"Quantum Leap - Prelude" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

Jancyk hesitated, looking from one person to the next, hoping for some sympathy, some reprieve. None was forthcoming. They were so many statues, their eyes like glass eyes of brown, of blue, of gray. Were it not for the quiver of a muscle below the eye, the lash-shadow of a blink, they might be statues indeed
"If he'd come here, he'd have had to listen," he began. No one responded. Jancyk licked his lips and swallowed the rest of his justification, reached for his briefcase.
"You will leave that here," Hsuieh-lung said implacably. [
The briefcase fell out of his hand as if the handle ha burned him. He jerked his head in a staccato nod, scanned the others, looking for and not finding any support, and turned and walked very quickly out of the room.
There was no movement, no sound from the assembly until the footsteps in the hallway paused, and the front door opened and closed. The four people remaining in the room looked at one another.
"Definitely a liability," one of the men said. "I'm sorry we ever brought him into the group."
"And he's a reporter, too. Not wise to antagonize writers is it? He might write something about us instead of for us next time."
"It is fortunate," the sole woman, a short, emaciated red-head, observed tranquilly, "that Washington has such a very high murder rate, isn't it?"
"Indeed," Hsuieh-lung said, and favored her with a thin-lipped smile. "Sometimes the results are tragic. Sometimes less so. You will see to it, I trust?"
She smiled brilliantly in return.
"Meanwhile," someone else noted, "let's see what advantage we can make from this, and what lessons we can learn. Nothing is without use, after all."
After a moment, Yen agreed.
"Oh, shit, I just hate it when they're famous," Weasel Mikowski said, holding his hands up in the air and shaking drops of water from them. "Give me an unknown and a grieving family every time." He leaned forward to give a particularly short scrub nurse some assistance in fastening the mask over his mouth and nose, turned again to let another assist him in putting on surgical gloves. "But the famous ones, holy heaven, you might as well have the press right there taking pictures over your shoulder."
The loose green scrubs, mask, and cap made him look like someone wearing a disguise. Everyone else looked exactly alike, wearing the same garb. He had to recognize them by the way they moved, by the stations they took up. But they all knew where they were supposed to be and what they were supposed to do.
"Is this guy famous?" the second nurse asked. "I never heard of him."
"You never heard of him?" Weasel was stunned. "He won the Nobel Prize a couple years back. He was on the cover of Time and Newsweek and Rolling StoneЧ"
"Get my picture ..." someone caroled.
Weasel gave the culprit a withering look, the effect of which was largely spoiled by the fact that only his eyes could be seen. "The slab of meat on this afternoon's table, ladies and gentlemen, has more degrees than all of us put together. He sings. He dances. He does physics. He's only one of the smartest men in the world!"
"Not any more," the scrub nurse said. "Not with a depressed fracture of the skull and subcranial bleeding.
He's going to be lucky he doesn't end up a babbling idiot." She counted sponges and instruments and made note of the total.
"Now Zelda, cut it out. It's not that bad," Weasel chided her as they pushed through the swinging doors into the surgery. "I hope," he added, looking down at the man lying before him.
Sam Beckett had IV needles, BP gauges, tubes down hi throat, fluids going in and going out. Sensors were taped I his head, wires trailing over the edge of the operating table to be caught up neatly in a plastic tube. His chest rose fell in a steady rhythm. His eyes weren't quite closed. The machinery hummed and wheezed.
Zelda, whose first name was not Zelda but whose last name was, unfortunately for her, Fitzgerald, sniffed.
"Let's get cracking, shall we?" she said. "I've got a date tonight, even if nobody else does."
"Yeah, you're bragging," Weasel jeered. But his attention was still on the surgical field. He was standing at the heal of the table, and sterile sheeting was draped over everything. The man on the table was no longer famous, no longer Sal Beckett, no longer even a man, but an area of prepared, shaved scalp turning black and blue, with a clearly visible depression in the middle of the bruise. "Vitals?"
In moments the surgical ER was all business, punctuated by the occasional off-topic remark on just what it was Zelda ha managed to get a date with. The machines hummed to themselves, making sure that breathing and heartbeat and blood pressure and blood gases remained steady. It might have been moments, but was probably longer, before Weasel laid the skull beneath the skin. The bone was pink.
It looked as an egg would, if someone had struck it hard with a pencil: a shallow, concave area, a well filling with blood, visibly cracked, with one or two slender fragment missing. Missing, the surgeon feared, because they had been driven into the brain beneath.
Weasel probed the depression carefully, and grunted with dismay when a fragment of bone shifted under the tip the scalpel. "I think I'm going to have to go in here and maybe take a bit of a look to see what shape the dura's in," he muttered, almost to himself. "How are we doing?"
"Just fine." Perry James, the anesthesiologist, was paying more attention to his instruments than to the patient. "We're steady and within limits, seventy-five over one hundred ten." As the words came out of his mouth, the machine squawked. "Oh, hell. Oh, hell. This is not good. BP's droppingЧ"
The team swung into emergency status. A controlled frenzy came over them as each person in the room, save one, took the necessary steps to try to bring the patient on the table back from the brink. The clock ticked. They worked. The electroencephalograph readings, reflected on a monitor overhead, jumped and slid crazily. Only one of the operating team happened to be looking at it at the time, and she was too busy to comment.
There was darkness. Pressure. Pain.
It was. . . light, where he was now.
I don't know, Sam said silently. I don't know what I want. I don't know who I am. Where I am or what I'm doing.
I know this is right. I know this has to happen.
But what is "this"?
He was floating in blue-white light, seeking some thread back to reality. For part of him there was no sensation, no weight, scent, taste, nothing but the light surrounding him, bearing him up.
At last the anesthesiologist said, "I've got pressure."
"Stable?"
"Pretty much," the anesthesiologist said. "I think I can keep him going until you close, at least."
"I thought we had flatline," Zelda muttered.
Weasel looked down at the open surgical field, the cracked and splintered bone, the gleam of brain tissue peeking through.
"Get me RPMI," the surgeon said abruptly.
"Get you what?" Zelda was incredulous, talking even as she moved. "That's cell-culture medium. What do you want that for?"
"I dunno," Weasel said, as he exposed more of the durable mater, the tough membrane surrounding the brain. Meningeable fluid ran along the blade as he sliced through, widening the tear enough to see how deep the splinters went. "Seems lib a good idea. I want to ... I wantЧ"
For another part of him there was the sharp, not unfamiliiar smell of antiseptic and sweat and worry, and the relief of someone patting the perspiration from his forehead so it wouldn't run into his eyes and blind him. He had to be able to see. Had to be able to know exactly where the blade was. He could feel the resistance of the membrane before it parted, hear the exclamations as blood under pressure spurted along his thumb and up his sleeve. But the blood didn't go far, and there wasn't too much of it, he thought. Was there?
What am I doing here? he asked silently. What is this? don't understand!
And answer came there none.
"We'd better put in a drain," Weasel said. "He's got himself quite a hematoma here. Come on, damn it, I asked for some RPMI."
"I'd have to go to Pathology for it," the scrub nurse work ing with Zelda said.
"Then, damn it, go!"