"Paingod and Other Delusions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

Chapter four

That night was hell. Hell with the torture of memories past and present. He knew he had been acting like a fool, that he was just another stupid man who could not accept what was to be.

But there was more, and it pervaded his thoughts, his dreams. He had been a coward in front of Calkins. He felt strongly — God! More than merely strongly! — yet he had backed down. After making an ass of himself at the operation, the day of old Fritz Kohlbenschlagg’s death, he had backed down. He had run away from his problem.

Now, all the years that he had lived by the Oath were wasted. His life seemed to be a failure. He had struggled desperately to get where he was, and now that he was there … he was nowhere. He had run away.

It was the first time since he had been very young that he had felt that way. He lay on the bed, the formkling sheet rumpled half on the floor at the foot of the bed. Thelma lay silent in the other hush-bunk, the blanker keeping her snores from disturbing him. And the memories slid by slowly.

He could still remember the time a friend had fallen into a cistern near a deserted house — before the dome — and fear had prevented his descending to save his playmate. The boy had drowned, and ten-year-old Stuart Bergman had fostered a guilt of that failure he had carried ever since. It had, he sometimes thought, been one of the factors that had contributed to his decision to become a doctor.

Now again, years later, he was helpless and trembling in the spider’s mesh of a situation in which he could not move to do what he knew was right. He did not know why he was so set against them — Murray’s analogy of the scalpel was perfectly valid — but something sensed but unnamed in his guts told him he was right. This was unnatural, damnable, that humans were worked over by machines.

It somehow — irrationally — seemed a plan of the Devil. He had heard people call the machines the Devil’s Playthings. Perhaps they were right. He lay on his bed, sweating.

Feeling incomplete, feeling filthy, feeling contaminated by his own inadequacy, and his cowardice before Calkins.

He screwed his face up in agony, in self-castigation, shutting his eyes tight, till the nerves running through his temples throbbed.

Then he placed the blame where it really belonged.

Why was he suffering? Why was his once-full life so suddenly empty and framed by worthlessness? Fear. Fear of what? Why was he afraid? Because the phymechs had taken over.

Again. The same answer. And in his mind, his purpose resolved, solidified.

He had to get the phymechs discredited; had to find some reason for them to be thrown out. But how? How?

They were better. In all ways. Weren’t they?

Three days later, as he assisted a phymech on his scheduled operating assignment, the answer came to Bergman as horribly as he might have wished. It came in the form of a practical demonstration, and he was never to forget it.

The patient had been involved in a thresher accident on one of the group-farms. The sucker-mouth thresher had whipped him off his feet, and dragged him in, feet first. He had saved himself from being completely chewed to bits by placing his hands around the mouth of the thresher, and others had rushed in to drag him free before his grip loosened.

He had fainted from pain, and luckily, for the sucker-mouth had ground off both his legs just below the knees. When they wheeled him before Bergman — with his oxygen-mask and tube in hand — and the phymech — with instruments already clasped in nine of its thirteen magnetic tips — the man was covered with a sheet.

Bergman’s transparent face-mask quivered as he drew back the sheet, exposing the man. They had bound up the stumps, and cauter-halted the bleeding … but the patient was as badly off as Bergman had ever seen an injured man.

It will be close all the way. Thank God, in this case, the phymech is fast and efficient. No human could save this one in time.

So intent was he on watching the phymech’s technique, so engrossed was he at the snicker and gleam of the instruments being whipped from their cubicles in the phymech’s storage-bin chest, he failed to adjust the anaesthesia-cone properly. Bergman watched the intricate play of the phymech’s tentacles, as they telescoped out and back from the small holes in each shoulder-globe. He watched the tortured flesh being stripped back to allow free play for the sutures. The faint hiss of the imperfectly fitted cone reached him too late.

The patient sat up, suddenly.

Straight up, with hands rigid to the table. His eyes opened, and he stared down at the ripped and bloodied stumps where his legs had been.

His screams echoed back from the operating room walls.

“Oh, I wanna die, I wanna die, I wanna die …” Over and over his hysterical screams beat at Bergman’s consciousness. The phymech automatically moved to leach off the rising panic in the patient, but it was too late. The patient fainted, and almost instantly the cardio showed a dip. The spark was going out.

The phymech ignored it; there was nothing it could do about it. Organically the man was being handled efficiently. The trouble was emotional … where the phymech never went.

Bergman stared in horror. The man was dying … right out from under the tentacles. Why doesn’t the thing try to help the man? Why doesn’t he soothe him, let him know it’ll be all right? He’s dying, because he’s in shock … he doesn’t want to live! Just a word would do …

Bergman’s thoughts whipped themselves into a frenzy, but the phymech continued operating, calmly, hurriedly, but with the patient failing rapidly.

Bergman started forward, intent to reach the patent. The injured man had looked up and seen himself amputated bloodily just beneath the knees, and worse, had seen the faceless metal entity working over him; at that crucial moment when any little thing could sway the desire to live, the man had seen no human with whom he could identify … merely a rounded and planed block of metal. He wanted to die.

Bergman reached out to touch the patient. Without ceasing its activities, the phymech extruded a chamois-mitt tentacle, and removed Bergman’s hand. The hollow inflectionless voice of the robot darted from its throat-speaker:

“No interference please. This is against the rules.”

Bergman drew back, horror stamped across his fine features, his skin literally crawling, from the touch of the robot, and from the sight of the phymech operating steadily … on a corpse.

The man had lost the spark.

The operation was a success, as they had often quipped, but the patient was dead. Bergman felt nausea grip him with sodden fingers, and he doubled over turning quickly toward the wall. He stared up at the empty observation bubble, thankful this was a standard, routine operation and no viewers sat behind the clearness up there. He leaned against the feeder-trough of the instrument cabinets, and vomited across the sparkling grey plasteel tiles. A servomeck skittered free of its cubicle and cleaned away the mess immediately.

It only heightened his sickness.

Machines cleaning up for machines.

He didn’t bother finishing as assistant on the phymech’s grisly operation. It would do no good; and besides, the phymech didn’t need any help.

It wasn’t human.

Bergman didn’t show up at Memorial for a week; there was a polite inquiry from Scheduling, but when Thelma told them he was “just under the weather,” they replied “well, the robot doesn’t really need him anyhow,” and that was that. Stuart Bergman’s wife was worried, however.

Her husband lay curled on the bed, face to the wall, and murmured the merest murmurs to her questions. It was really as though he had something on his mind.

(Well, if he did , why didn’t he say something! There just is no understanding that man. Oh well, no time to worry over that now … Francine and Sally are getting up the electro-mah jongg game at Sally’s today. Dear, can you punch up some lunch for yourself? Well, really! Not even an answer, just that mumble. Oh well, I’d better hurry … )

Bergman did have something on his mind. He had seen a terrifying and a gut-wrenching thing. He had seen the robot fail. Miserably fail. That was the sum of it. For the first time since he had been unconsciously introduced to the concept of phymech infallibility, he had seen it as a lie. The phymech was not perfect. The man had died under Bergman’s eyes. Now Stuart Bergman had to reason why … and whether it had happened before … whether it would happen again … what it meant … and what it meant to him, as well as the profession, as well as the world.

The phymech had known the man was in panic; the robot had instantly lowered the adrenaline count … but it had been more than that. Bergman had handled cases like that in the past, where improperly-delivered anaesthesia had allowed a patient to become conscious and see himself split open. But in such cases he had said a few reassuring words, had run a hand over the man’s forehead, his eyes, and strangely enough, that bit of bedside manner had been delivered in just such a proper way that the patient sank back peacefully into sleep.

But the robot had done nothing.

It had ministered to the body, while the mind shattered. Bergman had known, even as the man had seen his bloody stumps, that the operation would fail.

Why had it happened? Was this the first time a man had died under the tentacles of a phymech, and if the answer was no … why hadn’t he heard of it? When he stopped to consider, lost still in that horror maelstrom of memory and pain, he realized it was because the phymechs were still “undergoing observation.” But while that went on — so sure were the manufacturers, and the officials of the Department of Medicine, that the phymechs were perfect — lives were being lost in the one way they could not be charged to the robots.

An intangible factor was involved.

It had been such a simple thing. Just to tell the man, “You’ll be all right, fellow, take it easy. We’ll have you out of here good as new in a little while … just settle back and get some sleep … and let me get my job done; we’ve got to work together, you know …”

That was all, just that much, and the life that had been in that mangled body would not have been lost. But the robot had stood there ticking, efficiently repairing tissue.

While the patient died in hopelessness and terror.

Then Bergman realized what it was a human had, a robot did not. He realized what it was a human could do that a robot could not. And it was so simple, so damnably simple, he wanted to cry. It was the human factor. They could never make a robot physician that was perfect, because a robot could not understand the psychology of the human mind.

Bergman put it into simple terms …

The phymechs just didn’t have a bedside manner!