“He’s stable. Let’s lift him to the stretcher.”
Larry’s detached grin faded as they buckled him into the web cradle on the Medimeck’s back. He found that he was not alone. The lower end of the cradle held a twitching bundle wrapped in a winding-sheet. The Mediteck checked the pulsing tubules attaching Larry to the life-support console. Similar tubes entered the bundle. As the teck lifted the sheet a foot kicked out, a foot clad in a woven sandal—Larry’s.
“That’s it,” said the teck. “We’ve got all of him. Let’s get back to the Clinic.”
The amphitheatre was crowded. Five colour-coded Transplant Teams were milling around the rows of seats chatting casually. Larry felt warm in his zone of the air laminar flow. Music and molecules soothed.
“Debridgement completed. Bone Team in.”
A block of protein-sponge-matrix containing Larry’s bone dust was wired into the vertebral defect. The Vascular Team worked at a leisurely pace since the console oxygenated the detached hemitorso.
“Is he awake?”
Larry grimaced around the large, crusted breathing tube. Mediteck glanced at the EEG patterns.
“Encephalogram looks alert.”
“Good. Watch for emboli. We’re going to hook up the vessels now. We’ve tried pulse irrigation, but there may still be some clots lurking in those big leg veins. Here we go.”
Flavours. A bad taste told Larry that the venous return from his legs wasn’t clear. Something had died down there and was leaking bad molecules—enzymes and myoglobin fractions. In a moment the new flavour vanished. A member of the Bone Team tested their graft for oxyhaemoglobin levels. Satisfied, he returned to his seat. Someone back in the last row began to pass food items round—snack sandwiches, sweet bars, and drinks.
“Lost footage, ten feet. Malabsorption unlikely,” said the captain of the Gut Team as he studied Larry’s loops of intestine through transparent sacks of wash fluid. “The caecum and terminal ileum are gone. So is most of the left colon. But I think we can close the gaps.”
As the repair work continued Larry dozed off several times. Most of the faces he saw were relaxed, optimistic, almost cavalier in their attitude towards their work. The only looks of concern were on the Renal and Neural Teams.
“Only about forty grams of kidney tissue here.”
“Same over here. He has to stay away from the Gram negative organisms. I guess we should make the Blood Scrubber unit available a couple days a week.”
“The spinal cord looks OK, above Lumbar-two. He’ll lose a couple segments of his dermatome—somites L-three and L-four; but spreading should cover it eventually.”
Larry’s room was bright and cheerful. A wide window gave him a view of the city’s skyline through a trellis of flowers. One wall was coarse, unmatched stone with climbing vines and a noisy waterfall. The other wall was a mirror, one-way, he guessed, for anonymous observation. The wall behind his headboard was heavily telemetered. He puffed up his pillow and gazed between his numb feet towards the picture window. He smiled. Less than twenty hours after his accident, he was whole again. Skin, bones, muscles, kidneys, gut, and nerves—all sutured and beginning to knit.
“I’m sorry to inform you that Belt didn’t make it,” said Mahvin the Psychteck. “The crush was too much for the amorphous elements in his circuitry—the glasses—especially his delicate semiconductors and the chalcogenides. Belt’s personality is gone for ever.”
Larry had expected as much. “I don’t think I’ll be able to afford to pay—”
“Now we mustn’t worry about that.” Mahvin smiled, interlacing his long, soft fingers. “You are now classified as handicapped—temporarily, we hope—and your debts become Society’s debts. Your loan on Belt has been wiped clean. You will be given First Class Living and Rec allowances. I’ll take care of everything.”
Mahvin punctuated each sentence with an overly solicitous pat on Larry’s forearm. The words rolled around on his tongue as if they had a flavour of their own.
“How long will I be—er—handicapped?”
“Not long. Not long at all.” Mahvin smiled.
“Days? Months?” begged Larry.
“I’m not in Bio,” said Mahvin sweetly. “Your healers have all the facts right at their fingertips. Why not ask them? I’ll be in to check on you every day. If you need anything, just fill out one of these request slips.”
“My feet. I still can’t feel my feet,” said Larry. The Neuro Team had been at his bedside most of the morning. Eight weeks had passed since the surgical repair, and there had been little change since the first day. A teck had placed a web of sensor wires over his numb legs and pelvis. Muscles jumped under faradic and galvanic stimulations, but he felt nothing. A lengthy printout confirmed their suspicions: spinal cord regeneration—negative.
“Tinel’s sign is still absent,” said the teck.
The team made more notes on their printouts.
“My feet?”
“I’m afraid we can’t expect much more improvement than we have right now. Ordinarily we can expect one or two millimetres a day regeneration in peripheral nerves, but your injury involved the central nervous system—and CNS tissue just doesn’t seem to heal satisfactorily. Your regenerating fibres are all caught up in the CNS scar tissue. Our tests show a ball of hyperplasic glial fibres at L-two. Nothing is getting past it.”
Larry stared at his flaccid feet—limp, white and already swollen with the fluids of inactivity.
“But look at my dermatograms,” pleaded Larry. “The skin sensation is spreading down past the scars. Why, I have four or five inches of skin with new feeling.”
“I’m sorry, but those are peripheral nerves spreading from skin above the suture line. They usually do nicely in cases like yours. It is the cord that gives us a problem.”
“But the surgery was a success. I’m all healed up fine. I need my nerves to walk and for bladder and bowel control. I can’t just lie here in pools of urine and faeces with all this dead meat attached to me. I’m getting bed sores already.”
“The answer to that is a hemicorporectomy.”
“I’m to be a paperweight?”
“Yes. The dead meat, as you call it, can be removed.”
Larry remained depressed, silent.
“It won’t be so bad,” continued the Neuroteck. “You’ll be issued a mannequin—a cosmetic body with a companion meck personality and powerful android muscles. Ferrite converters, I think. You’ll be freed from this bed and there will be accessories for blood scrubbing. Bowel and bladder care will be automatic too. I think it will be a real improvement.”
Larry nodded. Anything would be an improvement.
The teams milled around the operating table.
“What do we do with this part that is—left over?”
“Why?”
“Is he asleep?”
“Yes.”
“Well there’s a collector from Embryonics. They need live organs for tissue culture and budding experiments.”
“Let them have the lower torso; just be sure it is correctly labelled in case someone orders more tests on it.”
Sixty pounds of meat and bones left the operating room, with the label “Larry Dever’.
Stump revision continued.
“Cut the cord below the knob of scar tissue. Graft this bar of ilium crosswise at the base of the spine.”
The colostomy and ureterostomy openings were routed through the rectus muscles at a sharp angle so the belly muscle could act as a sphincter. Skin suture-lines were placed away from the weight-bearing points under the spine and rib cage.