[Illustration]
In the dark, our glider chutes zeroed neatly on target--only Art
Benjamin missed the edge of the gorge. When we were sure Invader hadn't
heard the crashing of bushes, I climbed down after him. The climb, and
what I found, left me shaken. A Special Corps squad leader is not
expendable--by order. Clyde Esterbrook, my second and ICEG mate, would
have to mine the viaduct while my nerve and glycogen stabilized.
We timed the patrols. Clyde said, "Have to wait till a train's coming.
No time otherwise." Well, it was his show. When the next pair of
burly-coated men came over at a trot, he breathed, "Now!" and ghosted
out almost before they were clear.
I switched on the ICEG--inter-cortical encephalograph--planted in my
temporal bone. My own senses could hear young Ferd breathing, feel and
smell the mat of pine needles under me. Through Clyde's, I could hear
the blind whuffle of wind in the girders, feel the crude wood of ties
and the iron-cold molding of rails in the star-dark. I could feel, too,
an odd, lilting elation in his mind, as if this savage universe were a
good thing to take on--spray guns, cold, and all.
We wanted to set the mine so the wreckage would clobber a trail below,
one like they'd built in Burma and Japan, where you wouldn't think a
monkey could go; but it probably carried more supplies than the viaduct
itself. So Clyde made adjustments precisely, just as we'd figured it
with the model back at base. It was a tricky, slow job in the bitter
dark.
I began to figure: If he armed it for this train, and ran, she'd go off
while we were on location and we'd be drenched in searchlights and spray
guns. Already, through his fingers, I felt the hum in the rails that
every tank-town-reared kid knows. I turned up my ICEG. "All right,
Clyde, get back. Arm it when she's gone past, for the next one."
I felt him grin, felt his lips form words: "I'll do better than that,
Willie. Look, Daddy-o, no hands!" He slid over the edge and rested
elbows and ribs on the raw tie ends.
We're all acrobats in the Corps. But I didn't like this act one little
bit. Even if he could hang by his hands, the heavy train would jolt him
off. But I swallowed my thoughts.
He groped with his foot, contacted a sloping beam, and brought his other
foot in. I felt a dull, scraping slither under his moccasin soles.
"Frost," he thought calmly, rubbed a clear patch with the edge of his
foot, put his weight on it, and transferred his hands to the beam with a
twist we hadn't learned in Corps school. My heart did a double-take; one
slip and he'd be off into the gorge, and the frost stung, melting under
his bare fingers. He lay in the trough of the massive H-beam, slid down
about twenty feet to where it made an angle with an upright, and wedged
himself there. It took all of twenty seconds, really. But I let out a
breath as if I'd been holding it for minutes.
As he settled, searchlights began skimming the bridge. If he'd been
running, he'd have been shot to a sieve. As it was, they'd never see him
in the mingled glare and black.
His heart hadn't even speeded up beyond what was required by exertion.
The train roared around a shoulder and onto the viaduct, shaking it like
an angry hand. But as the boxcars thunder-clattered above his head, he
was peering into the gulf at a string of feeble lights threading the
bottom. "There's the flywalk, Willie. They know their stuff. But we'll
get it." Then, as the caboose careened over and the searchlights cut
off, "Well, that gives us ten minutes before the patrol comes back."
* * * * *
He levered onto his side, a joint at a time, and began to climb the
beam. Never again for me, even by proxy! You just _couldn't_ climb that
thing nohow! The slope was too steep. The beam was too massive to
shinny, yet too narrow to lie inside and elbow up. The metal was too
smooth, and scummed with frost. His fingers were beginning to numb.
And--he _was_ climbing!
In each fin of the beam, every foot or so, was a round hole. He'd get
one finger into a hole and pull, inching his body against the beam. He
timed himself to some striding music I didn't know, not fast but no
waste motion, even the pauses rhythmic.
I tell you. I was sweating under my leathers. Maybe I should have
switched the ICEG off, for my own sake if not to avoid distracting
Clyde. But I was hypnotized, climbing.
In the old days, when you were risking your neck, you were supposed to
think great solemn thoughts. Recently, you're supposed to think about
something silly like a singing commercial. Clyde's mind was neither
posturing in front of his mental mirror nor running in some feverish
little circle. He faced terror as big as the darkness from gorge bottom
to stars, and he was just simply as big as it was--sheer life exulting
in defying the dark, the frost and wind and the zombie grip of Invader.
I envied him.
Then his rhythm checked. Five feet from the top, he reached confidently
for a finger hole ... No hole.
He had already reached as high as he could without shifting his purchase
and risking a skid--and even his wrestler's muscles wouldn't make the
climb again. My stomach quaked: Never see sunlight in the trees any
more, just cling till dawn picked you out like a crow's nest in a dead
tree; or drop ...
Not Clyde. His flame of life crouched in anger. Not only the malice of
nature and the rage of enemies, but human shiftlessness against him too?
Good! He'd take it on.
Shoulder, thigh, knee, foot scraped off frost. He jammed his jaw against
the wet iron. His right hand never let go, but it crawled up the fin of
the strut like a blind animal, while the load on his points of purchase
mounted--watchmaker co-ordination where you'd normally think in
boilermaker terms. The flame sank to a spark as he focused, but it never
blinked out. This was not the anticipated, warded danger, but the trick
punch from nowhere. This was It. A sneak squall buffeted him. I cursed
thinly. But he sensed an extra purchase from its pressure, and reached
the last four inches with a swift glide. The next hole was there.
He waited five heartbeats, and pulled. He began at the muscular
disadvantage of aligned joints. He had to make it the first time; if you
can't do it with a dollar, you won't do it with the change. But as elbow
and shoulder bent, the flame soared again: Score one more for life!
A minute later, he hooked his arm over the butt of a tie, his chin, his
other arm, and hung a moment. He didn't throw a knee up, just rolled and
lay between the rails. Even as he relaxed, he glanced at his watch:
three minutes to spare. Leisurely, he armed the mine and jogged back to
me and Ferd.
As I broke ICEG contact, his flame had sunk to an ember glow of
anticipation.
* * * * *
We had almost reached the cave pricked on our map, when we heard the
slam of the mine, wee and far-off. We were lying doggo looking out at
the snow peaks incandescent in dawn when the first Invader patrols
trailed by below. Our equipment was a miracle of hot food and basic
medication. Not pastimes, though; and by the second day of hiding, I was
thinking too much. There was Clyde, an Inca chief with a thread of black
mustache and incongruous hazel eyes, my friend and ICEG mate--what made
him tick? Where did he get his delight in the bright eyes of danger? How
did he gear his daredevil valor, not to the icy iron and obligatory
killing, but to the big music and stars over the gorge? But in the
Corps, we don't ask questions and, above all, never eavesdrop on ICEG.
Young Ferd wasn't so inhibited. Benjamin's death had shaken him--losing
your ICEG mate is like losing an eye. He began fly-fishing Clyde: How
had Clyde figured that stunt, in the dark, with the few minutes he'd
had?
"There's always a way, Ferd, if you're fighting for what you really
want."
"Well, I want to throw out Invader, all right, but--"
"That's the start, of course, but beyond that--" He changed the subject:
perhaps only I knew of his dream about a stronghold for rebels far in
these mountains. He smiled. "I guess you get used to calculated risks.
Except for imagination, you're as safe walking a ledge twenty stories
up, as down on the sidewalk."
"Not if you trip."
"That's the calculated risk. If you climb, you get used to it."
"Well, how did you _get_ used to it? Were you a mountaineer or an
acrobat?"
"In a way, both." Clyde smiled again, a trifle bitterly and switched the
topic. "Anyway, I've been in action for the duration except some time in
hospital."
Ferd was onto that boner like an infielder. To get into SC you have to
be not only championship fit, but have no history of injury that could
crop up to haywire you in a pinch. So, "Hospital? You sure don't show it
now."
Clyde was certainly below par. To cover his slip he backed into a
bigger, if less obvious, one. "Oh, I was in that Operation Armada at
Golden Gate. Had to be patched up."
He must have figured, Ferd had been a kid then, and I hadn't been too
old. Odds were, we'd recall the episode, and no more. Unfortunately, I'd
been a ham operator and I'd been in the corps that beamed those
fireships onto the Invader supply fleet in the dense fog. The whole
episode was burned into my brain. It had been kamikaze stuff, though
there'd been a theoretical chance of the thirty men escaping, to justify
sending them out. Actually, one escape boat did get back with three men.
I'd learned about those men, out of morbid, conscience-scalded
curiosity. Their leader was Edwin Scott, a medical student. At the very
start he'd been shot through the lower spine. So, his companions put him
in the escape boat while they clinched their prey. But as the escape
boat sheered off, the blast of enemy fire killed three and disabled two.
Scott must have been some boy. He'd already doctored himself with
hemostatics and local anaesthetics but, from the hips down, he was dead
as salt pork, and his visceral reflexes must have been reacting like a
worm cut with a hoe. Yet somehow, he doctored the two others and got
that boat home.
The other two had died, but Scott lived as sole survivor of Operation
Armada. And he hadn't been a big, bronze, Latin-Indian with incongruous
hazel eyes, but a snub-nosed redhead. And he'd been wheel-chaired for
life. They'd patched him up, decorated him, sent him to a base hospital
in Wisconsin where he could live in whatever comfort was available. So,
he dropped out of sight. And now, this!
Clyde was lying, of course. He'd picked the episode at random. Except
that so much else about him didn't square. Including his name compared
to his physique, now I thought about it.
* * * * *
I tabled it during our odyssey home. But during post-mission leave, it
kept bothering me. I checked, and came up with what I'd already known:
Scott _had_ been sole survivor, and the others were certified dead. But
about Scott, I got a runaround. He'd apparently vanished. Oh, they'd
check for me, but that could take years. Which didn't lull my curiosity
any. Into Clyde's past I was sworn not to pry.
We were training for our next assignment, when word came through of the
surrender at Kelowna. It was a flare of sunlight through a black sky.
The end was suddenly close.
Clyde and I were in Victoria, British Columbia. Not subscribing to the
folkway that prescribes seasick intoxication as an expression of joy, we
did the town with discrimination. At midnight we found ourselves
strolling along the waterfront in that fine, Vancouver-Island mist, with
just enough drink taken to be moving through a dream. At one point, we
leaned on a rail to watch the mainland lights twinkling dimly like the
hope of a new world--blackout being lifted.
Suddenly, Clyde said, "What's fraying you recently, Will? When we were
taking our ICEG reconditioning, it came through strong as garlic, though
you wouldn't notice it normally."
Why be coy about an opening like that? "Clyde, what do you know about
Edwin Scott?" That let him spin any yarn he chose--if he chose.
He did the cigarette-lighting routine, and said quietly, "Well, I _was_
Edwin Scott, Will." Then, as I waited, "Yes, really me, the real me
talking to you. This," he held out a powerful, coppery hand, "once
belonged to a man called Marco da Sanhao ... You've heard of
transplanting limbs?"
I had. But this man was no transplant job. And if a spinal cord is cut,
transplanting legs from Ippalovsky, the primo ballerino, is worthless. I
said, "What about it?"
"I was the first--successful--brain transplant in man."
For a moment, it queered me, but only a moment. Hell, you read in fairy
tales and fantasy magazines about one man's mind in another man's body,
and it's marvelous, not horrible. But--
By curiosity, I know a bit about such things. A big surgery journal,
back in the '40s, had published a visionary article on grafting a whole
limb, with colored plates as if for a real procedure[A]. Then they'd
developed techniques for acclimating a graft to the host's serum, so it
would not react as a foreign body. First, they'd transplanted hunks of
ear and such; then, in the '60s, fingers, feet, and whole arms in fact.
But a brain is another story. A cut nerve can grow together; every fiber
has an insulating sheath which survives the cut and guides growing
stumps back to their stations. In the brain and spinal cord, no sheaths;
growing fibers have about the chance of restoring contact that you'd
have of traversing the Amazon jungle on foot without a map. I said so.
"I know," he said, "I learned all I could, and as near as I can put it,
it's like this: When you cut your finger, it can heal in two ways.
Usually it bleeds, scabs, and skin grows under the scab, taking a week
or so. But if you align the edges exactly, at once, they may join
almost immediately healing by First Intent. Likewise in the brain, if
they line up cut nerve fibers before the cut-off bit degenerates, it'll
join up with the stump. So, take a serum-conditioned brain and fit it to
the stem of another brain so that the big fiber bundles are properly
fitted together, fast enough, and you can get better than ninety per
cent recovery."
* * * * *
"Sure," I said, parading my own knowledge, "but what about injury to the
masses of nerve cells? And you'd have to shear off the nerves growing
out of the brain."
[Illustration]
"There's always a way, Willie. There's a place in the brain stem called
the isthmus, no cell masses, just bundles of fibers running up and down.
Almost all the nerves come off below that point; and the few that don't
can be spliced together, except the smell nerves and optic nerve. Ever
notice I can't smell, Willie? And they transplanted my eyes with the
brain--biggest trick of the whole job."