The Far Arena (6 page)

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 chiselled out a section to the groin. A tubular metal drill pointed just beneath the scrotum. 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.

Lew tried to follow the explanations. The foil tabs 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 was so concentrated now because of the low temperatures that its own blood would kill it at normal body temperatures.

The blood itself cannot possibly carry oxygen in its current form,' she whispered. 'Its three-dimensional molecular structure has been broken down. It can't carry oxygen without it.'

'Could you simplify ?' said Lew.

'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 temperature. 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 has to be done within one minute when it hits the critical normal temperatures.'

The little figure was still running in its glistening cell of ice, but this time towards 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 though 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 Petrovitch. 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 towards a terminal in the ice. The terminal was the chest.

The nurse put the board down in front of her stomach. She looked to Dr Petrovitch. Petrovitch inhaled. He looked into the eyes of everyone in the room.

Lew felt embarrassed by the intensity of those black eyes, as deep as the holes of space, Lew thought. Breathing should have been easier. The air was almost doing it for him. Lew felt his own heart beat, heavy and solid. There was quiet in the chamber. No one moved. It was as though they all stood at the opening of something so subtle and so deep it went on forever.

Then it all happened quickly. Petrovitch nodded and machines were operating. Heavy, glistening shiny yellow pads went over the top of the mound. A nurse called out seconds.

Lew saw a clear bag of clear liquid go down a few centimetres in a sudden drop. The top of the yellow pads lowered in a simultaneous jerk.

Dr Petrovitch put his hand on top and pressed steadily down. That was where the leading foot had been. Foul, putrid water gushed out of the end of the table into white plastic buckets on the floor. They had no handles and Lew saw the water getting darker.

The front foot was down, and the whole mass of ice was down, as though 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 Lew's socked foot. It was hot.

The head was free of ice, Lew saw, the hair suck and wet like a just-born infant. The pale, smelly blood collected through tubes in plastic bags. The new, dark red blood coursed into the body. Lew suddenly realized there were no bottles in the chamber, only bags.

He asked why, and the nurse, so engrossed, did not answer him. He reasoned 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 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 though its stomach was being sucked out. It jerked again, then tremors shot through its shiny fingertips. Forty-two seconds were called out, and Dr Petrovitch roughly pushed away scalpels paused at the chest cavity. The chest moved. It expanded up, contracted down. Expanded up. Contracted down.

'Is it breathing ?' Lew 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.'

Lew saw only another machine. A nurse turned a dial, then turned it back. She was blocked by another doctor moving around Petrovitch.

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 Petrovitch 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 grey against their pure white gauze.

The nurse no longer counted seconds.

'The heart is working.'

'My God. By itself?' asked Lew.

'No. No. In consonance with the machine. It's the machine's energy. But the muscles appear 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 Petrovitch. The nurse had talked too loud.

If it wasn't the hyberbaric chamber pressiirizing oxygen into all of them, it had to be the tension. Eyes watered and did not blink. Sentences were cut short. Instruments came and went on the slightest nod or sound. People hung on expectant orders.

'What ?' whispered Lew.

'Shhh,' said the nurse assigned to explain things to him. She poked him sharply. She wanted him to get out of the way. Lew 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 form of oscilloscope. It had a round face with a white grid and a smooth-flowing green sine curve, keeping its pace with time like restful moving green hills.

Lines taped to the floor ran to the edge of the table, to the head. Lew felt dizzy. His own 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 Lew, 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. Lew noticed electrodes on the chest wall of the body. Petrovitch looked back over his shoulder. He motioned Lew to move. The finger contracted . Lew stepped farther to the side.

Petrovitch said something hoarsely in Norwegian. Lew 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 Lew's nurse. 'I heard.'

Suddenly, the nurse dropped her head in her hands and began sobbing. She no longer talked in English and Lew couldn't get an answer.

Dr Semyon Petrovitch himself had to explain. He pointed to the oscilloscope Lew stood near. The lines were jagged and harsh, like jarring interruptions of a honking horn during a peaceful symphony.

'You're shooting waves into the brain, right?' said Lew McCardle, trying to fathom what had caused the emotional outburst. Petrovitch'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 then with great strength, forcing the words out again, overcome by his own wonder, he said, his voice hoarse as though he had been yelling, possibly within his own mind, screaming out prayers that only a doctor might scream to a god he did not believe in, Semyon Petrovitch said:

'I think it thinks.'

Lew McCardle felt his body very weak, and he waited for the sine curve 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, at this place, for now, it lived. And maybe thought A doctor clamped the thigh wound.

I am dead. But if I know I am dead, then I am not dead. Yet I will soon be dead. I am in the snows and the cold of the barbaric North, and I do not hear the legionnaire who has brought me here, nor see those who have stripped me of garments and left me defenceless against
an invincible cold that even fe
lls men swathed in animal skin. 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 these German gods, although some legions on the Danube border in Gaul honour them. The Roman will honour any god, I suspect, because he believes in none of them. Nor 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 be death. I feel pain, a familiar companion, and the certain proof of life.

I hear dog-bark grunts of a barbaric tongue at many leagues and now very close, as though yelling my ears from my head. My limbs are there but do not move. My eyes are sandy pools, and I suspect light but do not see it. I taste the sewers of death in my mouth. Taste? Am I living?

There is no taste. I am warm again and my body has gone off to its gentle sl
eep, and I think. Is that death
? No. Dreams are of a different stuff, and I can put my mind where I wish it.

Some say Dis greets all in the underworld, that the spirit escapes through the mouth. But I have seen men with their mouths mashed 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 a cunning mind. No, I have seen too much death not to know it is but a last sleep, leaving nothing. It is neither fearful nor wonderful, only eventual. It is the one kept promise of birth. And I am forced to await it with an active mind. So this is the way snow kills. Perhaps it is worse than the sword.

The sword does not make you dwell on what a fool you are.

Four

First Day - Petrovitch Report

Patient poor. Pulmonary by-pass unit disconnected, 9:22 pan. Systolic pressure 120 mm. Diastolic 80 mm. Circulation, therefore, good, but patient experiencing apparent paroxysmal ventricular tachycardia, variable and occasional rapid heartbeats This caused by ventricular node unable to send clear signals to the heart. State of shock feared imminent.

Electroencephalograph records unusually intense brain-wave activity as though experiencing severe dream or nightmare.

Why am I not dead? Where is my death? I know death. It is a proud and free thing in a quiet place. Disembowel the dead, it is free of needing its stomach. Cut off an arm, it does not care. It has triumphed over the shouts of the mobs themselves. No emperor can harm it further.

That is death. I know death. In death I will not think about why I was marched to the German Sea. In death, I will not remember, nor stand as my chief accuser. Where is my death? That one and only debt owed by life waits. But it does not tarry for those who fear it.

I will not think.

Second Bay - Petrovitch Report

Condition poor. Elevated SGP-T level due to some liver damage, but 1 mg/100 ml creatinine indicates kidney functioning. Also, blood urea nitrogen remains under 20 mg/100 ml, which also supports belief that kidney functions, perhaps perfectly. Paroxysmal ventricular tachycardia experienced by patient at 2 a.m. and 4:55 a.m. Danger of shock remains high,