Another doctor cleaned out Austin’s windpipe. Because complications of shock made it impossible to determine immediately the respiratory-system damage, standard procedure was followed. An intubation tube was moved carefully down through the trachea into the lung sac to assure continued oxygen flow and the exchange of gases within the lungs. It would be kept there as long as was possible.
Austin had suffered the outright loss of his left arm, as well as the mangling of both legs. Skin ripped away, compound fractures, severing of blood vessels, internal injuries. The medical team, of course, immediately clamped all exposed vessels, but there was another reason why Austin had not bled to death despite the terrible mauling of his body. The answer was in the unique nature of the forces tearing at him in the tumbling, flaming crash.
His arm and leg muscles, subjected to violent acceleration forces as the lifting body broke up on the desert, also received extreme twisting forces because of this shearing, twisting motion. In effect, startling as it seemed, it saved Austin from profuse bleeding. As his body took its battering, the limbs torn open and mutilated, the femoral arteries snapped shut. It was a matter of body defenses instantly going into play. Moreover, that action established a time frame of lifesaving. The femoral arteries literally self-sealed themselves, and they would remain in this condition for some four hours after the body gave its biological alarms. Four hours and no more, but four hours in which his own body mechanisms assured he would not bleed to death, and it was barely sixteen minutes between the time of the crash and the moment when Austin was placed on the surgical table in the hyperbaric chamber. The exposed vessels were clamped as quickly as more critical matters allowed them to be. But the body had protected itself. Plasma had been used at the crash scene, but Wells had done this more as a safety precaution than because of fears of fatal bleeding. Major blood loss, despite body and head damage, had been essentially restricted to the limbs that were severed or mutilated so badly they had to be removed. In effect, then, Steve Austin retained nearly the fully required blood quantity of his body because he retained the blood in the still-functioning parts of his system.
Cortisone injection was continued to assist the heart. A doctor inserted a catheter into the vein of Austin’s right arm. Intravenous fluids would be kept moving through the catheter. It was essential that fluids be kept circulating through what remained of his body.
There were, of course, uncounted other items to which the medical team attended. Some of these were considered peripheral, such as cutting away skin hanging in flaps and shreds. The pressure suit had provided an excellent thermal barrier between Austin and the fire that swept the cockpit; fortunately, at that moment, the integrity of his environmental control system had been unbroken, and he suffered no intake into his lungs of fire or even extreme heat. And the suit, as it had been designed to function, kept the flames from his body. By the time the suit began to yield to direct fire the rescue team had split open the canopy and doused the slumped figure inside with fire-quenching foam. Steve Austin’s burns were therefore minor, a factor of major importance in the labors of the medical team to keep him alive.
There was other, critical work. A piece of metal had snapped off somewhere in the cockpit and penetrated the helmet visor. Penetrated it deeply enough to stab through into Austin’s left eye and, from all preliminary studies, deeply enough to have destroyed the optic nerves and eye structure to such an extent that no one in the room doubted he would be forever blind in that eye.
The list of injuries grew as the medical team moved from the immediately critical to the attentions that had been held aside. His jaw had been broken in several places. Several ribs were crushed, and an angry laceration along his left side, from the same tearing chunk of metal that had severed his left arm, had penetrated deeply enough to provide suspicion that several ribs were not only fractured but reduced to dangerous and separated pieces of bone. A skull fracture also was suspected, and the head injury, producing fracture of both the skull and the jaw, had broken perhaps half the teeth in his mouth.
The instruments placed tenderly on his body—the same monitoring instruments developed originally for medical monitoring of men in space and then adapted to hospital use—led Dr. Ashburn to believe that there had been some damage to the heart-valve structure. But the heart continued beating strongly enough to allow that examination to be held for the “second phase.”
Ashburn’s plan was to keep Steve Austin under hyperbaric conditions for at least three to five days. It was essential that this time be provided for the body to stabilize, to adjust to the drastically altered conditions of its existence.
There was the other immediate need—to be certain that Austin remained unconscious as long as possible before shock and unspeakable pain intruded. And also while emergency treatment and surgery continued. For this Ashburn used an electronic device already distributed to most of the Air Force’s emergency wards—the electrosleep machine, an instrument the Russians had long used successfully and which only recently had found widespread acceptance in the United States. Electrodes were applied to the skull while Austin remained on the surgical table. With the connections inspected carefully, an electronic pulse was generated directly to the skull, transmitting through to the brain in impulses that matched the alpha rhythm. In effect, Austin’s body began to resonate to the impulse, and as long as the current was maintained he would remain within a deep sleep, oblivious to pain. He would remain this way for days free of any gaseous anesthesia, of barbiturates or narcotics.
It was many hours before Ashburn stepped back from the surgical table to wipe his tired eyes. Until he could say two vital words.
“He’ll live.”
For the next several days, with full oxygen saturation and body stabilization the two prime requisites for his continued life during that period, the medical team would take its X-rays and would attend to the secondary survival requirements to sustain Austin’s life. He would remain there, in the hyperbaric chamber, until his tissues sealed off, and body stabilization was assured.
Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Matthews slumped in his easy chair, holding the empty glass in his hand. He stared vacantly across his living room, his arms and legs leaden. It was his third drink and it wasn’t doing a bit of good.
“Another?” his wife gestured to the mixer.
Matthews sighed. “No, I guess not.” He let his arm hang over the side of the chair, the glass forgotten. “It’s not doing much good tonight.”
She nodded. “You keep seeing it, don’t you?”
He shrugged. “Hard not see it.” Hard? Impossible. From the pilot’s seat of Chase One . . . he’d see it for a long time to come. The flash reflection of sun off metal as the lifting body twisted and yawed with its nose too high in the air, the plunge into desert floor, the ship breaking up, the flame licking through . . .
“Where’s Jan?” he asked suddenly.
“With Marge,” his wife said. “She’s under heavy sedation.”
An awkward pause followed. “Chuck, I’d like to go to the chapel.”
He leaned back in the chair, pain screwed into his face, his eyes closed tightly.
“If you love that man like I do . . . then pray that he dies.”
CHAPTER 4
Dr. Rudy Wells glanced again at his watch. Jan Richards would be here in a few moments. She would walk through the door to his office in the main hospital building. Well, there wasn’t any way out of it. Steve for years had been a special favorite of his. Now they were, and would be, even closer.
He crossed his office and opened the slats of the Venetian blinds, staring into the rippling heat waves covering the concrete flight lines and the desert beyond. He looked out of place in the midst of the most advanced flight-test center in the world. A picture of thundering jets and razored wings did not include this man. Wells stood six feet tall, nicely thick in the shoulders, the indifferent owner of a rounded bay window that reflected years of exceptional dining and staggering quantities of Ja
panese beer. But in his presence you forgot such details almost at once and your attention returned insistently to the salt-and-pepper beard, a surprisingly thick shock of dark hair, wrinkles about his eyes. And the eyes themselves. Wells was a man with a gaze so penetrating as almost to be hypnotic. His eyes commanded attention and with acute discomfort would often lock the gaze of another person. They seemed constantly to move, to flick back and forth, piercing those before him, and it could be unsettling indeed to be a victim of Rudy Wells when zeroing in on target.
He was either hyperactive or nearly somnolent, with no comfortable middle ground. When hyperactive he exuded energy, a bustling figure of staccato motions and nervous gestures and his eyes almost illuminated from within. Then, without preamble or transition, he could become a bearded Buddha, a paradox of a doctor, chainsmoking the cigarettes his peers adamantly condemned. That, and the aura of knowledge about him, quickly suggested that here was a mind that held far more than was ever learned from weighty tomes or direct experience as a doctor and a flight surgeon.
Wells had never been able to sustain a civilian practice. Oh, he had tried. After years in Japan and Korea with the Fifth Air Force, he shed his uniform, hung the necessary papers on his office wall in Indian Harbour Beach in Florida, and nearly drowned under the rush of afflictions assailing the good people of that small coastal town. If success were to be measured by the immense popularity he enjoyed as a general practitioner, as a modern M.D. with an old-fashioned bedside manner, then Wells was an astonishing phenomenon in a time when the public derided medical indifference. For Rudy Wells was in many ways an adherent of yesteryear. His philosophy was that while things changed and society went through its head-bumping, the human body, and individual fears of a body failing itself, had changed not one iota.
Above all else, even his professional skills, Rudy Wells discovered he had a talent recognized by a minority, rejected almost wholly by his contemporaries. For years this thing he had had been called the laying on of hands, a startling intuitive sense of the ills of his patients. Startling because he found little explanation for it. But it was there, and it was real. Wells could learn much from a simple verbal exchange with a patient; revealing words rolled from them, and he gained this inner feeling of what was wrong. Every time the sense flowed through him, his medical examination confirmed his intuitions. There had been times when diagnosis contradicted feeling—and in the long run, diagnosis had proven in error.
The explanation, he suspected, to some extent manifested itself through his fingers. They were extraordinary. His fingertips were so sensitive that they might have been sanded down. It had proved almost impossible for him to have clear fingerprints taken, and the necessary fingerprints during his military career were a record of smudges that baffled security officers. But to patients whose ills he identified quickly, he became known as much more than a doctor. He was a healer.
Several years passed pleasantly enough, despite calls through all hours of the day and night, in the small coastal town in Florida. Then Wells began to suffer from his own form of malady until it was no longer possible to ignore the itch for which no medicine could be prescribed. He missed the challenge of his former role as a flight surgeon. He missed the thunderclap of machines splitting barriers of sound and heat, of watching pinpoints of flame pushing their tiny silvered darts away from a planet. No pilot himself, he had nonetheless spent many hundreds of hours high above the earth with pilots and scientists, studying, charting, planning, testing. Twice he had been forced to bail out of aircraft. Once, from a lumbering C-124 with three engines burning. Again, when he ejected from a jet bomber with frozen engines and equally frozen solid controls. He had also survived a half dozen crashes, these unusual moments all prompted by his determination to be in the thick of testing. The pilots and aircrews knew him to be a magnificent flight surgeon, a little nuts, and one hell of a man.
The siren call proved finally too heady to ignore. There was also a felt responsibility compelling his return. He knew intimately the dangers to which the young men of the flight test programs were subjected. There was, he reasoned aloud with his wife, Jackie, a need for the best men available on the ground to assure that those who paid for flight testing with physical injury and disfigurement would be given every opportunity to return as whole as possible to the society to which they’d paid such extravagant dues. Wells’s intimacy with the human body under extreme stress, through the gamut of atmospheric and space environments, and his ability to relate closely to the men who flew the dangerous machines, had always made him welcome at the test centers.
The daily ministrations to ailing housewives, whining children, grumbling old men, frightened youngsters, and those who knew they were dying and concealed such imminence in loud complaints, all these, and more, at long last piled up like the bow wave of a speeding vessel. Phlegm and fractures, obesity and bladders, venereal diseases and worms and lungs tortured by drugs and—well, enough. He packed away his shingle and with a sense of growing pleasure that they were, and far overdue, returning home, rushed back to the sprawling flight center in the California desert.
And now he waited for Jan Richards.
To whom he must be not a friend.
Because it was necessary to be cruel.
To avoid the greater, later cruelty.
She came into his office with more control than he had expected. Four days had elapsed since she stood with him to watch the savage mutilation of her fiancé.
Correction, he told himself. Of what had been her fiancé. Don’t forget the past tense, doctor. It will help in here with this girl.
He rose to greet her. “Jan, thank you for coming,” he said quietly, his voice flat, almost mechanical. It would do no harm to establish from the outset this would not be pleasant for either one of them.
He motioned her to a chair.
“How is he, Dr. Wells?”
“He’s alive, Jan.”
“Alive? Is that all . . .”
“That’s all,” he told her. “How much do you know?”
“I know that Steve has been badly hurt. He . . . may lose a leg, from what I understand.” Her face colored suddenly. “But Dr. Ashburn won’t say anything. He talks around the subject, as if something unspeakable had happened to Steve. Rudy, you know I’ve been around this business for a long time. I’ve seen airplanes crash before. My father was in a very bad accident. I saw what the burns did to him. I am not a child, Rudy, and yet you’re acting like Ashburn. You have—”
“Been in an operating room with Steve Austin almost every hour of the day for the past four days and nights,” he said.
“I know that,” she replied, her voice suddenly subdued. “That’s why I wanted so much to speak with you. Now, will you please answer my questions?”
God help me. “Yes,” he said.
“Why haven’t I been allowed to see Steve?”
“He’s unconscious.”
“Something’s happened, then? I mean, just now?”
He shook his head. “No. He has been unconscious since the accident.”
“You mean he’s been in a coma all this time?”
“No, no, not that. We have kept him unconscious. Deliberately.”
“But why, for God’s sake?”
“Because we have been afraid of the shock if he were to regain consciousness at this time. Not only the physical shock,” he emphasized carefully, “but also what could happen to his mind. Steve . . .” Quickly he forced out the words. “Steve is a triple amputee.”
She stared at him. Now, he thought, now while the shock is on her.
“He lost his left arm in the crash, and both legs were crushed. We had no choice but to amputate.” He rushed on, not wanting to look at her. “You’re going to have to get out of here, Jan. You’re going to leave him.”
“You’re crazy,” she whispered.
“The man you know as Steve Austin is no longer living,” he said in the same affected, mechanical voice. “This is what I want y
ou to understand, what you must understand. If you leave him now, it will be just one more shock to his system. It will mix with the rest. But if you stay with him, what is now love and devotion and loyalty will change as you face the everyday sameness of the horror of what Steve—”
“Stop it!”
Not now; there was no stopping now. “If there is even a chance that he will live, that he will—recover is hardly the word, of course—that he will survive, your leaving him at a later time could kill him. It could finally destroy whatever man may come out of all this. There’s something else you should think about.” He waited until she calmed a bit. “Do you believe Steve would want you to be with him now? You know the man, you must know how he will feel.”
“You still can’t just write out your little prescription, Rudy, and tell me to disappear. My God, how could I do—”
He gestured impatiently. “Will you hear me out? Steve will come to hate you. He is no longer a man as we knew him. Oh, I know, it’s what’s inside a man, it’s fortitude and the rest of that, and it’s all true enough, but this has transcended anything within your experience, or his. You will not be able to avoid pity. He will never believe, never, that pity is not your chief motivation.”
“You’re a cold, heartless bastard,” she said, grimly quiet now.
“I wish I were,” he replied. “Are you ready for the rest?”
“The rest? I don’t—”
“I told you he is a triple amputee.” He watched her stare at him. “He is also blind in one eye. He is a man with one arm, without any legs, with only one eye.” Get it over with, doctor, he said in a scathing lash at himself.
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