Bergman offered it another inch, and Thomas took it. He opened it out, turning it below the level of the seats, trying to catch the light from below. He roamed the page for a moment, then his hands crumpled tight on the plastic. He saw the five-line filler.

Kohlbenschlagg was dead.

He turned to Bergman, and his eyes held infinite sorrow. He mouthed with his lips the words, “I’m sorry, Stuart,” but they died midway between them.

He stared at Bergman’s face for a moment, knowing he could do nothing for the man now. Kohlbenschlagg had been Stuart Bergman’s teacher, his friend, more a father to him than the father Bergman had run away from in his youth. Now Bergman was totally alone … for his wife, Thelma, was no help in this situation … her constitution could not cope with a case of inner disintegration.

With difficulty he turned back to the operation, feeling an overwhelming desire to take Bergman’s hand, to help ease away the sorrow he knew coursed through the man; but the sorrow was a personal thing, and he was cut off from the tense man beside him.

Bergman watched the operation now. There was nothing else to do. He had spent ten years of his life training to be a physician, and now he was sitting watching faceless blocks of metal do those ten years better than he ever could.

Murray Thomas was abruptly aware of heavy breathing beside him. He did not turn his head. He had seen Bergman getting nearer and nearer the cracking point for weeks now: ever since the phymechs had been completely installed, and the human doctors had been relegated to assistants, interns, instrument-carriers. He feverishly hoped this was not the moment Bergman would choose to fall apart.

The phymechs below were proceeding with the delicate operation. One of the telescoping, snakelike tentacles of one phymech had a wafer-thin circular saw on it, and as Thomas watched, the saw sliced down, and they could hear the buzz of steel meeting skull.

“God in heaven! Stop it, stop it, stop it … !”

Thomas was an instant too late. Bergman was up out of his seat, down the aisle, and banging his fists against the clear plasteel of the observation bubble, before he could be stopped.

It produced a feeling of utter hysteria in the bubble, as though all of them wanted to scream, had been holding it back, and now were struggling with the sounds, not to join in. Bergman battered himself up against the clearness of the bubble, mumbling, screaming, his face a riot of pain and horror.

“Not even a … a … decent death! ” he was screaming. “He lies down there, and rotten dirty metal things … things, God dammit! Things rip up his patients! Oh, God, where is the way, where, where, where …”

Then the three interns erupted from the door at the top rear of the bubble, and ran down the aisle. In an instant they had Bergman by the shoulders, the arms, the neck, and were dragging him back up the aisle.

Calkins, the head resident, yelled after them, “Take him to my office for observation, I’ll be right there.”

Murray Thomas watched his friend disappear in the darkness toward the rectangle of light in the rear wall. Then he was gone, and Thomas heard Calkins say: “Ignore that outburst, doctors, there is always someone who gets squeamish at the sight of a well-performed operation.”

Then he was gone, off to examine Bergman.

And Murray Thomas felt a brassy, bitter taste on his tongue; Bergman afraid of blood, the sight of an operation? Not likely. He had seen Stuart Bergman work many times — not Stuart Bergman; the operating room was home to Bergman. No, it hadn’t been that.

Then it was that Thomas realized: the incident had completely shattered the mood and attention of the men in the bubble. They were incapable of watering the phymechs any further today — but the phymechs …

… they were undisturbed, unseeing, uncaring: calmly, coolly working, taking off the top of the patient’s skull.

Thomas felt desperately ill.

Chapter three

“Honest to God, I tell you, Murray, I can’t take it much longer!”

Bergman was still shaking from the examination in Calkins’s offices. His hands were prominent with blue veins, and they trembled ever so slightly across the formatop of the table. The dim sounds of the Medical Center filtered to them in the bush — booth. Bergman ran a hand through his hair. “Every time I see one of those …” he paused, hesitated, then did not use the word. Murray Thomas knew the word, had it come forth, would have been monsters . Bergman went on, a blank space in his sentence, “Every time I see one of them picking around inside one of my patients, with those metal tips, I — I get sick to my stomach! It’s all I can do to keep from ripping out its goddamned wiring!” His face was deathly pale, yet somehow unnaturally flushed.

He quivered as he spoke. And quivered again.

Dr. Murray Thomas put out a hand placatingly. “Now take it easy, Stu. You keep getting yourself all hot over this thing and if it doesn’t break you — which it damned well easily could — they’ll revoke your license, bar you from practicing.” He looked across at Bergman, and blinked assuringly, as if to keynote his warning.

Bergman muttered with surliness, “Fine lot of practicing I do now. Or you, for that matter.”

Thomas tapped a finger on the table. It caused the multicolored bits of plastic beneath the formatop, to jiggle, casting pinpoints of light across Bergman’s strained features. “And besides, Stu, you have no logical , scientific reason for hating the phymechs.”

Bergman stared back angrily. “Science doesn’t come into it, and you know it. This is from the gut, Murray, not the brain!”

“Look, Stu, they’re infallible; they’re safer and they can do a job quicker with less mess than even a — a Kohlbenschlagg. Right?”

Bergman nodded reluctantly, but there was a dangerous edge to his expression. “But at least Kohlbenschlagg, even with those thick-lensed glasses, was human. It wasn’t like having a piece of — of — well, a piece of stovepipe rummaging around in a patient’s stomach.”

He shook his head sadly in remembrance. “Old Fritz couldn’t take it. That’s what killed him. Those damned machines. Playing intern to a phymech was too much for him — Oh hell! You know what a grand heart that old man had, Murray. Fifty years in medicine and then to be barely allowed to hold sponge for a lousy tick-tock … and what was worse, knowing the tick-tock could hold the sponge more firmly with one of its pincers. That’s what killed old Fritz.”

Bergman added softly, staring at his shaking hands, “And at that … he’s the lucky one.”

And then. “We’re the damned of our culture, Murray; the kept men of medicine.”

Thomas looked up startled, then annoyed. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Stuart, stop being melodramatic. Nothing of the sort. If a better scalpel comes along, do you refuse to discard the old issue because you’ve used it so long? Don’t be an ass.”

“But we’re not scalpels. We’re men! We’re doctors! ” He was on his feet suddenly, as though the conversation had been physically building in him, forcing an explosion. The two whiskey glasses slipped and dumped as his thighs banged the table in rising. Bergman’s voice was raised, and his temples throbbed, yet he was not screaming; even so, the words came out louder than any scream.

“For God’s sake, Stu, sit down! ” Thomas looked apprehensively around the Medical Center Lounge. “If the head resident should walk in, we’d both get our throats cut. Sit down , will you already!”

Bergman slumped slowly back onto the form seat. It depressed and flowed around him caressingly, and he squirmed in agony, as though it were strangling him. Even after he was fully seated, his shoulders continued rounding; his eyes were wild. Beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead, his upper lip.