He was looking at the young man seated in one of the three chairs in the
small, comfortable room. There was a clublike atmosphere about the room,
but none of the three men were relaxed.
"Five years?" said the young man. He looked at the third man.
Dr. Farnsworth nodded. "More or less. More if it's a partial
failure--less if it's a complete failure."
"Then there _is_ a chance of failure?" the young man asked.
"There is always a chance of failure in any major surgical undertaking,"
Dr. Farnsworth said. "Even in the most routine cases, things can go
wrong. We're only men, Mr. Stanton. We're neither magicians nor gods."
"I know that, Doctor," the young man said. "Nobody's perfect, and I
don't expect perfection. Can you give me a--an estimate on the
chances?"
"I can't even give you any kind of guess," said Farnsworth. He smiled
rather grimly. "So far, we have had no failures. Our mortality rate is a
flat zero. We have never lost a patient because we've never had one. As
I told you, this will be the first time the operation has ever been
performed on a human being. Or, rather," he corrected himself, "I should
say series of operations. This is not one single--er--cut-and-suture
job, like an appendectomy."
"All right, then, call it a series of operations," the young man said.
"I assume each of them has been performed individually?"
"Not exactly. Some of them have never been performed on any human being
simply because they require not only special conditions, but they
require that the steps leading up to them have already been performed."
"You don't make things sound very rosy, Doctor."
"I'm not trying to. I'm trying to give you the facts. Personally, I
think we have a better than ninety percent chance of success. I wouldn't
try it if I thought otherwise. With modern mathematical methods of
analyzing medical theory, we can predict success for such an intricate
series of operations. We can predict what will happen when massive doses
of hormones and enzymes and such are used. But medicine still remains
largely an art in spite of all that.
"In parallel operations, performed on primates, our results were largely
successful. But remember that not even every human being has the genetic
structure necessary to undergo this particular treatment, and a monkey's
gene structure is quite different from yours or mine."
"I'll just ask you one question," the young man said firmly. "If _you_
were being asked to undergo this treatment, would you do it?"