Gray Matters (3 page)

Skeets Kalbfleischer is also a film star of sorts. A file composed of ancient newsreels, newspaper clippings, and hospital training films is stored in the memory bank under the general classification Medicine, subheading Surgery. Skeets has programmed his file several times, out of the same morbid curiosity which once caused men to peek under their own bandages.

The film is a history of mankind’s first successful cerebrectomy. It tells the story of a twelve-year-old boy named Denton Kalbfleischer, who was returning home with his parents to Joliet, Illinois, from a Christmas skiing vacation in Vail, Colorado. While circling O’Hare Field in a holding pattern prior to landing, his jetliner was apparently hit by lightning. The result was, at that time, the worst air disaster in aviation history. Over five hundred people were killed, more than half of them on the ground, as bits of molten 747 rained down on East Cicero like a meteor shower. And when, amidst the din of sirens, a fireman found Skeets’ broken body heaped on a curbside pile of rubble, it was assumed he was a neighborhood boy, injured by falling debris. Only many hours later, during a routine check of the passenger lists, was his correct identity discovered.

The newspapers, of course, had a field day. Banner headlines proclaimed a
XMAS MIRACLE
and a swarm of reporters descended like encircling vultures on the Kalbfleischers’ Joliet home to interview the maid, the neighbors, the postman, Skeets’ sixth-grade teacher, anyone at all with even the vaguest connection to “that courageous, freckle-faced kid fighting for his life on the fifth floor of the Cook County Hospital.” Skeets’ parents, Dr. and Mrs. Harold Kalbfleischer, were killed in the crash, but home movies the family took the summer before at Narragansett, Rhode Island, were broadcast in color on all the major television networks. Skeets and his dad playing catch on the beach.

Newsreel cameramen stalked the corridors of the hospital, ambushing unwary doctors for filmed firsthand reports and occasionally sneaking past the security guards for a chance at valuable footage of poor Skeets, so savagely mangled that his body could not tolerate the pressure of an ordinary hospital bed, floating like a mummified Hindu levitation artist on a cushion of compressed air. Although, for the benefit of the press, the hospital staff remained cheerfully optimistic, in private Skeets’ doctors held out little hope for recovery. Virtually every major bone was fractured, arms and legs shattered, the spinal vertebrae crushed and disconnected like a broken string of beads; all the internal organs ruptured and hemorrhaging; rib fragments punctured both lungs—even considering the recent advances in the field of organ transplants, surgical teams across the nation agreed the case was hopeless. In order to save Skeets they would have to rebuild him from scratch.

A Hollywood film, late in the second reel, would call in a handsome young specialist for delicate, last-minute surgery; happy ending: Skeets lives to play football again and the successful surgeon gets the bosomy blond night nurse with the heart of gold. Reality is more prosaic. The memory-file program cuts to an old videotape of the medical laboratory at the Space Center in Houston, Texas, where the mechanical narrator introduces a NASA engineer, Dr. Frank E. Sayre, Jr. Dr. Sayre has thinning hair, combed straight back, and wears bifocals. For the past five years he has been engaged in special research dealing with the problem of space environment. It is Dr. Sayre’s contention that man’s body is a liability on a space mission. It must be supplied with oxygen, shielded from extreme temperature variation and radioactivity, provided with food, and let’s not forget the nasty business of waste removal. All this requires complex weighty equipment.

“Weight is a critical factor in the success of these missions,” Dr. Sayre says, nervously toying with his slide-rule tieclasp. “Now it always seemed to me that going to all this expense and trouble to accommodate the human body on a space flight was putting the cart before the horse, if you understand my meaning.” Dr. Sayre clears his throat and continues in a soft sugarcured Tidelands accent. “The only essential part of a man, the part that can’t be duplicated mechanically on a spacecraft, is his brain. The rest is simply excess baggage. I approached the problem from the point of view of an engineer. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could find some way to integrate a man’s brain with the control system of a space vehicle and leave all that other junk at home in the deep freeze? It would make long-range manned space probes—something on the order of a trip to Pluto, say—feasible right now, today, instead of in a hundred years or so as is currently predicted.”

The narration resumes at this point to explain how Dr. Sayre was inspired by the work of a team of Russian scientists who successfully grafted the head of one dog onto the body of another. Using similar surgical techniques, Dr. Sayre was busy for the next few years scooping the brains out of a zooful of rhesus monkeys. The primitive equipment he used grew ever more refined as his government research grants increased and by the time the film was made he had amassed over half a million dollars’ worth in the corner of his lab. Although this jumble of tubing and circuitry looks quite haphazard and comical when compared with the sleek efficient Depositories into which it evolved, the essential mechanism remains the same. In Dr. Sayre’s day it resembled nothing more than a pet shop fishtank. He is shown in the film posing with a big smile beside this device. Inside, floating in the electrolyte solution, is something that looks like a pinkish-gray jellyfish. This is the brain of George, a nine-year-old orangutan, which, according to the encephalograph, was still alive sixteen months after Dr. Sayre wheeled his great orange-haired body to the incinerator.

A phone call from a colleague in Chicago brought the case of Denton Kalbfleischer to Dr. Sayre’s attention. The boy was very near death and, as there seemed to be no living relatives around to object, perhaps the hospital staff might be willing to attempt a radical experiment. Negotiations were conducted and that same evening Dr. Sayre and all his apparatus were on board a northbound plane. Inside of twenty-four hours, George had a roommate in the fishtank.

The newspapers were told that Skeets had died and the reporters were all there when his body was buried in the family plot. It was a closed-coffin funeral. The official press release mentioned a Scout uniform with merit badges and a beloved fielder’s mitt under the pale folded hands, but these were only lies designed to satisfy a sentimental public. After the operation, the body was wrapped in a black plastic bag and sent to its final rest with the tracheotomy tubes still in place and the skull open like an empty porcelain soup tureen.

A color film of the operation was secretly placed in the hospital archives for the elucidation of future surgeons. Shots of the shaved scalp being peeled forward like a bathing cap and of surgical saws neatly carving through the cranium are especially vivid, but unfortunately a section of the print was damaged at the point where a vacuum pump lifts the brain intact, the enveloping meninges untorn. Cuts from other, later operations had to be spliced into the memory-file. Because a more sophisticated technique was then employed, certain concessions were made and the narrator politely apologizes to the viewer for the slight lapse in chronological accuracy.

After the operation, Skeets’ brain remained incognito for almost two years in Dr. Sayre’s Houston laboratory, a lump of gray matter distinguishable from the others in the tank only by the added number of wrinkles on its convoluted surface. NASA was no longer interested in the experiment once federal funds were cut back in an election year Congressional economy drive, and Dr. Sayre kept the brains around more or less as pets. Skeets would have been doomed to this limbo forever if an overanxious hunter hadn’t mistaken the balding scientist for a mule deer while he was out bird watching early one fine fall morning. After the funeral, his widow came across an unpublished notebook among the papers on his desk. It was a day-to-day record of Skeets’ progress following the operation. Mrs. Sayre instinctively knew this was the instrument that not only would save her late husband’s name from obscurity, but handsomely endow his meager estate as well.

When the news broke, as a cover story in
Life,
the ancient periodical photo magazine, public reaction was immediate. Panels of clergymen convened to discuss the ethics of such operations. The Bar Association appointed a special commission to study the legal rights of cerebromorphs. The AMA got in on the action by condemning unauthorized experimentation on hospital patients. Across the country there were hundreds of volunteers for cerebrectomy. Many of these individuals were already signed up to have their bodies frozen in liquid nitrogen after death. Now they wanted to place all bets on a sure thing. Enterprising morticians modified their facilities and advertised what were soon to become the world’s first Depositories.

As for Skeets, Mrs. Sayre turned down a very generous offer from a traveling circus and donated him to Johns Hopkins, her husband’s alma mater. There he spent the next twenty-five years as a curiosity, a prize specimen gathering dust in a graduate school laboratory, until advancing technology at last provided the elaborate mechanism that put him once again in touch with the outside world. The historic moment when the Bell Laboratory technicians hooked Skeets up to Dr. deHartzman’s ingenious neural communicator was televised internationally and portions of the preserved videotape provide a fine ending for the memory-file presentation.

In keeping with the occasion, the president of the university prepared a statement clearly intended to live forever: “Mankind proudly welcomes back the intrepid voyager into the unknown.” But history is not so easily juggled with and it is Skeets’ answer that is remembered, not the president’s eloquent words. There was a crackle of static on the loudspeaker system as the boy got used to his new computerized electric vocal cords and then, in a smooth machined monotone, he asked, “What time is breakfast?”

And so ends memory-file number M109-36S. It documents the world’s first cerebrectomy in an entertaining, yet educational, manner, but omits the most significant part of Skeets Kalbfleischer’s incredible story. There is no mention of the twenty-five years Skeets spent alone in darkness. Not one word to describe the explosive holocaust in which his dreams were born; the instant of absolute terror when the jetliner disintegrated in a ball of flame and he was torn loose from his fastened seatbelt; his clothing and hair, even the comic book he was reading, ignited by the blast that sent him tumbling down through five miles of open sky like a shooting star. It was the beginning of a nightmare a quarter century long.

Obu Itubi is a bee, or almost anyway, for the memory-file is one of a recent series which includes a separate track for each of the senses. Itubi can smell the heat and the sweet dusty pollen; he can feel the jostling of his busy neighbors, the furred armor of their pulsing abdomens. The drone of thousands of transparent wings is programmed into his auditory nerves. His is a bee’s-eye view of the hive: the perfect geometric succession of hexagonal cells, the interlinked pattern of the comb, membranous waxen walls. To his sculptor’s sensibility it seems pure poetry in the use of materials—nature’s harmony, the ultimate technology. Here is real elegance in engineering, a refinement sadly lacking in this age of contemplation. Moreover, the whole unit is organic. Itubi is awed.

As the file progresses, Itubi happily participates in the worker’s directional waggle-dance. He gathers pollen, produces honey and joins with thousands of others in the heat of midday to fan his wings and keep the delicate wax structures from melting. He is proud of his six clinging legs, the sensitive jointed antennae, the potent stinger. He feels lost and empty when the file comes to an end and he is no longer a bee.

And yet, transmission fade-out is something Itubi has always enjoyed. First there is the image (in this case, the busy swarm of
Apis mellifera)
flooding his consciousness like sunlight and then, with only the briefest command from the telescript console, it’s gone, the whole universe of thought receding into a tiny pinpoint in the frontal lobe. It hovers for a moment, a candle flame in the eternal night, very serene and distant. The final flickering seems almost an invitation: follow me, follow me… . Itubi wonders how many men have lingered in the evening at the edge of a lonely marsh to watch the flitting light of the will-o’-the-wisp? At such times liberation seems almost possible. But at the very instant of the soul’s release, the candle is snuffed and you are left alone in the dark.

Vera Mitlovic is deep in a celluloid dreamland: the fashion designer back at her drawing-board, a faraway look in her violet eyes as the old film drowns in a climactic violin whirlpool. “All lost,” the disembodied actress muses, consulting the Index for the number of yet another film. Not any film this time—for it is usually Vera’s habit to choose her entertainment by whim and random selection—but her very first, made in Vienna when she was six. The great Klimpt was directing, and although she had only a bit part, the magnificent ballroom scenes never fail to lift her spirits and she can think of no more effective antidote for melancholy than her own brief appearance in pigtails and pinafore.

She finds the correct code number for
The Golden Epoch
and activates the telescript console. To Vera, this device is one of the few gay toys in her spiritless mechanical universe. Think of a number and, like rubbing a magic lantern, within seconds a memory-file materializes. When her wish doesn’t come true, Vera is puzzled. Can there have been a breakdown in the System? She repeats the number, pausing between each digit so there will be no mistake. Again, nothing happens.

This is alarming. The Depository System functions automatically, although breakdowns are not unknown. Precise emergency procedures and periodic drills ensure the alertness of the residents. Vera was at the movies during drill and now finds she is helpless in the face of actual crisis.

The clear musical clarion of a deHartzman Communicator is as reassuring as the nick-of-time cavalry bugle call when the wagon train is surrounded by rampaging Sioux. A silent wind sweeps the prairie.