CHILLER by Gregory Benford

Author:Gregory Benford [Benford, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1993-07-08T21:00:00+00:00

3

ALEX

It was a relief to release his pent-up energies in a flurry of activity. As soon as he reached the ICU with Dr. Anderson, Alex began to pepper the man with questions.

“Can we move Susan into that area down at the end?” he gestured down the long, machine-thronged room, which was partitioned into ample spaces around each bed.

Anderson looked at the head nurse, the muscular woman named Dowell. “That’s farther from the nurses’ station,” she said.

“I appreciate that, but then our work won’t bother your other patients as much, either.” He studied Dowell’s stony face for an instant and added, “I’m thinking of them. We’ll do as much as we can to minimize the disruption.”

“I should hope so,” Dowell said, rolling her eyes skyward, apparently because Anderson was going to be of no use whatever in warding off these crank invaders.

Alex ran through the checklist in his mind, with Gary standing next to him, eyes on the loose-leaf manual. Doing things by the numbers saved time and, long afterward, could be the touch that kept lawyers off your tail. “Dr. Anderson, will you or another physician be available all tonight, to pronounce legal death?”

Anderson frowned. “Normally, no. I have other duties, other patients.”

“Could you let us know when you’re in the hospital?”

Anderson’s mouth worked, annoyed. “I suppose so. You can reach me on my beeper, through my office. I go off duty at two o’clock. You’ll have to talk to my replacement physician then.”

“We’ll be happy to, sir,” Alex said briskly.

The ICU outside the nurses’ station murmured with the whispers and gurgles of machines, the music of medicine. There were five patients in the ICU at the moment, each the nucleus for a web of tubes, wires, catheters, lines, and other unsubtle invasions. The price of survival is inevitably an utter exposure, a nakedness before the brute fact of the physical self that reduces a person to a machine. That is the philosophy of modern medicine, and it works.

But the whole person has properties beyond the underlying machine, facets like passion and gossamer-thin intuition and a certain instinctive resonance with other life. Usually our minds work on, party to airy dreams, while our bodies labor in ancient silence. Here the roles reversed. Susan lay inert and her body held the stage. Modern medicine could pull her body back from the abyss, yet lose her self to the oblivion of coma.

Alex was no poet, as some cryonicists were, rhapsodizing about immortality. He was here to save whatever he could. This head nurse was not his enemy, though she undoubtedly thought herself one. Compared with the touchy-feely brigade, the health faddists and cult figures and gurus, he and Nurse Dowell were soldiers in the same small army.

“Nurse Dowell, you’ve got IV lines, bladder catheter, some other diagnostics in the patient now. Could you please leave them in for our use, if Susan dies?”

Nurse Dowell frowned, looked exasperated for a moment at this intrusion into routine, and then turned to Anderson without saying anything.

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