Read Ebook: Am I Still There? by Hall James R Summers Leo Illustrator

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Ebook has 1348 lines and 54100 words, and 27 pages

"You haven't guessed?"

"No."

The doctor paused to light a half-gone cigar. "My job here at Merkins Replacive is to deal with just such fears as you have expressed. I'm an M.D. and a psychologist, and"--Letzmiller smiled to himself--"a kind of historian."

"Historian?"

"Well, you see I was supposed to give you the regular formal lecture on the history of replacive surgery when you first came in. Like to hear it?"

Lee nodded, so Letzmiller continued. "Replacive surgery is actually quite old. Old as medicine itself, I suppose. Very early attempts at dentures were tried, though with little success. And, of course, peg legs and hooks for persons who had lost their hands might be called replacive surgery, though they were very crude. Later on came more refined dentures, artificial limbs, corrective lenses, skull plates, hearing aids, plastic or cosmetic surgery, blood transfusions, all types of skin grafts, et cetera.

"The 1950s saw the beginning of bone and corneal transplants, use of plastics in arteries, those huge heart-lung and kidney machines, implantation of electrodes in the heart to steady its beat--many things which were mostly emergency or stop-gap measures. All through the late 1900s refinements continued to be made, but it wasn't until 1988 that the fathers of replacive surgery, Doctors Mills, Levinson and McCarty made the breakthrough that revolutionized the whole concept. In very simplified language they unlocked the key to producing specialized living tissue through a bombardment of an extremely complex carbon compound with amino acids and electricity, then making it selective in function by a fantastically intricate application of radiation.

"That pulmonary replacement you received in 1991 was undoubtedly one of the first successes. You were quite lucky, you know. Up until 2017, only about five per cent of their synthesized hearts lasted more than thirty days. At any rate, the principle was established, and it was proven that it could work. Most of our work from then till a few years ago has been in improving and refining the work those three good doctors did over three hundred years ago."

Letzmiller's cigar had gone out, and he discarded it in favor of a cigarette. "That would be the end of my history lecture, if it were not for the nature of your trouble."

Lee looked at him closely. "Why's that?"

"Well, Mr. Lee, the big thing missing in that summation is the seemingly impossible task of synthesizing nerve tissue, especially that of the cerebral cortex. It's been approximated, at any rate closely enough to give us good enough results to allow an artificial tissue to respond to brain signals about ninety-eight per cent as well as the original would. But actual duplication? No. At least not until about three years ago. To tell you the truth, it is barely out of the experimental stage."

"Experimental!"

"Yes, this will be the first complete replacement of a human brain. Oh, of course it has been done with animals, and it has been successful with partial replacements on humans. But you will have the honor of being the first human with a complete substitution."

Lee could not contain himself. "Doc, that's just it! There won't be a single atom of me except what you fellows have conjured up--"

Letzmiller broke in mildly. "I think 'conjured' is hardly the proper word, Mr. Lee."

"Well, of course, I didn't mean that. But don't you see what I'm driving at? You could just as well start from scratch and duplicate me without bothering about going about it piecemeal. And what does that make me?"

The doctor had been looking at Lee intently, studying him through this outburst. "I think I see what you mean. And I can't answer you. The question you raise may be philosophical, or metaphysical, but it certainly isn't medical. And from a doctor's point of view complete substitution is the only course open, risky as it may seem."

Lee mulled this over. Of course he knew surgery was the only solution to his decaying mentality, actually the only alternative to his becoming a virtual idiot, and, shortly after that, dead. And he did not want to die. He had lived a long time, but thanks to the methods of Letzmiller, Gorss, and all their predecessors, he was as full of juice as he had been at thirty-five. But the question that kept plaguing him Letzmiller seemed determined to avoid. He didn't understand very much about replacive surgery, really didn't care to. If Letzmiller said it could work, then he wasn't worried about that. Well, he guessed he really didn't have much choice. With this realization, he had only one more question for Letzmiller.

"Doc, if I'm not me when this is over, do you think I'll know it?"

Letzmiller looked at Lee's troubled face. "Do you think that you would want to?"

Lee answered slowly. "No, no I guess not."

Letzmiller rose from his chair. "I'll talk to you again after the operation. Do you think you're ready to go to your room now?"

Lee nodded and obediently followed the doctor.

Lee was asleep when the nurse came, but with the efficiency of all good nurses since time immemorial, she woke him to give him the sedative to prepare him for surgery. She chattered brightly as she prepared the hypodermic.

"You know, you have all the nurses speculating, Mr. Lee. I mean we're wondering just what Dr. Lakin, he's the anesthesiologist, is going to use for you when you won't have any brain for the anesthesia to work on." She stopped, the needle poised above Lee's arm, realizing the inaptness of her remark. "Oh. I shouldn't have said that."

"No, that's all right," said Lee. "I've already reconciled myself to being the headless horseman for a while." He had, too, although it was wonderfully strange to think of himself lying on the operating table with a cavity where he right now thought, felt, knew that he was a person.

Lee didn't actually lie on the table in the literal sense. The table was inclined to about forty-five degrees, with his head exposed and supported by a clamp on the cheek and jaw bones. This arrangement was necessary to allow the waiting machinery access to the area where it would perform.

Physicians, surgeons, biologists and the like were gathered in the amphitheater to see a bit of medical history. Actually there wasn't much to see. A team of technicians, radiologists and surgeons were working around Lee. Some were attaching electrodes to parts of Lee's body to maintain the electrical impulses necessary to keep his vital processes in motion while the main switchboard was out of commission. Others were sensitizing the exposed brain, from which the skull had already been removed, to guide the delicate fingers of the huge automatic Operating, Recording and Calculating Complex through its precisely programmed steps.

Letzmiller was among those in the amphitheater, as a spectator, drawn both by professional curiosity and a desire to know the answer to Lee's question, "Doc, what will there be left of me?" Of course he couldn't find out even part of the answer for some weeks. Even the ORC complex, now being fitted to Lee's unconscious brain, adjusted and activated, would not finish with its job for something like thirty-two hours.

The synthesizer would reconvert the data, translate it into countless chemical and electrical formulae, and apply it to the raw material of carbons, amino acids, proteins, and other components. When the basic organ had been reconstructed, a process requiring another week and a half in the synthesizer, it would be grafted back. The nerve lead-ins would then be reconnected, one by one, spaced at intervals to avoid shock. Lee would be unconscious the whole time, of course. Or rather Lee would be unconscious part of the time. Most of the time he wouldn't have the capacity for either consciousness or the lack of it.

Dr. Letzmiller observed the huge ORC complex for a time, but there wasn't anything to see. It simply sat over Lee, doing its job. Unwanted, the thought came to Letzmiller that the machine looked like a frog with a long worm dangling from its mouth. Lee was the worm.

"You can talk to him now, doctor." Oldenreid, Surgeon in Charge, addressed Letzmiller outside Lee's room where he had just finished his examination. "Personally, I think things went exactly as they should. All physical and mental responses check out. I guess here's where I'm finished and you go to work."

Lee was sitting up in bed as Letzmiller entered. He looked just like he had in Letzmiller's office before the operation, except for the small white bandages around his head to protect his healing skull. "Well," the doctor said, "how do you feel? Your head hurt?"

Letzmiller checked at Oldenreid's office, and was admitted to give his report, as had been planned.

"Well?" asked Oldenreid.

Letzmiller lit the end of his cigar before answering. "I wholly agree with you. Everything seems to have worked out exactly according to plan. I found him essentially the same as he appeared to me during his pre-operative interview. Of course he's a little foggy yet, but I suppose that's just the post-operative shock."

"Yes, that will clear up in a few days."

"He seems alert, responsive, full memory. I don't think there will be any difficulty with my part of his post-operative treatment. Except--

"Doctor, have you ever listened to a group of violins and sensed, just sensed, not actually heard, that one of them seemed about a quarter of a note flat?"

Oldenreid looked at him strangely as Letzmiller left the office and closed the door.

"Ye'll be taking your supper here, miss, and then ye shall gang to your bed," Mrs. Nicol informed her, and Joey, seeing nothing whatever to stay up for, agreed meekly. It was not the evening she had pictured to herself, but she must make the best of it. She wrote a pencil post card to Mums, while Mrs. Nicol laid the table and set before her a rather gristly chop, in which she mentioned that the journey had been "all right" and she herself was "all right" too. It seemed better not to mention Miss Craigie's illness, and this rather desolate reception, when she happened to be one of those five children who had promised father to "take care of Mums."

THE DUTIES OF A SCHOLARSHIP KID

"She'll be there, I suppose?"

"Why should she, you mugwump? A scholarship kid won't have an entrance exam like an ordinary new girl."

"I wish to goodness the Redlands trustees had never thought of the old scholarship idea," grumbled a third voice. "Mary Hertford was rather the limit, wasn't she? at least when she was in the Lower School--setting the pace so frightfully fast, specially in maths, but at least Mary was our own sort. I don't call it playing the game to shove village schoolgirls among us."

"Syb, you don't mean it?"

"I do. Miss Wakefield told mother. The Lamb had had a letter from her dear Miss Craigie, I fancy, and in her joy went bleating round to everyone.... Fact! This scholarship kid was the priceless gem from some village school."

"How putrid!"

"What on earth are we to do with her?"

"Put up with her, I suppose, Noreen, my good child. What else do you suppose we can do?"

"She's Scotch, not Cockney, you cuckoo, and probably quite harmless," someone else chimed in. "But I should have thought the Grammar School a bit more her line. However to Redlands she's coming, and at Redlands she'll presumably stay, and we shall have to make the best of it."

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