Survey Ship (22 page)

And then he wondered, sharply; wasn't it demeaning God, to call on the forces of the Deity for help in purely mundane problems? If God was ineffable, he could not be a kind of super-Mommy, contorting cries and tears and fears. God, if there was a God at all, and Ravi knew he could not admit any such possibility, God had to be something above and beyond all human problems, something not to be questioned about Its divine ways, but accepted, endured, shared. God was all of them together, the crew, the Ship, the stars, everything. And how did he dare to think that he alone suffered for some spiritual awareness? It was the same problem every one of them had; how to deal with the terrifying fact that every human being, every atom of material
matter, is forever alone, shut up inside the confines of his own thought processes. Everyone needed that awareness of NOT being alone, and when for a moment they were conscious of the truth, that every atom in the great universe needed every other atom, not to DO anything, but simply to BE, then they had realized God. No matter what they called it.

And then he raised his eyes and found that God, whom for the moment he knew in Moira, was beside him, tears raining down her face, holding out her arms.

“Oh, Ravi, Ravi, I need you, I love you so,” she whispered, and Ravi knew in that instant he too was God for her.

Peake consulted the chronometer for, it seemed, the fifth or sixth time in an hour. He bent to check Ching's vital signs again; pinched a fold of muscle on her upper arm, brutally. The response was fainter this time, none of the sharp flinching she had shown at first. There was no point putting it off. She was worse. Her response to painful stimuli was diminishing; the last real sign of brain activity. She breathed, her heart beat, her blood moved and was deoxygenated and reoxygenated in her veins, the superb physical organism was there. But where was the real Ching?

He was alone, on this Ship, alone with a crew of hostile strangers, and at this moment they needed him, he was the only one who might be able to save Ching. And to save Ching was to save them all, for Ching was their one hope of repairing the computer, and with it the faulty DeMag units, the problems with navigation, the Ship itself.

So he had no choice but to operate. The question he had asked himself before came back now, with sickening force.

If it had been Jimson, could I have done it? Will I be less squeamish because it is Ching?

And suddenly, touching Ching's cold foot with careful surgeon's fingers, he knew that the answer was yes. He would have operated on Jimson, if the alternative was death; the reason Jimson was not on their crew was because the powers of the Academy had known that Jimson, buried in self-distrust of the thing he had become, would not have been willing to do the same for him.

He had never been alone. Or rather, all during the years with Jimson he had been alone without knowing it; and now he would never be alone again. He had not a single lover, but five of them. It did not matter whether or not he ever managed to bring himself to have sex with any or all of them, though he supposed that some day, now that he was aware of how deeply he was bound to them, that would happen too, in the proper time. But when and if it did, that was irrelevant. The important thing was that for now it was his responsibility to do the best he could for Ching, and for them all. There was no room for a consensus decision now; he could not refuse now to take that responsibility upon himself.

He touched a button to the intercom.

“Fontana and Teague,” he said into it, “I need you here. Ching isn't responding, and we need to decide what to do.”

“Moira,” he said, in surprise, “I didn't call you. It's going to be hard enough, operating, in this crowded space, with an unskilled surgical team. There's nothing you can do to help —”

“No, you need me,” Moira said quietly. “You need me more than you need Fontana, or Teague. You said you had no X-ray on board. And I know enough anatomy to know what your problem is — the body is only a machine, after all. You're not sure whether Ching has a fracture or not, or whether it's bleeding inside the skull and pressure building up. But I have ESP, Peake. I can find out whether or not the bone is broken, or where the bleeding is.”

He looked at her in amazement; he had never thought of this. There had been a tacit agreement among them all not to talk about Moira's ESP, to treat it, not as an asset, but as an odd and humiliating handicap she had to overcome. And yet, looking into her calm green eyes, he knew that she promised no more than she could do.

His lips twitched. “All right,” he said, "I can use all the help I can get. Fontana, you'll have to assist; go and scrub up. Teague, can you handle anesthesia? It's sort of an ultimate Life Support; not that she's going to need any anesthesia, except for a little novocaine in the skull,

but you ought to stand by. Moira—" he looked down at her, then shook his head. There was nothing he could say in return for this enormous breakthrough, which, if it worked, would certainly mean the difference between life and death for Ching, perhaps for all of them,

“Stay with Ching while I go and get everything ready.”

“Do you need her head shaved, Peake?”

“Half,” he said, his dark pink-lined finger pointing to the temple, describing a line across Ching's skull. “And rinse with antiseptic solution; Fontana will show you what to do.”

Scrubbing for the operation, holding his long mus-cular hands under the sterilizing light, he found himself in sudden panic. But he took a deep breath, as he had been trained to do, and reminded himself that he really had no choice. Life and death didn't leave anyone much choice.

Ching had been shaved, her head painted with the pinkish antiseptic solution; she looked small, unfamiliar, vulnerable, not quite human. There was no need for anesthesia; nature had done that, the deep coma where she lay. Peake glanced around at the small array of surgical instruments. Fontana had done well.

“Well,” he said grimly, “let's get, on with it. I hope you know how to use electrocoagulation, Fontana; any opening in the skull means a hell of a lot of blood. Do the best you can to keep the field clear — you have assisted before, haven't you?”

She laughed, a small mirthless sound. “I held the retractors once for a normal Caesarian section. And I circumcised a newborn baby. Which is the total sum of my surgical experience. But I can use the aspirators, and I did work with electrocoagulation in the medical laboratory.”

Peake thought, it's worse than I thought. We don't just need luck, we need a bloody damned miracle! But he said, “Do the best you can.”

And as if reading his mind, Ravi said softly, “Remember those Egyptian mummies and the trepan holes in their skulls, Peake. If they could handle it then, it ought to be easy enough for you.”

Peake said, “Thanks.” He gestured to Moira. “If you can tell what —”

She gestured, laying her fingertips close to Ching's skull without touching it. She said, almost in a whisper, “I know this, Peake. There's no bone broken there, not even a crack in the skull. It's a — a clot right underneath the bone — does that make any sense at all?”

“Damn right,” Peake said. His trained mind remarked, subdural hematoma. I thought so. He picked up the small, circular ring saw, tested it for an instant, buzzing, and laid it against the skull to begin the first touch into the bone.

Moira, watching Fontana's hands doing things to clear the gush of blood, wondered how it was that somehow she could see the inside of Ching's skull as readily as the outside, see the small, heavy clot of blood. She held a sterile cloth ready, with curiosity and a touch of horror, to receive the small plug of bone. Peake's hands were probing, delicately.

“Got the bastard,” he said, holding it up with some small instrument. Moira did not need to look at the blood clot. She had seen it before.

From the table below them a blurry voice spoke.

“What are you — what are you doing with my head? I can't move, I can't see — ” and a fretful pulling at the restraining straps.

“It's all right,” Teague said, quickly alert. “Peake's just bandaging you up now, you're all right. You can't
see because there's a towel over your eyes,”

“Oh,” The fretful voice subsided, and Peake let his breath go. He had seen this before; the sudden miracle, the dead speaking from the tomb. Now that it was over, he knew that he had been clenched against disaster, another DeMag failure — what would have happened if the gravity suddenly disappeared at the moment he was making the first incision, would the scalpel have slipped into the brain? Maybe someday there would be a medical specialty, Free-fall surgery; Peake fervently hoped he would never find out.

“My head aches a little. What happened?” Ching murmured in that plaintive, fretful voice.

“You fell. Now lie perfectly still, Ching, it's all right,” Peake said, in a stern commanding tone, and she was quiet. He knew that the layer where he was working was insensitive to pain in the ordinary sense, but the exposed brain tissue could give rise to irritability.

“Do I have to have my hands tied? I won't move,” she murmured.

“Sssh, darling, it's all right,” Teague soothed, holding her hands, and she subsided. Later, when Peake was suturing the skull, which really hurt her, she began to cry softly, but she did not complain; and after a little, exhausted, she fell asleep before he finished. Normal sleep, this time; Peake, checking her reflexes as he transferred her to the stretcher again, realized that she would sleep, and wake without any memory of the operation at all. She would have a small scar, and with luck her hair would grow right back over it. Peake left Fontana to clear away the operating area — Ravi came to help, since he had not done anything — and Teague to stay close to Ching in case she woke and wanted him, and went to dial himself a very stiff drink from the console. Medicinal, he told himself firmly, as he
settled down to enjoy it. His chair was next to the bin where Fontana's electronic keyboard was stored, and he found himself thinking of the Schubert Nocturne he and Jimson had played at the final concert. He thought! ot the lovely plaintive melody without bitterness. He and Fontana would play it, when Ching was well enough that they could all make music again.

Moira came to help Ravi put the soiled cloths into the disposer.

She said, “'You know, all the time 1 was watching Peake operate, I was wondering. I should have been able to see inside the DeMags and find the flaw in the controls, just as ! saw inside Ching's skull. I've got a lot of exploring to do, to find out what my ESP is really good for.”

Ravi smiled at her. “Maybe we can use it to get us back on course again, my darling.”

“Nothing's impossible,” she said softly, pressing close to him.

And Survey Ship 103 moved past the orbit of Pluto, out into the unknown.