Impact! Read online

  Fred Epstein and Carol unbolted and moved the port up to the top end of the table while Lindy Thompson brought in some pillows to catch the titanium “transfer jacket” that Phil was supposed to be put in before he was sent through the port.

  All five of his fellow colonists stood by to catch the transfer jacket when it came through because, to test the port, they sent the jacket through with several big balloons full of water to simulate Phil’s mass. The transfer jacket looked pretty much like a Phil sized oval titanium pipe. It came shooting through with a crash and Phil’s fellow colonists had a bit of a struggle keeping it from falling off the table.

  Diane ran tests on the port to make sure it had tolerated the transfer and showed no evidence that it would fail soon. Fred and Carol then unbolted and moved the port to the bottom of the table again, where they reattached it. The colonists tilted the table back flat for Phil to be transferred onto it.

  Putting him into the transfer jacket, or “spam can” as Phil had begun thinking of it, turned into quite an ordeal. First they took the front half off the can, removed the bags of water and put the back half of the can on the ground off the end of his bed. Mark dosed Phil up with quite a bit of morphine and disconnected his traction. Then the other colonists picked Phil up by grabbing his sheet, two on each side. They shuffled forward, carrying him on the sheet from his bed to the spam can, trying to lower him into it gently. However, just the fact they had taken off his traction made him hurt. Carol tried to keep a constant pull on his Phil’s leg while he was being moved, but it was almost impossible to keep an even, steady traction while the others were shuffling him from one location to the other.

  Every jerk caused quite a bit of pain.

  They closed the lid on his can while they lifted it onto the table and positioned it for the actual transfer. Once he was in place, they opened the can back up and hung the traction weights off the end of the table in an effort to keep Phil comfortable while Mark got him ready.

  Getting him ready essentially meant drugging him out of his mind. Phil was loaded up with anticonvulsants and given several tranquilizers. Right before they sent him, Mark was going to put him all the way under general anesthesia and put a tube in his throat to breathe for him. His muscles would be paralyzed, then the table would be tilted, the port opened and Phil would slide through the big port to arrive at the University Hospital in Chapel Hill. They had anesthesiologists and neurologists standing by there to try to do their best for him, even though no one was sure exactly what that would be.

  Mark put a mask over his face, saying, “This is just oxygen for now.”

  A few minutes later Phil groggily heard Mark say, “Hang that IV a little bit higher. Diane, are you ready to push the medications in those syringes?” Then he said, “Well, here we go.” Phil’s arm started to burn where the IV entered it.

  The world floated away.

  Phil had no awareness as the endotracheal tube went into his throat and was hooked up. The spam can was closed, the table tilted up, the port opened, and Phil shot through to earth, spam can and all.

  ***

  A couple of techs wheeled the anesthesia machine into the recovery room and hooked it up. Clint started checking it over, what he thought of as a “preflight” of the machine. He’d been asked by his attending anesthesiologist, Dr. Norwood, to help with this and felt pretty excited about it. Someday, he might be able to tell people that he’d been present the first time a human being was ported. Even if he was just an anesthesia resident helping out, it was a momentous occasion. Of course, if it all went south and the poor bastard arrived here in pieces or completely out of his mind, it probably wouldn’t be something he’d want to brag about.

  The guy was supposed to arrive with an endotracheal tube in place, but to have only been given a short-acting paralytic and propofol as anesthetics. Norwood had said that going through a port caused seizures in animals, so apparently this Martian astronaut was going to be loaded up with anti-seizure meds as well. Clint would need to hook his endotracheal tube up to the anesthesia machine and start giving him some inhalational anesthetic because the plan was to keep him under for a day or so before letting him wake up.

  Norwood arrived and looked over the selection of the emergency drugs that Clint had checked out of the pharmacy. “Looks like you’ve got everything I’d thought of. Sure as hell, that means we’ll need some drug neither one of us considered.”

  Clint asked, “Isn’t this guy supposed to need some kind of surgery on his hip?”

  Norwood nodded, while still frowning at the selection of emergency drugs, apparently still trying to think of anything else they might need.

  “As long as we’re keeping him asleep, why don’t they just take him on back to the operating room and fix his hip while he’s under?”

  Norwood looked back up at him and shrugged. “I think they feel like being ported is traumatic enough. They’d like not to do both things at once. Besides, they want to be sure his brain’s okay before they start operating on him”

  “But if he’s got to have both things done…”

  “He’s also going to be the first human to go through a port. Probably the second human being through a port is going to want to know for sure whether any bad effects came from the port… or from the surgery.”

  “So he’s just a guinea pig then?”

  Norwood gave Clint an irritated look. “No, Dr. McVeigh, he’s a human being who’s decided to take the risk of being sent through a port in order to save his hip. As long as he’s taking that risk anyway, it seems only rational that we should try to gain as much information from this event as we can—to the benefit of the rest of mankind.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Norwood rolled his eyes at Clint. He seemed about to say something further, but then a group came in pushing a large device on wheels. The two men turned to watch.

  One of the people with the device stopped to ask one of the nurses something. She pointed at Clint and Norwood. The men resumed rolling the big device in their direction. One of them evidently recognized Norwood, stepping ahead. He said, “Dr. Norwood, where should we set up?”

  Norwood frowned at the device, “Which end of this thing will Mr. Zabrisk come out of?”

  After a short discussion, they wheeled it around so that the large thing with all the radiator fins on it was up against the wall. It had a set of curved rails in front of it. Apparently, the astronaut would be in some kind of metal canister that would slide out of the port and onto the rails. Then they would be able to open the canister and get to the man inside. Once they were sure he was stable, they would be able to remove him from the canister and put him on a regular gurney, but for now they needed the anesthesia machine to be near where his head would be located after he’d come out.

  After some further discussion they finally had positioned everything to their satisfaction. Quite a few people had gathered around and they had moved some equipment out of their way. With some surprise, Clint realized that one of the people gathered there was the Dean of the medical school. He turned to Norwood and quietly asked, “What’s the Dean doing here?”

  “D5R donates huge quantities of money to the University. Besides, the University’s reputation will be affected by the outcome of this. The Dean’s probably sweating this even more than we are.”

  Clint stepped closer to the big port the astronaut was supposed to come out of and was startled to realize that it was very cold. In fact when he looked at it he realized that the surface of its radiator fins were frosting. “Why’s it so cold?” he asked of no one in particular.

  A woman’s voice spoke over his shoulder, “Opening a port this big is going to generate a lot of heat. They’re porting liquid nitrogen through it to try to keep it cool.”

  Clint started to look around to see who had spoken, but, just then the man who seemed to be in charge of the big port said, “Okay, the people on Mars say they’re all ready. Is everyone ready here?”

  Several affirm
ative responses came. Norwood looked at the machine one more time, took a deep breath and said, “As ready as we can be.”

  To Clint, it felt like everyone held their breath for a moment. Several loud clicks came from the port and then a substantial hum emanated from it. A few seconds later a bright flash of light signaled the opening of the port and a large gray metal tube shot out of it and onto the rails. The cold Clint had been feeling from the radiating fins immediately became heat. Hot! Hot enough that he shuffled a little further away, even though his eyes were fixed on the metal tube containing their patient.

  Several of the people from D5R stepped up, flipped latches, and lifted the top half off of the tube exposing a man laying inside. He had his hands up over his head like a diver which surprised Clint. His eyes were taped shut and an endotracheal tube was taped in place where it came out of his mouth. There was an IV bag lying on his chest. Clint picked it up and hung it from an IV pole, eying it to be sure that the IV was still running.

  Norwood disconnected the man’s endotracheal tube from the tubing it had been attached to. Clint distantly noted that the tubing had been cut off when the port closed. Norwood hooked the man’s tube up to the circuit on the anesthesia machine and turned on some isoflurane. Apparently, some neurologist who’d been studying porting of living beings thought that animals who went through ports did better if they were kept on isoflurane for a while afterwards. Clint hooked up a set of EKG leads, an oxygen saturation monitor, a temperature thermocouple and a BIS monitor to follow the astronaut’s brain waves.

  The woman behind him, the one who’d explained the liquid nitrogen in the port, said, “What’s all that stuff you just hooked him up to?”

  “Standard anesthesia monitors,” he responded, and listed them off. “We don’t always use a BIS monitor, but since porting is supposed to induce seizures, it seemed like a good idea to follow his brain wave activity.”

  “Oh,” she said, sounding ineffably sad.

  The way she’d said it made Clint’s hair stand on end. He suddenly worried that somehow one of the patient’s relatives had been allowed into the room. Having someone with an emotional attachment present in a life-threatening situation could be problematic. He glanced quickly over his shoulder to see who he’d been speaking to.

  The woman was about his own age and very, very pretty. Suddenly, even more goosebumps shot down his spine.

  Ell Donsaii!

  ***

  Los Angeles, California—The news from TC3 has not been good. Video released by Team Teecee shows that dust continues to fill the atmosphere in the vicinity of the cave of the teecees that so many of us have become attached to. The dust is so thick that visibility is limited to no more than a few feet. The teecees seem to be safe for now, living in the depths of the cave system in which they have made their homes in the past. D5R has provided them with “misters” which clear the dust out of the air inside their caves. They have also provided them with goggles and breathing filters which allow them to go outside, however the world outside their cave has been devastated. As you can see in these radar images provided by the research team, enormous tracts of the vegetation have been blown down. No animal life is moving around. The teecees have been butchering a herd of grazing animals that died nearby. They’re preserving the grazers’ meat, but it is unclear how our friends will continue to survive when that runs out.

  On another front, D5R has used a large port to retrieve astronaut Phil Zabrisk from Mars after he fell in the Valles Marineris, injuring his hip. Work with animals has shown that being “ported” may cause significant neurologic issues. It is unclear what exactly is going to happen to Mr. Zabrisk because he is the first human being to actually go through a port.

  Francis Ementhal, the disgraced leader of the defunct Committee for Extraterrestrial Affairs has publicly accused D5R and Ell Donsaii of overextending themselves. “They find themselves unable to cope with these disasters. If only they had been properly managed, these situations could have been prevented…”

  When President Stockton was asked about Ementhal’s comments, she said, “The events of which he speaks were a natural disaster and an accident. It is not clear to me how ‘proper management’ can prevent such incidents…”

  As Warren’s mother led him into the facility at D5R his stomach was practically cramping. He kept wondering, what if this doesn’t work?

  A few minutes later, a pleasant sounding young woman named Bridget led them into a large room where Warren was quite distracted by the sounds of many conversations, various tools and other noises and vibrations he didn’t recognize.

  Then he heard Dr. Keller’s voice, “Warren, there you are! Are you ready to try out your neurotrode?”

  The familiar voice settled Warren’s nerves quite a bit. “As ready as I’ll ever be I guess. I’m not sure what I’m gonna do though if it doesn’t work. I think my head might explode.”

  “Mine too, mine too,” Keller chuckled. “Actually I’m pretty sure it’s gonna work. Sending impulses to nerves is something we’ve been doing for a long time after all. What I’m really worried about is whether you’re going to be able to interpret the impulses we send you. I really doubt that we’ll be able to do anything that immediately gives you a ‘picture’ to look at.”

  Warren’s mother helped him get seated at a table.

  Keller said, “Okay, tell me what you see when I do this.”

  Warren involuntarily jerked his head back as a series of colored sparks flew across his field of vision, generally traveling from left to right. “I saw sparks!” he said holding his hand up and moving it through the air in front of him from left to right. He wiggled his fingers in an attempt to somehow show the scattered location of the sparks.”

  Keller sighed, sounding disappointed.

  “What’s wrong?! I saw something, isn’t that good?”

  “Yeah, yeah, it’s good,” Keller said. Warren could tell he was trying to sound upbeat. “You saw something and that’s great. We’ve done a lot of work in animals to determine the kind of signals the cells in the retina send out through their neuron’s axons in response to light striking them. We’ve been worried that the signals we generate in your optic nerve axons might not be perceived as light at all. Actually, scattered sparks were what I expected you to see. Well… I’m assuming from the way you wiggled your fingers around that you saw a bunch of scattered sparks?”

  Warren nodded.

  “It’s okay, it really is. I was just hoping that it might just possibly have been a single line like I drew on the screen. It just means you’re going to have to spend some time teaching the AI where each of your axons is located in your visual field. Then the AI will be able to convert images from the camera into something that will look like a picture to you.”

  “Teaching the AI?”

  “Yeah, for instance where do you see this spark?”

  A spark of light appeared just to the left of center in Warren’s field of view, or what he vaguely remembered as a field of view from back when he could see as a little kid. He said, “It’s pretty much in the center, just a little bit to the left actually.”

  “That’s okay,” Dr. Keller said. “I’m putting a trackball in front of your hand to help you communicate with the computer. If you’d roll the ball it will stimulate different axons. To you it should seem to move the spark. Tell me when you’ve got it lighting up an axon that seems to be exactly in the center.”

  Warren moved it and the spark jumped around but generally moved in the direction he moved the ball. He kept moving it until he felt like the spark it generated was in the center and said so. Another spark flashed up into Warren’s field of view. Keller said, “Where’s that new spark in relation to the first spark?”

  “Up high and just a little to the right,” Warren said.

  “Okay,” Keller said. “Leave it up high but move it until you feel like it’s centered right over the one in the middle.” Next Keller had him center one at the left edge of his fie
ld of view, the right edge, and then the bottom center. “You’re going to be doing this until you’re absolutely sick of it. The issue is, that the axons in your optic nerve are only approximately arranged in the same way the neurons are organized behind your retina. That means that if we just send impulses to axons that are in the same relative location as the pixels in the video image from the camera, the spots of light you see will all be a little bit out of place. In theory you’ve got to tell us where each axon is located in your visual field. Now that we’ve got an approximate grid of your retina from the center, left, right, top, and bottom neurons you’ve picked out, you can just tell us which axon lights up a spot in relation to those that we’ve already located.” He sighed, “There are over a million neurons though, so once you’ve got your image to be pretty good I’m worried you’ll be sick of it and probably quit doing it. Your brain may adjust to them being a little bit out of place too. We’ll give you a trackball to take home with you, but I’d like you to work with the AI here until we’re sure everything’s going okay. We’ll also need you to tell the AI what color you see.”

  “Wait, can’t you just feed me a picture, even if it's bad?”

  “Well, we can, but it’ll be really messed up because we’ll be activating axons that aren’t quite in the right place. The image will be incredibly blurry.”

  “Believe me, ‘blurry’ will be an enormous improvement over my current situation!”

  “Ah… well yes, you’re probably right. Here goes.”