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In the back of the truck, his knees wet from the incredibly cold water that had seeped down his open jacket underneath his pants, and trying desperately to protect the piece of paper authorizing him to leave the drill site far up north, Kit Carson heard massively confusing comments from the Chinese doctor.
"Why not?" said the Chinaman. His dark eyes were wide, his face just across the slick ice mount between them, and he was grinning as if Kit was supposed to understand "why not?"
"Can I let it down?"
"Of course. Do you have sinus trouble?"
"No."
"Then why not?"
"Why not what?" asked Carson.
"Let it down carefully. Carefully. Carefully."
Kit eased the block down to the cold, wet floor. His fingers were numb. He blew on them. Duan yelled out for a nurse. He yelled out for orderlies. He wanted an assistant. He wanted the hyperbaric chamber. A nurse came with a light sweater over her starched uniform. She wanted to see the patient. Duan said it was none of her business.
Duan said it was an emergency because he said it was an emergency. Carson squeezed out of the truck. Duan grabbed Carson. The nurse grabbed Carson. Kit Carson asked what was going on.
"Don't ask nurses questions. Give them orders," said Duan.
"You're accepting the body?"
"We have. It's mine. Come. We'll get a reasonable nurse. Don't worry, you're part of it."
"Me? Worried?" said Carson. He said it to Duan. But Duan was out of the truck and back inside the hospital. Carson said it to the nurse.
The nurse didn't speak very good English. She was not Duan's nurse. Kit tried to brush the water down off the outside of his pants. It was no help. It was inside. The body rested on the bottom of the dark, wet truck. Now the driver wanted to go. He had to return to the airport. He had been hired when Kit had landed from the air base. He was an Oslo driver. He had agreed because the American had said it was a rush. Well, where was the rush?
Orderlies came wheeling a raised chrome platform about waist high. They slid a thin piece of white plastic underneath the block of ice, between it and the truck. Someone ordered the driver not to rock the truck. The driver said he'd been rocking the truck since the airport and nobody minded then. The nurse told him to stop rocking the truck. She had forms for Carson to sign.
Carson was damned if he was going to sign any forms, though. He told that to the nurse. She said someone had to sign forms. One didn't go delivering cadavers hither and yon, without anyone caring. This wasn't Brooklyn, America, and gangster people, said the nurse.
Carson told the nurse it wasn't his body. It was Dr. Duan's now.
Dr. Duan had problems of his own, the nurse said. She wanted Carson inside the office immediately to fill out forms. She said she wanted no part of the madness.
The block of ice, slick and smooth now, glistening as the driveway lights from the emergency room hit it, came out of the back of the truck on the plastic sheet, ever so evenly, ever so carefully, onto the chrome table.
The orderlies pulled up the sides of the white plastic sheet, and Carson noticed the plastic was opaque. It covered the ice mound with the body in it. Orderlies folded it closed, but it dripped, water flowing down the chromium legs of the wheeled table. The orderlies quite smoothly and steadily pushed the mound up the small gradual incline that had received so many wheeled stretchers and guided the high table, each keeping a hand on the plastic-covered mound, through the doors, and into the hospital.
On the black driveway, the water drippings had turned hard. It was all ice again.
Carson was left with the truck driver, whom he paid, and the nurse with the sweater, whom he followed, and the question of why it was important if he had trouble with his sinuses.
"Because you can't go into a hyperbaric chamber if you suffer sinus trouble."
There were no further explanations. He would first protect the chit of paper authorizing his departure from the drilling site. Second, get in touch with Moradian Oil Corporation representatives here to make sure he was doing the right thing. Third, he would cautiously answer any questions they might have. Geologists at exploratory sites were not supposed to discuss their work.
Carson decided to say nothing until he had authorization from his company. Another nurse, with an operating mask, green cap, and green gown, intercepted Carson.
"You're the American," she said.
"I am."
"Come with me. Get undressed. Come. Come."
Carson followed her to a small well-lit room with three chairs on narrow white metal legs. The seats seemed to screw on. Her hands pulled at his jacket. It was a reach for her.
Carson pulled away.
"What the hell's going on here?"
"Dr. Duan wants you to be a part of this. He's grateful for the specimen. Come. You've got to get scrubbed."
"How am I going to infect a cadaver?"
"We're saying it's not. That's how Dr. Duan can claim the hyperbaric chamber immediately."
"It's not going to get more alive by going in now," said Carson.
"Doctor, you don't know its temperature exactly. We don't know exactly its interior temperatures. The exterior was melting. So why not now?"
"Because it's dead. I know it's dead. I found it dead."
"Of course it's dead. We know that," said the nurse," said the nurse. "Get undressed and scrubbed. I'll explain."
The explanation was shocking to Kit Carson, partly because he had not been aware of the extent of advances in low-temperature medicine. He had attended that lecture run by Dr. Duan in Sweden the year before, but he was not aware so many plans had become actuality.
"If we treat the patient as a rehabilitable patient, we find we are always more successful. We assume all the functions of the body can be induced to proper functioning. We make the body prove to us we are helpless. We don't know what will respond to treatment, especially with a total case just like you've brought in.
"But if we make the assumption we will try to save everything, just as we would try to save all the functions of a frostbitten arm, then who knows? Maybe a kidney will survive. It was as perfect specimen from appearances, Dr. Duan was saying."
"I don't know," said Kit Carson. His jacket was off, his pants were off, and he was stepping out of his arctic boots. He needed a shave, and, from the wincing eyes over the nurse's mask, he realized he was ripe.
"The wet's from the ice," he said about his dark, wet long johns. He felt very tired and old and in need of washing and rest. He tried to sit, but the nurse refused to let him rest.
"Our technique is like that with any part of the body suffering frostbite. It is alive until it proves it does not respond to everything that we can give it. Dr. Duan heads a small staff, without lavish funding or quarters, but we are all proud of him and what we can do. We are proud of the limbs that work today because we did not accept their loss when others did."
"Nurse, that body is dead."
"In ten, twenty, thirty minutes we will accept that. But not now. And why not? Why not see what we can save, yes?"
Kit Carson pushed his document through the sleeve of a fresh green surgical gown. He didn't have time to transfer it to the other hand that was getting into a sleeve also.
"I guess," said Kit.
His hands were scrubbed at a sink in a room down the hall while he held the document in his mouth. The nurse gave him a plastic bag for it when he said he was taking it with him. They covered his face with a mask, and his head with a hat, and the nurse, with great discipline, washed his feet and pulled new socks on.
"I'm vague as hell," said Kit. "Do you research or treat people? Usually, they're separate, aren't they?"
"We do what we can do. Dr. Duan is a great man. Most other men with his achievements would have been popularly famous. Popularly."
"Let me make one phone call first. I think I'd better get a hold of one of our offices," said Kit.
"Too late," said the nurse. "You're in the entry lock."
"Entry lock? This is a goddamn storage room," said Kit, pointing to the stacked cartons against a light green wall and three chest-high machines with burnished steel exteriors, waiting, their plugs pinioned to their sides by plastic clasps.
"Yes. Once we start, we have to have everything here we might need. We can't open the doors to bring in extra machinery until it's all over. It's all here."
"And when you declare it dead, do you open the doors and let everybody out?"
"No. Then you got into a decompression chamber. This is why we asked you about the sinuses. We're all going under compression."
"I just delivered the body. I didn't sire it," said Kit.
The door to the main chamber was slightly ajar, and a rubber-gloved hand signaled for them to enter fast.
"If the patient is declared dead, then you may go immediately to decompression. We've got a phone link from there. You can call your office."
"I've heard of Catholic saints being made saints vox populi, never people dying that way."
"Vox populi?" said the nurse.
"Voice of the people," said Carson. "It's Latin. When the Catholic Church makes a saint or declares one, sometimes it's the people themselves who demand that a person...."
"Please, please, doctor---we're in a hurry," said the nurse and Kit bent down to enter through the lock and to wait until he was told everyone had now agreed that what he found was dead.
Dr. Duan, in operating cap and gown, nodded as Kit entered.
"Thank you," he said to Kit, whose head had to be kept bent as he maneuvered for a place to stand. The nurse guided him.
"I will explain everything. Don't talk to Dr. Duan, talk to me," whispered the nurse. The chamber was a giant tube. Twelve feet wide and about twenty feet long, Kit estimated. There were five women and two men. One woman---a nurse---standing by a dark hole in the far side of the chamber, received instruments through the hole and was stacking them.
"I thought nothing entered," said Kit to his nurse.
"Nothing big. We can get small instruments, but large amounts of plasma and machinery have to come in through the entry lock."
"Do we leave that way?"
"No, we leave through the rear lock," said the nurse.
Kit felt a heaviness about his head. Oxygen, the nurse told him, was now being pressurized into his system and the systems of everyone else in the chamber, not of course for their benefit, but for the patient. The problem with frostbite, just as with gangrene, was that the blood no longer carried sufficient oxygen to the tissues.
The chamber pressurizing oxygen into the patient made up for the failure of the body. And there was no way to do it without treating the doctors as well as the patients.
Kit bent over sideways to hear her. He felt perspiration collect in his rubber gloves and remembered his nails had not been clipped. He felt them squishing at the tip of his gloves. He had a sudden strange desire to clip his nails.
He felt a push at his head, guiding his sight toward the back of a green apron.
The specimen was on its back in the shiny, drippy block. Someone had chiseled out a section of the vagina. A tubular metal drill pointed just beneath the urethra. It whirred, spitting back pieces of ice that clung on gowns and then quickly became water spots. Other drills were working. At the head, one technician was drilling holes into the open mouth, another was making two passages to the cranium.
Kit tried to follow the explanations. The foil taps were for any possible brain waves to be elicited. They were going to pump out all of its blood and replace it since immediate tests had shown that the red cells were all but driven out completely from the blood and that the normal enzymes and salts in the protoplasm of cells were so concentrated now because of the low temperatures that its blood would kill it at normal body temperatures.
"The blood itself cannot possibly carry oxygen in its current form," she whispered. "Its 3-dimensional molecular structure has been broken down. It can't carry oxygen without it."
"In English?" Kit complained.
"We're going first to elevate the temperature rapidly by pumping warm water into its digestive tract, while we simultaneously exert oxygenated heat on its external surfaces. That's the most crucial time, those first moments of normal temperatures. At those first moments, we pump out its old blood and put in new. We establish a cardiopulmonary bypass and provide renal dialysis. It gets an artificial bloodstream, heart system, and kidney system. All of this must be done within one minute when it is the critical normal temperatures."
The little figure was still running in its glistening cell of ice, but this time toward the ceiling. One leg was forward, the other back, one hand reached to the ceiling, and the open mouth now had a big plastic tube in it. Wires and tubes stretched down to the chest and head. Tubes burrowed their way in through the remnant of covering glacial ice to each limb. It was as if every advance of modern technology was now by wire and tube hooked into that stopped body hauled up from the crust at the top of the world.
A nurse read things from a list on a clipboard to Dr. Duan. He nodded and grunted at each sentence. Once he shook his head. A nurse checked the chest cavity. It looked like a convention of wires leading toward a terminal in the ice. The terminal was in the chest.
The nurse put the board down in front of her stomach. She looked to Dr. Duan. Duan inhaled. He looked into the eyes of everybody in the room.
Kit felt embarrassed by the intensity of those slanted eyes, as deep as the holes of space, Kit thought. Breathing should have been easier. The air was almost doing it for him. Kit felt his heart beat, heavy and solid. There was quiet in the chamber. Nobody moved. It was as if they all stood at the opening of something so subtle and so deep it went on forever.
Then it all happened quickly. Duan nodded and the machines were operating. Heavy, glistening shiny yellow pads went over the top of the mound. A nurse called out seconds.
Kit saw a clear bag of clear liquid go down a few centimeters in a sudden drop. The top of the yellow pads lowered in a simultaneous jerk.
Dr. Duan put his hand on top and pressed steadily down. That was where the leading foot had been. Foul, putrid water gushed out the end of the table into white plastic buckets on the floor. They had no hands and Kit saw the water getting darker.
The front foot was down, and the whole mass of ice was down as if the yellow pads had exhaled bulk. The ice had given up something and was now water in sealed plastic buckets set against the far wall, away from the body it had held.
Hands removed the shiny yellow pads. One of the pads hit Kit's socked foot. It was hot!
The head was now free of ice, Kit saw, the long, thick hair slick and wet just like a newborn baby's. The pale, smelly blood collected through tubes in plastic bags. The new, dark red blood coursed into the body. Kit suddenly realized there were no bottles in the chamber, just bags.
He asked why, and the nurse, so engrossed, didn't answer him. He figured it out for himself. In oxygen under pressure, dangerous gases could be created by air pockets in bottles.
A nurse removed the yellow pad at his foot and stored it too.
It was a lithe, muscular little body with a burn scar at its side and a white healed wound on its left shoulder and several on its right forearm. The right thigh pumped blood. What was once a smooth core hole was now an ugly, bloody wound.
The mouth closed on a large tube. Suddenly, the body jerked as if its stomach was being sucked out. It jerked again, then tremors shot through its shiny fingertips. 42 seconds were called out, and Dr. Duan roughly pushed away scalpels and paused at the chest cavity. The chest moved. It expanded up, and contracted down. Expanded up, contracted down.
"Is it breathing?" Kit asked.
"No," said the nurse. "Machines. It's at normal temperature."
"What's he doing now?"
"He's seeing what's working. He's going to shock the heart now."
"How do you know?"
"Look."
"What?"
"There."
Kit saw only another machine. A nurse turned a dial forward, then back. She was blocked by another doctor moving around Duan.
The body jerked again, and a foul putrescence, dark and bitter, vomited out of the sides of the mouth. White pads wiped it away until Duan said something sharply. Big red welts on the cheeks showed where the pads had wiped. They had also taken away an outer layer of skin.
The pads were stored with whitish smears set gray against their pure white gauze.
The nurse no longer counted seconds.
"The heart is working!"
"My God. By itself?" asked Kit.
"No. No. In consonance with the machine. It's the machine's energy. But the muscles seem to be responding."
"What does that mean?"
"It means that a muscle with machine help is functioning."
"That's amazing. Is this the first time?"
"No. It's been done with the pancreas and other organs. And the pancreas has functioned alone without machine stimulus."
"So what's happening?"
"It's not dead yet," said the nurse.
"Shhh," said Dr. Duan. The nurse had talked too loud.
If it wasn't the hyperbaric chamber pressurizing oxygen into all of them, it had to be the tension. Eyes watered and didn't blink. Sentences were cut short. Instruments came and went on the slightest nod or sound. People hung on expectant orders.
"What?" whispered Kit.
"Shhh," said the nurse assigned to explain things to him. She poked him sharply. She wanted him to get out of the way. Kit moved to his right, two steps. His neck hurt from bending over. He found himself holding his breath. He had been standing in front of some kind of oscilloscope. It had a round face with a white grid and a smooth-flowing green sine curve, keeping its pace with them like restful moving green hills.
Lines taped to the floor ran to the table's edge, to the head. Kit felt dizzy. His breathing was heavy. Even with that body now being electronically goaded to function in one organ or the other, to see it work like the living drained Kit, taking away feelings of stability. He felt alarmed. Ironically his old football injury caused him no pain whatsoever. He glanced at the oscilloscope connected to the body's brain.
A sharp spear of a line interrupted the smooth hill flow of the sine curve, and then there was smoothness again. Kit noticed electrodes on the chest wall of the body. Duan looked back over his shoulder. He motioned Kit to move. The finger contracted. Kit stepped farther to the side.
Duan said something hoarsely in Norwegian. Kit made out "much work, challenge, extremely dangerous now."
There was a hush.
A nurse called out the number of minutes in Norwegian.
"Time since normal temperature," said Kit's nurse.
"Yeah, yeah. I got that."
Suddenly, the nurse dropped her head in her hands and began to cry. She no longer talked in English and Kit couldn't get an answer.
Dr. Duan Qigang himself had to explain. He pointed to the oscilloscope Kit stood near. The lines were jagged and harsh, like jarring interruptions of a honking horn during a sensuous symphony.
"You're shooting waves into the brain, right?" said Kit Carson, trying to fathom what had caused the emotional outburst. Duan's eyes, too, held tears, filling up the lower rim.
"No. Not going in. Coming out. We are receiving brain waves. Those may be thoughts," he said. And with great strength, forcing the words out again, overcome by his wondering, he said, his voice hoarse as if he'd been yelling, possibly within his mind, screaming out prayers that only a doctor might scream to a god he did not believe in, Duan said:
"I think it thinks."
Kit Carson felt his body become very weak, and he waited for the sine curves to reappear in a smooth, easy, gentle hill pattern. Jagged peaks continued. The body was not yet dead. It now had one more death coming to it.
At this time and place, for now, it lived. And maybe thought. A doctor clamped the thigh wound.302Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ9RN9jSntAr
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Am I dead? If I know I am dead, then I cannot be dead. Yet I soon will be dead. I am in the snows and cold of the barbaric North, and I do not hear the legionnaire who has brought me here, nor do I see those lecherous souls who stripped me of my garments and left me defenseless against an invincible cold that even fells men swathed in animal pelts. I feel warm. But I have heard barbarians and other Germans of the north country say the final grip of the snow death is feelings of warmth and goodness. They call it the blanket of the snow god. Romans laugh at those German gods, although some legions on the Danube border in Gaul honor them. But the Roman, he will honor any god for the simple reason that he believes in no gods. Neither do I.
We passed the last Roman camp months ago. It does not matter. It could have been years ago. Why am I not dead yet? I have accepted it. Yet my throat feels the strong hard beak of a bird tear at it, and my stomach burns like molten bronze. This cannot death. I feel pain, my lover, and the certain proof of life.
I hear dog-bark grunts of a barbaric tongue at many leagues and now very close, as if yelling my ears from my head. My limbs are there yet they do not move. My eyes are sandy pools, and I suspect light yet I do not see it. I taste the swamps of death in my mouth. Taste? Am I living?
There is no taste. I am warm again and my body has returned to its blissful sleep, and I think. Is that death? No. Dreams are of a different stuff, and I can put my mind wherever I wish with it.
Some say Dis greets all in the underworld, that the spirit escapes through the mouth. But I have seen men with their mouths mushed solid into their throats. Where does the spirit go then? Others say, mostly slaves, there is a final beautiful place of eternal joy for those who live a certain way. But this hope is too much a hope for my cunning female mind. No, I have seen too much death not to know that it is but a final sleep, leaving nothing. It is neither joyous nor wonderful, only inevitable. It is the one kept promise of birth. And I am forced to await it with an active mind. Is this the way snow kills? Is it worse than the sword?
Probably.
For the sword does not make you dwell on what a fool you are.
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