CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

 

It had taken us six hours, but everything looked so good I was beginning to think we might actually pull it off.

I was inside the Omega Medical Research Center again, more specifically, inside the private laboratory next to Dr. Wintersong’s office, where this afternoon—no, yesterday afternoon now—I’d found the severed heads of Rusty, Guenther, Helga: two living, one dead. And I wasn’t alone, all five of us were here. With me were Henry Hernandez, M.D., and Dane Smith; and here with the three of us were Dr. William Wintersong and Hobart “Hobie” Belking. At least, their heads were here.

Unquestionably, we had been breaking all kinds of laws, probably including some we’d never heard of. But I, at least, had been doing it joyously and without the least reserve or regret. Hank, too, I’m pretty sure, had taken some pleasure in performing his complicated tasks. It was difficult to be certain about Dane. Since we’d arrived at Omega she’d said little, for the most part just silently, smiling, or frowning, often appearing to be doing both at the same time.

We’d arrived here shortly before dawn. Dawn, on Sunday morning. Soon lots of people would be going to church; we might be going to services in the slam. There had been no guards in evidence here this early a.m., but I’d had to ignore a plastic DO NOT CROSS banner at the entrance gate and break a police seal on the front door of Omega’s main building to get us all inside. For which crime alone, I feared the penalty could be humongous; but, under the circumstances that was the least of my humongous concerns.

Now, inside the small cluttered laboratory, brightly illumined by overhead fluorescent lamps, I looked around, one more time. Wintersong and Belking were still unconscious, but the drug that had put them under should be wearing off in a few minutes more, according to Hank. He’d sedated each of them a couple of hours ago, before we’d chopped off their heads.

Actually, we hadn’t really cut their lousy heads off. It only looked that way. But it sure as hell did look that way. We’d even shaved Wintersong’s scalp slick as a whistle. Hank insisted on that, saying when the doc came to, if he saw his reflection in a mirror—which he would; we’d made sure of that—he’d know something was amiss if his scalp wasn’t slick as a whistle. Or words to that effect. So everything was done except for the “finishing touches” which Hank would be taking care of any minute now. He’d been standing near Wintersong, checking him with a stethoscope, listening to his breathing, doing doctor-type things.

There hadn’t been any words exchanged among the three of us for a while.

Dane said in a small voice, “I am beginning to have serious misgivings.”

“No kidding?” I said, smiling stiffly. “That’s odd.”

She smiled back at me, frowning, brows knitted over the luminous green eyes; her folded arms clutching a compact camcorder against her breasts. Since both Hank and I were expected to be occupied with other things, that had become Dane’s job, to videotape the sights and sounds of the next hour or minute, or whatever it turned out to be when it happened, if anything significant did happen.

But her initial enthusiasm, apparently, had diminished somewhat during recent hours. She went from “Marvelous! Incredible!” and “What a fantastic final chapter for my book,” to “serious misgivings.”

That was the problem: all those misgivings. After Dane’s last comment, she’d fallen silent, hugging her camcorder, gazing fixedly at the chops of William Wintersong, M.D.

I took another gaze at the chops myself, thinking: Man, that head sure does look dead. I stood only a couple of feet from where it rested, exactly where Rusty’s head had been yesterday, and it truly did look like the McCoy, the real thing, a severed human head—alive, fed by tubes and monitored by thin electrical wires rising from the shaved skull. Those wires ran over beams above, and then down to the banks of gauges and dials, wide paper tape unrolling silently over there. The two lengths of plastic tubing ended at the squat barrel-shaped pump meant to recirculate nutrient solution to and from the brain, the pump making its whispery chshh-chshh sound.

Getting Wintersong muscled into place, sitting erect so his head would be at the level where we wanted it, had been our most difficult and time-consuming job, but both Hank and I were pleased with the result. I thought it was an almost-beautiful work of gruesome art. The doctor’s limp, bare form—he was naked as a new nudist—was seated on a heavy box and held erect by crude-looking but effective straps secured to the four-sided wooden frame around him. A few of those straps were heavy Velcro, the rest twisted strips from sheets supplied by Mrs. Hernandez.

The decapitated heads of Guenther, Helga, and Rusty were long gone, but all the experimental equipment remained behind. So we knew each of those heads had been positioned on a yard-square piece of polished inch-thick mahogany, directly above a six-inch hole in the board’s center, the hole allowing insertion of wires, tubes, probes from below. Unfortunately, Wintersong’s head wouldn’t go through a six-inch hole, and still had his body attached to it. So, in order to preserve, perhaps even improve, the illusion, we’d sawed one of the boards in two down the middle and, once Wintersong was strapped into place, put it together again around his neck.

It was a tight fit, but looked grand. Especially since around the doctor’s throat was a quarter-inch strip of elastic Velcro that could be tightened or loosened easily—not yet very tight because we didn’t want Wintersong to stop breathing entirely. We intended that he breathe with considerable difficulty, yes; and with discomfort noticeable where, presumably, his neck had been sliced like a delicatessen salami; but also that he continue to do some breathing.

From where I stood, Wintersong’s plastic-covered bare feet could be seen touching the floor below that five-sided, bottomless, framework enclosing his body. His hips and both legs were enclosed in whole bag “splints,” plastic bags filled with body-temperature water under pressure. Much of that plus such incongruities as taut twisted-sheet ropes extending from Wintersong to a desk on one side and a heavy air compressor on the other, would have been visible from just about any place in the laboratory except where Wintersong himself was. Which impressed me as good enough. More than good enough. Up there where Wintersong, or his head, rested slightly below my eye level, everything looked perfect.

Dr. Wintersong, upon seeing himself—what there was of him—reflected in a nearby mirror we’d thoughtfully provided, was also supposed instantly to believe those gadgets descended on down into his brain. Into his very own brain. Which, experimentally speaking had to be far, far different from someone else’s brain. But would he believe? Sure. Sure, I told myself a second time, otherwise why the hell go to all this trouble? With any luck he’d buy the whole package. Sure.

Earlier I’d asked Hank about one of my pesky misgivings, namely, “What if the doc gets cramps in his toes, or is seized by an uncontrollable impulse to scratch —”

“Not to worry, Sheldon.”

“That’s easy for you to say, doctor. Hell, that’s what doctors always say, right? I mean, do you think Wintersong will really believe he’s a head alone?”

“Your question is, will Wintersong, upon becoming indelibly impressed by his perplexed reflection before him, wonder frantically, ‘Is that all there is?’ or will he suspect devious trickery? Will he truly believe himself still whole or departed?”

“Close enough. Speaking loosely. However, I think you’re getting a little giddy, right?”

“Yes, plus enormous anxiety. I am worried about me, you, Dane, ten thousand others, all of POCUEH, our hundred lawsuits, a quarter-billion U.S. people who are about to become saved from IFAI now, and IFAI-squared later, if he himself to believe it. On the other hand—he may not. So the answer to your question is: Si, es possible, pero possiblamente no. Or quien sabe?”

“That’s about what I figured.”

“We must do those things I have mentioned, to you already, doing, as you say, the convincers. As, discussion of allowing more compressed oxygen mixture—substitute for his missing lungs—to activate his voice box. Unless he accepts he can speak, and believes it technically feasible, we are not, you and I, going to hear much from him that is interesting, informative, or life-saving. And you must remember to ask me about Maillander. Wintersong knows that name well, so it will be perhaps the most important convincer.”

Hank had discussed that bit with me earlier. Dr. Charles Maillander, now seventy years old, could probably without exaggeration have been called a neurosurgeon’s neurosurgeon. Twice Nobel nominee, but never Laureate, he was the widely admired practitioner-instructor pioneer in brain microsurgery who had most impressed our own Dr. Wintersong in medical school. Maillander had at one time been briefly interested in research into the possibility of cranial transplants—some years before the now notorious “Monkey Head” brouhaha in the media—of which Maillander then approved without reservations. He had even worked for a few months with Dr. Duncan Sherwood, primarily helping him develop nutrient solutions that might succeed in keeping those monkeys’ heads alive for more than minutes. None did; all died. But that’s progress.

Years ago, a hugely prestigious medical journal had published an approving article about Maillander’s brain-feeding experiments, and their “great promise.” The author: William Wintersong, M.D. So, no question, he would recognize the name.

Hank had the stethoscope in his ears again, black-plastic mouth pressed against Wintersong’s bare back. Nodding abruptly, he said, “Now, I think. Yes.”

“Now what?”

“Now we make the head unaware it is attached to a body.”

His black medical bag was open on a small table next to him. Hank reached inside it, brought out a large hypodermic syringe and a paper-wrapped needle. After stripping off the paper, he affixed the needle onto the syringe’s end and reached into his bag again. When he brought out a small rubber-topped vial containing an ounce or two of clear liquid.

“This is Xylocaine,” he said, sucking fluid from the vial into the syringe’s barrel. “In my bag are twenty-five gauge spinal needles, and we will do two nerve blocks at the cervical level—that is, we’ll give him two injections. His head will not know there is a body anywhere near it.”

I sighed. “You know, Hank this might work.”

“It had better. Now that we have committed all of...this.” Hank tightened the Velcro strap around Wintersong’s neck stepped back. He shrugged his shoulders, expression bleak.

I looked around again. Part of “this” was what appeared to be the head of billionaire Belking, about where Guenther’s severed skull had once rested with those straining, rolling eyes I so well remembered. But we’d done a simple job on Hobart, merely knocking him out with a drug from Hank’s bag and fitting one of those yard-square mahogany boards with a hole in it around his neck, leaving his wrists and ankles taped. No need for needles or whatever “blocks” Hank had mentioned. He had no speaking part, or any part at all, really—except to be seen by Wintersong, hopefully as one more “convincer,” if any more was needed by then.

When Wintersong opened his eyes, the first thing he would see was his reflection in the mirror we’d placed three feet in front of him, that and maybe Hank and me examining his head with interest. But if he rolled his eyes left, somewhat as Guenther had done yesterday, he would be able to observe, reflected in the heavy glass of a carefully-placed cabinet, what looked remarkably like the severed head of Hobart Belking, kaput, Hank had given Belking a larger shot than Wintersong’s, to be sure he’d just sort of lie there as a prop.

Hank snapped his black bag shut, everything put away, and said, “That is all we can do, Sheldon. Now there is nothing except to wait.”

So that’s what we did.

 

* * * * * *

 

I thought I saw the flicker of an eyelid.

And for a moment I felt a twinge of doubt about what we might have done to William Wintersong, M.D., because God only knew what the effect might be upon him if he really believed. But then I remembered all the rest, and there were no more twinges.

I just watched the eye that, I thought, might have flickered, thinking: When Wintersong’s head, such as it was, became clear enough, with reason ascendant; when he could clearly see what was before him, and near him; when he could hear, even speak; and when—if it indeed happened—he became fully aware of the unspeakable and criminally-insane thing this sonofabitch Shell Scott and that anti-science quack Henry Hernandez had done to him—then, well, it would be interesting to watch.

That eyelid flickered again, then both of them, twitched. Wintersong blinked. Blinked again—and those eyes stayed open. Open, getting wider and wider.

We waited.