The Fellowship of the Hand (21 page)

“This is Philip Whalen,” Hobbes announced, moving to the far end of the conference table. “He’s also a surgeon, and he’ll be assisting Dr. MacKenzie this evening.”

Whalen had none of the charm of the aging MacKenzie. He glared at Earl from beneath bushy black eyebrows and asked, “What do we need a photographer for? We’re not movie stars.”

“Maybe you will be someday,” Earl said, trying to laugh it off.

Hobbes moved along quickly to the last man. “And Dr. Harry Armstrong, an internist. He will pronounce the moment of life, and handle all postoperative care.”

Armstrong rose and reached across the table to shake hands. He was somewhere between MacKenzie and Whalen in age—perhaps in his mid-forties. There was nothing memorable about his almost featureless face. Earl decided he’d have made a good spy. “Did O’Connor come too?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Hobbes said. “I hope the damn fool remembers it’s tonight.”

“We can scarcely proceed without him,” MacKenzie commented. He reached into his pocket to extract a slender pipe. Seeing him light it, Tony Cooper took out another cigarette.

“I have confidence in his arrival,” Lawrence Hobbes said. He walked to the wall and pulled down a detailed medical chart of the human body. “Now, gentlemen—and Miss Morgan—shall we begin?”

Earl cleared his throat. “I guess I need a bit of the background. You didn’t tell me a great deal when you hired me.”

Lawrence Hobbes smiled thinly, looking more like a schoolmaster than ever. “What
did
I tell you?”

“That you wanted motion pictures and tape recordings of a revolutionary type of transplant operation, to be performed in secret on this island.”

“And that is correct, Mr. Jazine, as far as it went. I have assembled the experts here. Some, like these three distinguished doctors, have been living here for months, examining the problem. Others, like Cooper and Miss Morgan, arrived only yesterday. You and Dr. O’Connor are scheduled for today. The operation—the experiment—takes place tonight.”

“Isn’t it customary to perform important surgery in the morning, when the patient has had the advantages of a night’s sleep?”

“Our patient has had the advantage of thirty years’ sleep,” Hobbes replied.

“Thirty—”

“You are familiar with the aims of the International Cryogenics Institute, Mr. Jazine?”

“Certainly. You froze people at the moment of death and stored their bodies against a future time when they could be revived. There have been a number of other practitioners but ICI is the most successful financially.”

“Quite correct.” He turned to the white-haired surgeon. “Dr. MacKenzie, please tell him what we intend to do this night.”

MacKenzie cleared his throat. “We’re taking the best of the specimens from the vault—a young man who died of a brain tumor at age twenty-six—and we plan to transplant all necessary organs to his body. Surgery will be performed in a cryogenic state, following which the body temperature will be gradually increased. When it reaches the desired level, the heart will be stimulated with an electric shock and the patient will live once more.”

“Fantastic,” was all Earl Jazine could say.

“But nothing happens if Freddy O’Connor doesn’t get here,” Tony Cooper pointed out. He was not quite so handsome with his clothes on, Earl decided. “Freddy’s our brain man.”

“Brain?”

“Brain surgeon,” Hobbes explained. “Naturally we must replace the tumored brain, along with certain other organs.”

“Isn’t that difficult?”

“O’Connor has had great success with animals,” Vera Morgan volunteered. “I’ve heard him lecture on the subject.”

Another one of those lights started flashing near the ceiling, only this time it was green. Lawrence Hobbes didn’t go into a panic. He merely said, “That’s Hilda signaling a new arrival. It better be Freddy O’Connor.”

It was.

A few minutes later he swaggered into the conference room and dropped his free-form suitcase in a heap on the floor. “How the hell are you?” he asked to no one and everyone. “How’s life in the Frankenstein Factory? What say, Tony? You been fuckin’ our Miss Vera while you waited for me?”

E
ARL QUICKLY LEARNED THAT
Freddy O’Connor was not a man to take anything very seriously. He was a red-haired Irishman who liked to drink and curse, and he especially enjoyed riding Tony Cooper about his relationship with Vera. Earl wondered if he was seeing the remains of a love affair, the final embers of some bitter triangle. But then he decided that Freddy O’Connor would always be that way around a beautiful woman, especially someone else’s beautiful woman. Perhaps he was not that much different from Dr. MacKenzie, only more direct.

By early afternoon Freddy was drinking steadily, giving no indication that he’d be performing a transplant of a human brain in a matter of hours. There were still a number of blanks to be filled in for Earl, so he sought out the unmemorable Dr. Armstrong to talk with.

“I walk two miles every day,” Armstrong told him. “If you want to talk, you’ll have to walk with me.”

“Where can you walk for two miles on this island?”

“Around and around,” the doctor replied. “Actually once around the shoreline does it pretty close. The island’s horseshoe shape makes for a lengthy shoreline.”

The day was warming nicely, with no trace of the morning mist, and Earl enjoyed the freshness of the air in his lungs. Back in New York the air was too often rank with the ozone purifiers they sprayed from helicopters. At times it was enough to make him wish for the old polluted days.

“I didn’t even realize it was shaped like a horseshoe,” Earl admitted as they walked.

“How did you think it got its name?”

“I don’t think about names so much.”

Armstrong grunted. “You should. They shape our lives. My name has shaped my life. Do you know what it was like to be born with the name Armstrong in the second half of the twentieth century? There’d already been a radio hero named Jack Armstrong, an all-American boy. Then in 1969 we had Neil Armstrong as the first person to set foot on the moon. My father kept reminding me of them all the time I was growing up. Sometimes he’d even throw in Henry Armstrong, the boxer, and Louis Armstrong, the band leader. He’d always say I had to live up to the name. I suppose that’s why I became a doctor in the first place.”

“What about Hobbes? When did you link up with him?”

“Earlier this year. The International Cryogenics Institute has a good reputation, you know.”

“A reputation for being financially successful,” Earl corrected.

“It’s the same thing. Actually, I was surprised he wanted me. Hobbes has been running the show pretty much by himself these past years.”

“You don’t need a large staff to keep a few dozen bodies cold,” Earl pointed out. “It’s done by machine.”

The doctor sighed. “These days almost everything’s done by machine. They say in a few years even simple operations may be performed by computers.”

“I hope I’m not around to see that.”

They strolled along the beach past the boathouse, watching a group of sea birds swoop in low over the water. “Those are terns,” Armstrong said, “diving for their dinner.”

“Do you think they’ll succeed?”

Armstrong glanced up. “The terns?”

“No, the team. Do you think this multiple transplant will work?”

“It’s always a possibility.”

“O’Connor hardly seems the sort for a brain surgeon.”

“I’ve seen him work. He settles right down at the operating table.”

“But all that business about this being a Frankenstein Factory. …”

“He didn’t simply dream up the Frankenstein image, you know. The South African grocer, Louis Washkansky, the first man in history to receive a heart transplant, joked on television, ‘I’m a Frankenstein now. I’ve got somebody else’s heart.’ He wasn’t quite accurate, because Frankenstein wasn’t the name of the monster. And Washkansky lived only eighteen days, far less than the monster.”

“Still …”

“Let’s face it—we’re the modern equivalents of Dr. Frankenstein. If this first operation is successful, we’ll have created a whole new person—a body and a brain and other organs brought together from a half-dozen sources. That’s just what he was doing in Mary Shelley’s novel. And we could well become a factory if Hobbes decides to extend the technique to the other cryos he’s got stashed away down there.”

“But the people who asked to be frozen—the dead ones whose relatives had to pay the upkeep for all these years—certainly they would object to coming back in another body!”

“Maybe yes, maybe no.” Dr. Armstrong smiled slightly. “Of course Hobbes was quite clever when he founded the institute thirty years ago. There were other groups, like the Cryonics Societies of California and New York, operating in the 1970s, but Hobbes chose the word
cryogenics
instead of
cryonics.
Cryogenics covers the entire field of very low temperatures, and much of the research here has been directed toward operating techniques at low temperatures.”

“I’d think an operation on a frozen body would be impossible.”

“Quite true, if the body is solidly frozen. But the temperature can be regulated for optimum effect. In that first heart-transplant operation I mentioned, the heart was chilled to 50°F. And the patient’s body temperature was powered to 70.88°. You see, when the body is chilled, blood and kidney circulation naturally decrease. At a temperature of 68°F. blood flow is barely ten percent of normal.”

“But that’s a long way from freezing. The bodies they’ll be working with have been down in those vaults for up to thirty years!”

“A man named Openchowski was freezing the brain cells of dogs back in 1883, and Dr. Irving S. Cooper—no relation to Tony Cooper—was performing cryosurgery at St. Barnabas Hospital in New York forty years ago. Using a surgical wand about the thickness of a knitting needle, Cooper delivered liquid nitrogen to human brain tissues, lowering their temperature to minus four degrees Fahrenheit. You see, cryosurgery is especially useful when dealing with the brain. The cut of a scalpel is irreversible, but freezing is not—at least for a time. If the wrong tissues of the brain are frozen, the surgeon simply warms them again before any cells are actually killed.”

“Can it be used in other parts of the body?”

“Almost anywhere, these days. Cataract operations have been common for decades, as have treatment for cancer and certain bone diseases. All they will do tonight is simply bring together all the established techniques of organ transplant and cryosurgery into a single crowning operation.”

“And will it succeed?”

Armstrong smiled. A breeze was coming up and he placed a hand to his head, holding down his long dark hair. Earl wondered if he might be wearing a toupee. “Its success doesn’t really concern me. My job comes afterward. If the patient survives, and comes alive again, my job will be to keep him alive. We’ve come a long way in postoperative care, but something as mundane as pneumonia can still be a problem.”

They were just rounding a bend of beach when they suddenly came upon the bushy-haired Philip Whalen. He was down on one knee in the sand, as if tying a shoelace. When he saw them he pulled down his pants leg and got quickly to his feet. “Beautiful day,” he muttered and hurried past them.

“Not a very friendly fellow,” Armstrong remarked. “Don’t know why Hobbes hired him.”

“He’s a good surgeon, isn’t he?”

“I suppose so. But a team has to work together. They’ve got their hands full handling O’Connor as it is.”

Earl Jazine grunted and they strolled on for a bit in silence. Whalen had not been quite fast enough in pulling down his pants leg, and Earl had gotten a glimpse of something metallic.

He wondered why the unfriendly surgeon carried a small pistol strapped to the calf of his leg.

The cocktail hour was celebrated with little concern for the coming evening’s activities. Earl had been checking over his miniaturized motion-picture and taping gear, trying to remember all the hurried instructions he’d received back in New York. He had no intention of joining in the general drinking until Freddy O’Connor poked his head around the corner of the door and shouted, “Hey, boy! Everybody downstairs for booze!”

“Sure,” Earl said, getting to his feet.

“You’re one of them New York photographers, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“I been to New York. I been to Texas too. I like Texas better.”

“Lots of people do. Is that where you knew Tony Cooper?”

“Loverboy? Hell, I’ve known him for years! He makes out with every girl he can. We kid a lot.”

“He didn’t look like he took to your kidding this morning.”

“He’s uptight about this Vera. They been together a whole year, and that makes it pretty serious for dear old Tony.”

“Aren’t any of you married?”

He snorted. “Only the poor people get married anymore.” They were heading down the stairs to the main floor where the others waited, but he made no attempt to lower his voice. “Can you imagine what it would mean to me to get married every time I find a girl I want? The alimony would break me, man! Instead of clearing a hundred grand a year, I’d be limping along on twenty thousand, standing in line for food fortifiers with the rest of the poor folk.”

Earl himself wasn’t married yet and he could hardly present a convincing argument for it. He knew that Freddy O’Connor’s attitude was much like that of other professional men and women. They simply couldn’t afford marriage as part of a love affair that might dwindle and die after a few years.

When they reached the main living room he was surprised to see the others already assembled. Even old Emily Watson was there, supported by her cane, and it was she who took the first glass from the tray and lifted it in a toast. “To the nine of us,” she said, “and to the success of the great experiment!”

Earl glanced about at the other faces. Hobbes and Tony Cooper—his arm protectively about Vera—and Freddy O’Connor and Whalen and Armstrong and MacKenzie. Seven, plus Emily and Earl himself.

Nine.

Who was missing?

Then he remembered Hilda. Naturally the Mexican cook would not be included in the cocktail hour. Not in this house.