Orbit 5 - [Anthology] Read online

  Sturbridge held up his hand. “What I really meant to say is that it’s just going to be too confusing. Next thing you’ll be saying this Tony Krillus is somehow related to the fellow that got Tanker’s other kidney or even his heart or liver.”

  “That’s just the point,” Jennings said. “Isn’t he? What do we mean by related? Events don’t care how confused we are. The lawyers might figure a Martian space ship should be covered by the laws of trespass, but will that make any damn difference to the Martians? You have a new kind of person here and the lawyers are just blowing smoke out their ears when they talk as if present law will cover everything.”

  Jennings looked tired, but he was able to pound the table with his half-empty beer bottle. “I have to face it, Walter,” he said. “That bunch of quacks at University Hospital is so damned anxious to get a Nobel Prize, they’d put the balls from a bull on a refugee eunuch and lease him out for stud if they thought that would do it. Why, Christ, from what I read in our paper, they can’t even say for sure Tanker was dead and make it stick. When I think of that smoothie from the hospital office giving us that ‘everything for science’ bit and rolling his eyes toward the ceiling like some damned undertaker’s assistant, while all the time John was in Recovery fighting for his life, I tell you, Walter, it makes my blood boil. The fact is I’ve been screwed—and my wife and all my relatives will soon be shouting it at me—I’ve been screwed. Should have listened to you at the hospital that night. You smelled a rat—probably just instinct. But Holly, he was so damned happy with all those papers and being the big father advisor, he never even stopped to wonder what he might be getting my ass into.”

  Jennings finished his beer and struggled to his feet. “Might as well go home and face the music.”

  Sturbridge told Maisie later, “Believe me, Jennings has really got it in for the hospital. Figures it’s all their fault If Tanker had been allowed to die complete and natural as God intended, there wouldn’t be any trouble, as he sees it. He’s lining up all the heirs and if this deal costs them money, they’ll get it out of the hospital if they can. Legal costs, mental anguish, loss of time—they’ll hit them for all of that and any money they may lose from the estate.”

  Sturbridge leaned on his elbows. “The hell of it is, three weeks ago that bunch of heirs were thick as thieves going over plans for new houses and picking out interior decorators, and now they hate each other. Everyone thinks someone should have stopped the transplants. And they all agree it’s Jennings’ and Hartman’s fault. But I was feeling a little teed off that night because they were going to get all that money, so I didn’t sound very enthusiastic. Now they all think if they had listened to me they’d be home free. And they would. So we’re ahead. Maisie, let’s go to bed.”

  Sturbridge basically did not care whether the Tanker heirs or the Tanker transplants got the estate, or how they shared it. With Tony Krillus, however, he had to recognize that a transplant wasn’t just a surgical stunt ending in success or failure. After stewing it over for several days, he wrote a fifth article. “They Live Again” was syndicated nationwide and brought in sacks of mail. He had touched a nerve.

  The Tanker case became the subject in Tankerville. To get an expert opinion, place a bet, or get your face kicked in for expressing your own view too freely was easy. Believing that in union there was strength, Yates had everyone who had received a transplant from Tanker convinced he was entitled to part of the estate. Those patients who had died were represented by their families. Anyone who had kept part of Tanker alive or was still keeping part of him alive was a relative; this was the line on which the battle would be fought.

  The hospital called and asked for a conference. Sturbridge was relieved, because Jennings had been getting more and more fidgety. They met in Lawrence Jennings’ office: five of them. Dr. Wingate, Chief of Surgery; Cutler, Chief Attorney; Hartman, Jennings, and Sturbridge.

  Jennings said, “None of us have any idea where we really stand, so no sense sitting here trying to bluff each other. Do you agree with me that what we want is some way to kill this whole silly lawsuit? If we can do that, we have no problem. If we can’t, we won’t know for several months or years, and then we can settle down to our mutual bloodletting.”

  There was a certain amount of huffing and puffing by the lawyers, during which Jennings distributed drinks and beer and put out potato chips and peanuts; then he called the meeting to order by saying, “Bullshit, Holly. Let’s get down to real cases. Can the hospital make the diagnosis of legally dead stand, and if they can will you lawyers be able to get the court to accept it so we can go ahead and probate Tanker’s will?” He looked around. “What do you think, Doc?”

  Dr. Wingate was a spare alert man in his early forties. His eyes twinkled. “I think we’re being led up a damned daisy trail by this lawyer, Yates,” he said. “To the legal mind a man is either dead or alive. Not so. We’ve got instruments sensitive enough to detect electrical and chemical changes in a dead man in the ice box in the morgue. The law says when a licensed physician pronounces a man legally dead, he is dead. Doctors have made mistakes and can still make mistakes. Everyone in the transplant business is afraid of arguments about this. So we set up a committee. Just remember that, Mr. Jennings, five of our best doctors said Mr. Tanker was dead. If the court says that won’t do, that we have to wait until every possible evidence of activity is gone, then that is the end of the transplant business.”

  “I don’t want to be unpleasant,” Jennings said, “but suppose they come right out and say you were a little bit quick about taking parts out of John. What then?”

  “They’ve been through this in other places,” said Cutler, the hospital attorney. “The releases they sign are pretty comprehensive.”

  Jennings looked at the two lawyers. “Do you fellows feel that with the permits and the evidence of the five doctors you can knock this out of court?”

  The two lawyers buzzed together, then Hartman said, “As the law stands now we’re in. If the judge decides to dream up a new law, then God alone knows.”

  Jennings took a swallow of beer, wiped his mouth, and looked around the table. His gaze settled on Sturbridge. “Walter,” he said, “you got anything to offer?”

  “Yes,” Sturbridge said, “but it doesn’t help any and you won’t like it.”

  “I can’t see how we can be any worse off,” Jennings said. “Shoot.”

  Sturbridge said, “I’m not a doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief but I am a reporter, and I would like to ask Dr. Wingate a few questions to clear up what I want to say.”

  “Go to it.” Dr. Wingate said.

  “Everyone, subconsciously, thinks of a person as actually living in his head somewhere. Certainly not in his liver or heart. We were talking about it and realized that a person can lose arms, legs, gall bladder, spleen, appendix, and can be deaf, dumb and blind but we regard them as still being the same person. But suppose you take their head off and keep all the rest of the body living—would it still be the same person. Dr. Wingate?”

  “We’ve never done that,” Dr. Wingate said.

  “Just suppose. Doctor.” Sturbridge said.

  Wingate looked at him and smiled. “I’ll be damned if I know.”

  Sturbridge turned to the lawyers. “How about you?” he asked.

  They buzzed some more. “Maybe,” they said.

  “Then let’s take it a step further,” Sturbridge said, “and imagine that Dr. Wingate and his team over at University Hospital take the head off John Brown and put it on the body of Bill Smith and the operation is a perfect success. What’s the name of the survivor? What are his legal rights to the two estates, to the estate of John Brown, whose head he has, and to the estate of Bill Smith, whose body he has?” He looked at Hartman.

  “He’s still John Brown and he owns whatever John Brown owned and that’s it,” Hartman said.

  “Now let’s imagine that John Brown, who contributed the head, isn’t worth a nickel, but that Bill Smith, who
put in the body, is worth ten million dollars. How would you feel about that?” Sturbridge looked at Cutler, the hospital attorney.

  Cutler stuck his lower lip out. “There would be one hell of a lawsuit.”

  “That’s what you’re going to have,” Sturbridge said, looking around. “While I’m being my poisonous self, I’ve got one more. Tell me, Dr. Wingate, doesn’t any bunch of cells whether they’re in a plant, or a heart, or a kidney have a natural right to live by whatever means they can?”

  “It’s the struggle for existence,” Dr. Wingate said. “All evolution depends on it.”

  “Right,” Sturbridge said. “So tell me, who has the authority to sign away this natural right of Tanker’s heart or kidneys to try and keep on living? Even if the only way they can find to do it is to get Dr. Wingate to put them in somebody else? Does anybody? And if nobody can, then why can’t Tanker’s heart or kidney look to Tankers estate for food, shelter, amusement and medical care, even though the host Dr. Wingate selected—even if it’s Tony Krillus—has to receive all these things at the same time?”

  “Your question makes me realize I’m just a surgeon and damn glad of it.” Dr. Wingate said.

  A few nights later, Maisie invited the Hartmans and Gladys Peterson to dinner. “That Sidney Rowalski was back for a checkup,” Gladys said. “When I think of the times I’ve seen him lying in an oxygen tent ready to breathe his last, and now, my, he looks good.”

  Mrs. Hartman sniffed. “Poor thanks the Tanker family are getting, after all they did for him.”

  “The lawyers will have to find a way to take care of that.” Gladys said. “People aren’t going to keep on burying perfectly good hearts and lungs and kidneys, if they got sick kids or relatives that can be kept alive by using them. Stands to reason. People will settle this and settle it right.”

  Her certainty impressed Sturbridge. He wanted to finish his sixth article, which he called “On Borrowed Time.” He knew he would have to say a great deal about the medical and legal difficulties associated with transplants, but he did not want to say anything that would keep the work from going ahead. The idea that the people would decide what was right became the keystone. It was wonderfully well received.

  Some weeks later the word seeped around that old Judge Cotton was finally going to come up with a decision. Sturbridge met Jennings outside the old courthouse. Together they climbed the dirty wet granite steps, bending their heads to the gusts of wind and rain, until they reached the huge doors, which opened reluctantly into the wind to let them slide through into the lobby.

  Sturbridge was struck once again by the contrast between the dream of justice and its working reality. Lawyers and clients were scattered about, dripping from their sodden coats. The marble walls were discolored with smoke and grime. The light from the dirty bulbs in the huge candelabras disappeared into dingy darkness.

  The bailiff, red-cheeked and puffy with his moment of importance, was shouting, “Hear ye—Hear ye—” and they scrambled to their feet. The coughing ceased. Judge Cotton was a small man nearly lost behind the huge oaken bench, until he clambered into view on a high stool. He turned and nodded at the bailiff, and Sturbridge noticed the dandruff scattered over the back of his faded robe. “Even though he’s retiring pretty soon, he could loosen up enough to buy a new robe,” Jennings said, as they sat down again.

  The judge was perched up there between the flags, which hung listlessly from their poles. Behind and above him a huge gilded eagle had moulted in great white patches. The judge looked up. A sigh and then silence as everyone waited. Then a glut of lawyers and clerks surrounded the bench: the dank audience, condemned to limbo, picked their noses, loosened their ties, and squirmed in the eternal human effort to fit a hard bottom to a hard oak seat.

  Then another sigh. The lawyers and clerks had been driven back. The judge was alone. Silence fell.

  “I find in the case before us,” he said, in a voice as dry and serene as the whispering of leaves in the early morning, “that the recipients of tissue transplants from John Phillpott Tanker should share with the legitimate heirs in the distribution of his estate. They cannot replace these heirs but they cannot be excluded. The degree of sharing will be determined by future argument before this court.”

  Jennings looked at Sturbridge and sighed with relief. “I was scared, Walter, that he might leave the family out entirely. This I can live with. We’ll have to work out a settlement because none of us will want to wait forever. I have to call my wife.”

  That night Sturbridge watched Sidney Rowalski on television. Rowalski was asked about the lawsuit. “After all,” he said, “God knows, I’m grateful I got Mr. Tanker’s heart. I’d be dead probably if I hadn’t, because I couldn’t have hung on much longer. I had rheumatic fever when I was a boy and what heart I had left was going to pieces. But still I feel queer. Part of me is really Mr. Tanker and most of the rest of Mr. Tanker is gone. It’s different somehow from having a plastic or a metal heart, I think. I never had one, but you could imagine it being part of yourself, like glasses, or false teeth. But my heart belongs to Tanker and I’m not trying to be funny.”

  Later he was asked about the money. “Well, I’m glad,” Rowalski said. “At first, I admit I had a funny feeling. I was being ungrateful somehow and that just getting Mr. Tanker’s heart should be enough. My wife argued with me, pointing out that although I felt pretty good right now I had no way of telling what lay ahead. And then there was the children. If I was going to keep myself going I had to take care of Mr. Tanker’s heart, and if Mr. Tanker’s heart was going to keep going it had to take care of me. We were both in me together. I never knew Mr. Tanker, but I finally decided he would want his heart and me mighty well taken care of.”

  Right on the heels of his column on the court decision, Sturbridge was notified he had won the Pulitzer Prize. Lawrence Jennings told him at work, sent out for sandwiches and coffee for everyone, and gave Sturbridge a cold glass of beer. Sturbridge called Maisie and she cried. There at the paper everyone came up to his office and it was a nice party.

  He went home and petted Maisie until she stopped crying. Bill had gone AWOL from military school and thumbed his way home. The afternoon paper carried Sturbridge’s picture and then people started coming. Everybody. Bringing food, bringing liquor, bringing good wishes. They came from the hospital led by the Grubers, from the paper led by Lawrence Jennings, and from the town led by the Hartmans. Sturbridge was completely and utterly satisfied. It was three in the morning before they were gone. He was in a tremendous glow. He could hear Maisie reclaiming her kitchen, which the other women had taken over for the evening. Bill was trying to finish one last piece of chocolate cake. Sturbridge looked at him with great affection.

  “You know, Bill,” he said, “if you put a heart and a lung, and a kidney and a liver there on the table I doubt if I could tell them apart. But I’m mighty grateful to them, yes sir, mighty grateful. They sure did all right by me.” He pulled himself up and started for the stairs.

  Maisie called from the kitchen, “I’ll be right up, dear.”

  “You better be,” Sturbridge said.

  And Bill laughed as only a sixteen-year-old can laugh.

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  * * * *

  The Rose Bowl-Pluto Hypothesis

  by Philip Latham

  Crack!

  Six men came charging down the track, elbows churning, legs driving. Two of the blue-clad Tech men took an early lead, but at the halfway mark one of their rivals was gaining fast. The three flashed across the tape in a photo finish that had the little crowd in the Pasadena Rose Bowl yelling its head off.

  “I think one might be safe in describing that as an uncommonly rapid hundred,” Alyson said, speaking with that same air of guarded reserve that he ordinarily used for superior themes in his English Lit course. Zinner, his companion, was anything but reserved. At the moment, however, he appeared to be trapped in a stationary state of exceptionally long lifetime.

&
nbsp; “Know what the time was for that hundred?” Zinner asked, staring glassy-eyed at his stop watch.

  Alyson shook his head. “My waterclock sprung a leak.”

  “Eight point nine-two seconds is what I read it.”

  “So one of ‘em broke the nine-second barrier?”

  “One of ‘em? Three of ‘em!” Zinner retorted. “No wind either.”

  The hundred was only the first of a series of incredible performances on the cinder path that April afternoon. By the time the two professors left the Rose Bowl they had witnessed a 20.5-second furlong, a 45.8 quarter mile, and an 8:35.3 two mile. The mile was run in only 4:09.7, but then the winner hadn’t been pushed.

  Back at Tech they strolled across the campus in animated argument that had nothing to do with their scholastic activities.