The Alien by Raymond F. Jones (best summer reads of all time TXT) 📖

She bit her lips to hold back a further outburst. Then, at last she said, "Don't ask the impossible of me, Del. I saw the way they split the nerves in the operation we watched. It couldn't be done without long practise. Most of all, I couldn't do it to you."

As if sensing the meaning of their argument, Jandro spoke suddenly. "You will have great difficulty in making a successful installation because you are unfamiliar with the anatomy of the abasa, true, but I can help. I can guide and direct your hands up to the very point of cutting the nerves to the tri-abasa. You shall succeed if you allow me to guide you."

Underwood kept his eyes upon Illia. Her face was as pale as her shining hair.

"I'll try, Del," she said.

News of the projected experiment sped swiftly through the ship, and its significance was greeted with awed incomprehension as if Underwood has suddenly stepped from their midst into a misty realm beyond their reach. And their awe was magnified by the knowledge that it could very well mean death.

Within minutes of the decision, assistants were rolling the tables bearing the white sheeted forms of Underwood and Jandro into the surgery.

A strange peace, a sort of ecstasy, seemed to have come over Jandro. Underwood had seen and heard of resignation in the face of death, but never such serenity as possessed Jandro. It had a calming effect upon Underwood and he shed the thoughts of his own possible death or maiming as a result of the strange operation. He thought only of the mission that would be his once he owned the powers of the Dragbora.

Whatever turmoil possessed Illia had vanished as she faced Underwood. The sterile white of her surgeon's garb masked her personality and her feelings, and left only a nameless agent possessed of science and skill.

Underwood grinned up at her as the anesthetic was injected. "When I wake up I'll let you know how it feels to be a Dragboran."

At the adjacent operating table, Akers was preparing Jandro for the preliminary work of exposing the abasic organs.

Then, to each of them came the unspoken command to abandon their minds by Jandro. It was an incredible, unearthly experience, but they released their senses and gradually the guiding impulses from the Dragboran brain surged into their own.

For just the barest fraction of an instant, Illia's hand trembled as she touched the electronic scalpel to the flesh at the base of Underwood's shaven skull. The skin severed, and her nerves were threads of steel.

With increasing speed, Akers and Illia made the incisions in the bodies before them. Their hands moved surely, as if Jandro were seeing with their eyes and using their hands.

The deep incision was made in Underwood's skull. The pulsing brain lay exposed. Illia concentrated for an instant as waves of instruction flowed from Jandro. Then, swiftly, the scalpel cut a bloodless path through a section of unused tissue.

She moved to the adjacent table and peered into the wound that Akers had made in Jandro's head. She paused as his words came to her.

"This is the final step. I can go no further with you. Attend to my instructions now and you shall succeed."

Flashing, incomprehensible things flooded into her mind, imperishable photographs of the remainder of this operation and the one to follow, in which the two abdominal organs would be transferred. Illia knew that every picture would return in its own time to guide her hands in unfamiliar paths.

"Proceed!" Jandro suddenly commanded. "I retire to the seaa-abasa. Farewell!"

The flowing pictures ceased and Illia felt suddenly alone, like a child lost amid a blinding storm. There was nothing to depend on now but her own skill and the telepathic instructions.

She faltered for an instant and breathed a name, "Del—Del!"

Akers was watching her sharply as she stood staring at the strange, unearthly organ lying in the brain pan of the dead Dragboran.

But it was not strange. She knew its constitution and anatomy and the complex nerve hook-up that connected it with the brain. They were as clear as if she had studied them for many years.

A surge of gladness and confidence filled her. She was alone in this yes, but that did not matter any more. She alone possessed the ability to perform the operation, and a world awaited the results.

Her scalpel entered the incision and touched the flesh with a pinpoint of destruction that sheared away the tissue from the delicate white nerve channels serving the abasic organ.

For a full hour, and then another, Akers watched in un-believing fascination as Illia freed the twelve separate nerve filaments serving it, then cut the artery and filled the vessels with the chemical solution that would feed the cells until Underwood's blood could be sent pouring through it.

At last all that remained was the severing of the connecting tissues that held the organ in place. Illia cut them and plunged her hands into the sterilizing, protecting compound that had been prepared at Jandro's instructions. She salved the organ and lifted it out, then thrust it quickly into the corresponding cavity in Underwood's brain pan.

This phase of the operation was less than half over. Blood vessels had to be prepared to serve the new organ in Underwood's body, and the twelve nerves had to be connected into the Great Sympathetic where no such nerves had ever been connected before.

Another two hours passed before the final sutures closed the wound in Underwood's head.

When at last she laid the needle down, Illia's hand suddenly trembled and she quivered throughout her body.

"Can't we postpone the others for a time?" asked Akers. "You surely can't go on with two more like that."

"I'm afraid the tissues will degenerate too much if we delay. If I were only as fast as those Dragboran surgeons. What men they must be! Get me a shot of neostrene and better have one yourself. We'll go on."

Akers was willing, but he didn't believe that Illia could stand more hours of exacting surgery. After a moment's rest, however, and a shot of the stimulant drug, she stepped back to the operating tables to perform the adbominal operation. Once again, Akers made the preliminary incisions.

In the control room the group leaders waited for news in nerve-racking inactivity. Terry Bernard paced about, his flaming disheveled hair like a signal flare swinging through the room. Phyfe stood at one of the observation panels watching the inexorable approach of Demarzule's fleet. Dawson sat at his Captain's position fingering the inactive switches on the panel before him. Most placid of all, Dreyer simply sat in the navigation chair and smoked cigars so unrelentingly that it taxed the ventilating system of the ship.

Terry glanced at the clock anxiously and stopped his pacing. "It's been over thirteen hours since Underwood went in there. Don't you think we ought to ask Illia—"

"There are only two alternatives," said Dreyer. "Success or failure. Our questioning will not assure success. We had best keep out of the way."

Mason kept anxious watch of the progress of the fleet. No one knew what would happen when the battleships arrived and surrounded the Lavoisier, but they had not long to wait. The ships were hardly more than minutes away from the planet.

As if guided by a single mind, the ships turned slowly in the black sky as their navigators and lookouts spotted and set a course for the luminous bubble that marked the force shell hiding the Lavoisier.

To the crewmen watching from within, it was a fearful sight to witness the sudden plunging flight of those twenty mighty ships. Simultaneously, a score of fearful Atom Streams were turned upon the bubble, apparently not in the futile hope of burning through the protection, but to destroy the minute sensory probes and prevent the ship from navigating away from the planet.

In spatial combat, where the ship was free to wheel and turn and defend itself, it would not have been so easy to destroy the probes. But with the ship motionless upon the surface of the planet, the streams of incomprehensible fire washed over every square millimeter of the surface of the shell, probing, destroying and setting off the multitude of relays within the Lavoisier, closing the hairlike openings in the shell as the probes were burned away.

Mason moved away as one after another of the segments on his plates went dead until there was no vision whatever of the outside world.

He turned to the others and motioned toward the dead plates. "This is it."

The spell that fell upon them was broken minutes later by Illia's abrupt voice on the interphone.

"The operation is finished."

Consciousness came to Underwood as if he were responding to the persistent voice of some unseen speaker. It called him out of the depths of eternal existence into the realm of conflict and reality. Curiously, it sounded like Jandro.

He opened his eyes. Illia was there, her face white and strained. But as he looked at her, her blue eyes glistened and she bent down. "Del! Oh, Del—!"

Terry, Phyfe, Mason and Akers were standing near the bed, watching with anxious faces.

Pain was beginning to show itself in burning streamers, but he managed a quick smile to those about him. "Looks like we made it all right," he said. "I wonder what I can do with these gadgets now. Think they'll work, Illia?"

She raised up, brisk and businesslike once more. "You aren't going to find out for a while. I intend to knock you out for a good, cold twenty-four hours. Give me your arm."

She reached for a hypo needle on the table beside the bed.

It was like stumbling around in the dark at first, trying to run from an unseen pursuer. But all at once, Underwood knew he didn't need to run at all. The hypo was blocking the sensory equipment in other parts of his body, but it couldn't affect the abasic organs if he didn't want it to. He stopped running and watched the ordinary faculties of his body give way while he stood aside in complete immunity. It was as if he could step outside and look at himself.

And, suddenly, that was what he was doing!

He could see the room, the watching scientists, and Illia carefully checking his heartbeat and respiration. He could see himself lying still with eyes closed. Curiously, he could not identify the point of view. He thought for a moment that he was up near the ceiling somewhere, looking down, but that wasn't right, either, because he could see the ceiling just as well as the floor or the four walls. The scene was like a picture taken with a lens having a solid angle of perception of three hundred and sixty degrees.

He wondered if he could go beyond the limits of the room, tried it and found it quite easy to do. There was some clumsiness due to inexperience and conditioning that stopped him at the walls, where he had a moment's claustrophobic fright of being trapped between the metal panels, but it was over in an instant and he was through. He went toward the control room and found it occupied only by Dreyer, who remained placidly smoking a cigar in the navigator's chair.

Underwood wanted to communicate with the semanticist, only he wasn't sure how to go about it. It was like trying to talk with a mouth full of dry crackers.

But Dreyer stared around with a sudden start. He removed the cigar from his mouth and looked agape for an unseen speaker.

"Dreyer, can you hear me?"

"Underwood! You succeeded!"

"After a fashion. So far it's like walking around in deep mud, but I'm getting used to it gradually."

"This is wonderful—wonderful!" Dreyer breathed. "I hadn't dared hope that I would ever hear your voice again. Where are you?"

"That's a tough question. Theoretically, I'm unconscious back in sick bay with a shot of neo-morph that will keep me out for twenty-four hours. Illia and the others are back there watching me. The abasic senses aren't at all affected by the drug. I seem to be able to wander anywhere I wish about the ship. The funny part is that I can't pin down a point of view. I don't seem to be anywhere. Nevertheless, my senses perceive distant sounds and objects—including my own corpus."

"Can you detect my thoughts when I don't speak? Jandro didn't seem able to do that."

Underwood laughed. "I don't know whether I can or not. I try, but all I get is a fuzzy static. I'm sure that these organs have dozens of functions that we haven't even dreamed of yet. I hope that I can learn to use them all."

"What do you plan now? Do you need a period of exercise and study?"

"Some, but not