuse in it. It was so tiny and so quickly melted that it took quite some time to pick up all the bits. The wires, manipulated around, were more likely to touch each other than the scraps left.
Eventually that was gone too. Once more the gloves and saws, and presently the brain interior– mopped of green blood– was exposed. MacKendrick went over it with the greatest attention. Then he stood up.
MacKendrick was looking at Jonnie with awe. The lad had invented a new way to operate! MacKendrick was thinking of the bullets and metal bits that could be removed with this, and without making huge incisions or holes. Electrolytic surgery!
“It works on a corpse,” said Jonnie. He glanced at his watch. “It’s near midnight now. Tomorrow let's see if it works on a live one!”
Chapter 7
At seven the following morning, MacKendrick's team began to set up an entirely different room for operating. “We don't know enough about Psychlo diseases,” he told Jonnie, “and their cadavers might be very infective to them when decayed. They are built of viruses and there may be a virus smaller than viruses. So change your clothes and get brand-new wires and equipment.”
Jonnie did, and when he came back-having given Mr. Tsung the problem of digging up another white coat– and was laying out new wires, he was astonished to hear MacKendrick tell his nurse to go get Chirk.
“She's almost dead,” said MacKendrick. "Psychlo females have been feeding her for months with a stomach tube. The brain structure is similar and the hole in the jaw is bigger. She's already in a coma and we won't have to give her much methane. That's the anesthetic that knocks them out.”
“I better go get her,” said Jonnie.
He took a mine cart and an air mask and went down to the rooms which were always circulated with breathe-gas.
Two Psychlo females came over at once when he pushed the cart toward
Chirk's bed.
There she lay, eyes shut, unmoving. But she was thin, almost skeletal. Poor Chirk. The two hefty females had no trouble at all laying her on the mine cart. Jonnie thought he might have been able to do it himself. Her bones almost rattled.
“Give me a breathe-gas mask for her,” said Jonnie.
The two females looked at him blankly. “Why?” one said.
“So she can breathe!” said Jonnie impatiently.
The other female said, “It won't do any good to try to torture her first. In her state, she won't feel it.”
Jonnie was trying to wrap his wits around this, and seeing his confusion, the first one explained, “We have been waiting for someone to come down to kill her. They always do. We wondered and wondered why you waited months.”
“That's the only treatment the catrists ever permitted for lapsin."
What were these words? Well, "catrist" was the medical scientist cult that really ran Psychlo. Didn't he know that? And “lapsin” was a common disease which child females sometimes got, and although it was rare for one of Chirk's age– she's thirty, you know– to get it, it was undeniable that she had lapsin. And, naturally, sooner or later, she had to be killed.
"I’m not going to kill her!” said Jonnie, indignant. “I’m going to try to cure her!”
They didn't believe him. In the first place it was against the law to cure lapsin. It was also against the law for an unauthorized person to trifle with the mind. So it followed that he was lying to them just like a catrist would. But it still wouldn't do any good to try to torture her before she was vaporized as she wouldn't feel it and he wouldn't enjoy it.
Jonnie had to get the breathe-mask himself, put it on Chirk, and wheel her through the atmosphere lock. Behind him the two females were telling each other, “Torture, I told you so.”
Even getting his toe back into the “civilization” named Psychlo had upset Jonnie. But he soon had Chirk in the improvised operating room. Thin as she was, it still took three of them to get her on the table.
MacKendrick had drilled all this out long ago and his team was quite efficient. The new doctor lifted the mask enough to slip an expander into the mouth. A nurse slipped a methane tube under the mask edge and then stood with a stethoscope on Chirk's heart to detect beating changes. The heart evidently slowed down enough to suit her and she nodded to MacKendrick.
The jaw holes were outside the mask edge and MacKendrick soon had the wires inserted through the tissue and into the brain. He positioned the head on the viewscreen very carefully. Jonnie regulated the gun trigger for him. The nurse listened carefully to the heart and regulated the methane– breathe-gas mix.
The capsule in her head got less and less. The metal on the plate terminal got more and more.
One hour and forty-five minutes later, MacKendrick stood back, the extracted wires in his hands. A trickle of green on each side of the head was staunched by a nurse. The methane tube was taken away. The expander was removed from the mouth. The nurse turned up the breathe-gas valve to maximum on the mask vial.
“We tried this on a workman a few months ago without operating,” said MacKendrick. “It will take her about four hours to come out of it. If she does.”
Jonnie was going to make sure nothing got in the road of her doing just that. He pushed the mine cart and its burden out of the room and back to the lower atmosphere lock.