The Far Arena (5 page)

Obviously, the melting process had begun in the truck itself but had not reached the body. With grunts, the American climbed into the back of the truck, and both he and Dr Petrovitch eased the tarpaulin away. The American had amazing strength, and Dr Petrovitch cautioned him not to drop the water-slick ice with the specimen inside.

A small light in the back of the van showed flashes of skin, with very little discolouration.

It was a muscular young m
an. There was a wound, Dr Petro
vitch found, in the right thigh. It should not have been the cause of death.

That was from a core tube. Went through it,' said the American.

Dr Petrovitch pressed his forefinger into the cylindrical wound. He tried to feel the crack of crystals between thumb and forefinger. It was rubbery. He tried to find a vein, but there was not room enough to do this by eyesight since he was wedged against the side of the van, and the frozen specimen was right against him. If there was a vein at his fingers, it too had yet to be crystallized.

'My God,' gasped Dr Petrovitch, who did not believe in God. 'He's beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
’

Three

In the back of the truck, his knees wet from 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.Lew McCardle heard massively confusing comments from the Russian doctor.

'Why not ?' said the Russian. His dark eyes were wide, his face just across the slick ice mound between them, and he was grinning as though Lew was supposed to understand 'why not ?'.

'Can I let it down?'

'Certainly. Do you have sinus trouble?' 'No.'

'Then why not?'

'What, why not ?' asked McCardle.

'Let it down carefully. Carefully. Carefully.'

Lew eased the block down to the cold, wet floor. His fingers were numb. He blew on them. Petrovitch 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. Petrovitch said it was none of her business.

Petrovitch said it was an emergency because he said it was an emergency. McCardle squeezed out of the truck. Petrovitch grabbed McCardle. The nurse grabbed McCardle. Lew McCardle asked what was going on.

'Don't ask nurses questions. Give them orders,' said Petrovitch.

'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.'

'I'm not worried,' said McCardle. He said it to Petrovitch. But Petrovitch was out of the truck and back inside the hospital. McCardle said it to the nurse.

The nurse didn't speak English well. She was not Petrovitch's nurse. Lew tried to brush the water down off the outside of his pants. It didn't help. It was inside. The body rested on the bottom of the dark, wet truck. Now the driver wanted to go. He had to get back to the airport. He had been hired when Lew had landed from the air base. He was an Oslo driver. He had agreed because the American had said it was rush. Well, where was the rush ?

Orderlies came out 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 had been rocking the truck since the airport and no one minded then. The nurse told him to stop rocking the truck. She had forms for McCardle to sign.

McCardle wasn't signing any forms. He told that to the nurse. She said someone had to sign forms. One didn't go delivering cadavers hither and yon, with no one caring. This was not Brooklyn, America, and gangster people, said the nurse.

McCardle told the nurse it wasn't his body. It was Dr Petrovitch's now.

Dr Petrovitch had his own problems, the nurse said. She wanted McCardle inside the office immediately to fill out forms. She said she wanted no part of madness.

The block of ice, suck 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, on to the chrome table.

The orderlies pulled up the sides of the white plastic sheet, and McCardle 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 become hard. It was ice again.

McCardle was left with the truckdriver, whom he paid, and the nurse with the sweater, whom he followed, and the question why was it 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 piece of paper authorizing his departure from the drilling site. Second, get in touch with Houghton 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.

McCardle decided to say nothing until he had authorization from his company. Another nurse, with an operating mask and green cap and a green gown, intercepted McCardle.

'You're the American,'she said.

'Yes.'

'Come with me. Get undressed. Come. Come.'

McCardle followed her to a small well-lit room with three chairs on narrow white metal legs. The seats appeared to screw on. Her hands pulled at his jacket. It was a reach for her.

McCardle pulled away.

'What's happening?'

'Dr Petrovitch wants you to be a part of this. He is 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 Petrovitch can claim the hyperbaric chamber immediately.'

'It's not going to get more alive by going in now,' said McCardle.

'Doctor, you don't know its temperature exactly. We don't know exactly its interior temperatures. The exterior was obviously 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. 'Get undressed and scrubbed. I'll explain.'

The explanation was shocking to Lew McCardle, partly because he had not been aware of the extent of advances in low-temperature medicine. He had attended that lecture run by Dr Petrovitch in Sweden the year before, but he was not aware so many plans had become actuality.

'If we treat the patient as a totally 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 such as you have 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? Perhaps a kidney will survive. We are sure we are capable of reviving skin tissue. It was a perfect specimen from appearances, Dr Petrovitch was saying.'

T don't know,' said Lew McCardle. 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 wouldn't 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 we can give it. Dr Petrovitch 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 it. But not now. And why not ? Why not see what we can save, yes ?'

Lew McCardle pushed his document through the sleeve of a fresh green operating gown. He didn't have time to transfer it to the other hand that was getting into a sleeve also.

'I guess,' said Lew.

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, his head with a hat, and the nurse, with great discipline, washed his feet and pulled on fresh new socks.

'I'm not too clear,' said Lew. 'Do you do research or treat people ? Usually they're separate, aren't they ?'

'We do what we can do. Dr Petrovitch 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 had better reach one of our offices,' said Lew.

'Too late,' said the nurse. 'You're in the entry lock.'

'But this is a storage room,' said Lew, 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 begin, 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 everyone out?'

'No. Then you go 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 Lew.

The-door to the chamber was open slightly, and a rubber-gloved hand signalled for them to enter quickly.

'If the patient is declared dead, then you may go immediately to decompression. We have 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 McCardle. 'It's Latin. When the Catholic Church makes a saint, or declares one, sometimes it is the people themselves who demand that a person—'

'Please, please, doctor
...
we're in a hurry,' said the nurse, and Lew bent down to enter through the lock and to wait until he was told everyone had now agreed what he had found was dead.

Dr Petrovitch, in operating gown and hat, nodded as Lew entered.

'Thank you,' he said to Lew, whose head had to be kept bent as he manoeuvred for a place to stand. The nurse guided him.

'I will explain everything. Don't speak to Dr Petrovitch, speak to me,' whispered the nurse. The chamber was a giant tube. Twelve feet wide and about twenty feet long, Lew 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 Lew to his nurse.

'Nothing big. We can get small instruments, but large amounts of plasma and machinery have to come in from the entry lock.'

'And we leave that way ?'

'No. Through the rear lock,' said the nurse.

Lew felt a heaviness about his head. Oxygen, the nurse told him, was now being pressurized into his system and into the systems of everyone else in the chamber, not of course for their benefit but for the patient's. 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 patient.

Lew 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.