As Imo continued with his gruesome lecture, the crashed arm was removed and placed in a dish. One of the surgeons removed the new arm from its preservative solution and held it close to the socket, while another began connecting up the various nerves, muscles, sinews and blood vessels. For greater convenience, these were identified by small, colored tags, like the wiring of a switchboard. Finally the ball was fitted into the socket and the wound closed. During the whole process, the patient lay with open and interested eyes, conversing loquaciously with the operators.
"Getting a tire changed on my car seems more of a job than that," commented Woolf.
In the next operating theater, an eye was being removed from a woman.
"This lady has been getting very myopic, and we once replaced her cornea, but this failed to effect a permanent cure. Not long ago, we received an eye which would fit her, and she decided on an exchange. Eye operations are among our more difficult surgical problems. Shall we move on to physiotherapy?"
In a long, half dark room, patients lay on elongated apparatuses and watched a television show on the ceiling. Peculiar arrangements of levers and wheels moved legs, fingers or arms to and fro.
"Most of these people have received new members or had serious operations," explained Imo. "We apply local anesthetic to the joint or affected part and then use mechanical movement to restore suppleness. The movements are initially slow and small, to be increased in size and speed after a few days."
"Gosh, it's like running-in a car!" whispered Woolf. "Not over forty for the first five hundred miles; then increase speed gradually…"
They left the half-lit room and Holt questioned the young surgeon. "I saw some hearts on glass pumps in your stock room. Can you really exchange a heart without losing the patient?"
"I see at what you're driving," was the answer. "My father's remark about God living in the hearts of the few good Martians and suffering in the minds of the others… Perhaps the old gentleman is right.
"But you might as well know that medically the heart is neither more nor less than a pump with a particular aspiration pressure, and an optimum delivery pressure. It delivers per second an accurately defined quantity of a reddish liquid called blood.
"Of course we exchange hearts! First we shunt a sterile electric pump into the blood circuit and dam off the old heart; next we excise it and connect and insert the new one.
Finally we set the new heart in motion by mechanical massage, and after it takes up the load, we shut off and remove the electric pump. No patient has ever asked us what happens to his God during an operation."
Holt was having difficulty concealing his distaste and explained to Imo that other business called him urgently. When they got outside, he addressed Billingsley. "I'm beginning to understand what old Oraze meant. It seems impossible that men who pretend to serve a science should be capable of such sacrilegious cynicism."
A few days later they paid a visit to Imo's sister Mura at her school and heard a description of the Martian educational system.
Martian children entered school at the age of three, which was approximately equivalent to six on Earth. The first two years were devoted to reading, writing and arithmetic, together with a broad, illustrative coverage of the physical aspects of Martian civilization. Then the curriculum became more specialized.
It included mathematics, physics, engineering and electrotechnics, not to mention chemistry, sociology and jurisprudence. There was also a short course in the history of Martian development and civilization.
When the children attained their eighth year, there came a most confusing elaboration of the educational field. Metallurgy, food chemistry, atomic physics, transportation, communications, pressurizing and air conditioning, domestic economy, domestic troubleshooting, automatic registration and management, anatomy, medicinal properties, social hygiene, labor jurisprudence, vitamin studies, hydraulic installation, water rights, and ten or more other subjects, including the study of tunnel building, as abstruse as it might be to the average citizen, were thrown at the young students. The curriculum was designed to familiarize them with the inordinate complications of their future life and simultaneously to impress them with their responsibilities as vital, if undistinguished, cogs in the mighty machine.
At the age of 12, both boys and girls entered universities or technical schools to prepare for their actual professional or business activities. Mura explained proudly that for many generations, sex equality had been the foremost law and tenet of the Martian social order.Under her guidance, the visitors then entered a classroom where six year olds were studying chemistry.
The instructor was brushing through his subject at a terrifying rate. Within 30 minutes he covered the periodic system of elements and the secret of electrical adhesion which binds atoms into molecules in chemical combinations. Lightly, he tapped the subject of natural radioactivity of heavy atoms and included some remarks on the variety of behaviors of noble gasses in their splendid isolation, as compared to such clinging vines as the halogens.
On leaving the classroom, Holt spoke to their guide. "The speed with which all that involved material was presented to those children is really bewildering, and surely, even if those boys and girls understood it at all, it's out of the question that they should remember it!"
"Oh," answered Mura with a disarming smile, "they're not expected to. The children learn no detail matter in school. It's done at home at night."
"You mean in the evening, as homework?"
"No indeed. I mean at night, when they're asleep!"
"How on Mars can that be?"
"Our entire system of instruction is so arranged that lectures at school merely provide the children with a very general concept of the interrelation of things. In the classroom they are not expected to absorb detail, but only to comprehend indicative viewpoints and general systematics. We can instill detail much more simply in the absence of waking consciousness, when the brain is not distracted by other external stimuli.
"Here you will see a large collection of phonograph records relating to every professional subject. When they return from school, the children carry home records appropriate to the subjects they have just heard discussed. They fill their record changers and connect the pickup to their pillow receivers. During sleep, the substance of the instructional matter on the records flows into their subconscious and, according to our experience, it is absorbed much more reliably than if we had hammered knowledge into them in the classroom."
"How can a child get to sleep with a voice chattering from the pillow?" inquired Hubbard.
"The phonograph does not cut in until the encephalograph shows that the child is asleep."
"That's beyond me," answered Hubbard, with a shake of his head.
"Let's go to the repose chamber," said Mura, "and I'll give you a demonstration."
Nearby there was a dimly lighted room containing several couches, on one of which Mura invited Hubbard to recline. When he had done so, she produced a piece of apparatus like a radiophonograph on small, rubber-tired wheels. From a neighboring closet she took a record and placed it on the turntable.
"How much do you know of the periodic system of elements?" asked Mura.
"No more than I was able to pick up from that high-speed lecture we heard just now, and furthermore, my Martian is too limited for me to have understood it all anyway."
"You shall know much more very shortly," answered Mura confidently.
Dipping an absorbent pad into a liquid which smelled like acetone, she wiped several spots on Hubbard's scalp and then placed a number of shining metal disks on the spots, retaining them with an adhesive. Each disc was connected to the apparatus by a thin wire.