The Far Arena by Richard Ben Sapir Read Free Book Online Page A

too loud.
    If it wasn't the hyberbaric chamber pressiirizing oxygen into all of them, it had to be the tension. Eyes watered and did not blink. Sentences were cut short. Instruments came and went on the slightest nod or sound. People hung on expectant orders.
    'What ?' whispered Lew.
    'Shhh,' said the nurse assigned to explain things to him. She poked him sharply. She wanted him to get out of the way. Lew moved to his right, two steps. His neck hurt from bending over. He found himself holding his breath. He had been standing in front of some form of oscilloscope. It had a round face with a white grid and a smooth-flowing green sine curve, keeping its pace with time like restful moving green hills.
    Lines taped to the floor ran to the edge of the table, to the head. Lew felt dizzy. His own breathing was heavy. Even with that body now being electronically goaded to function in one organ or the other, to see it work like the living drained Lew, taking away feelings of stability. He felt alarmed. Ironically his old football injury caused him no pain whatsoever. He glanced at the oscilloscope connected to the body's brain.
    A sharp spear of a line interrupted the smooth hill flow of the sine curve, and then there was smoothness again. Lew noticed electrodes on the chest wall of the body. Petrovitch looked back over his shoulder. He motioned Lew to move. The finger contracted . Lew stepped farther to the side.
    Petrovitch said something hoarsely in Norwegian. Lew made out 'much work, challenge, extremely dangerous now'.
    There was a hush.
    A nurse called out the number of minutes in Norwegian. 'Time since normal temperature,' said Lew's nurse. 'I heard.'
    Suddenly, the nurse dropped her head in her hands and began sobbing. She no longer talked in English and Lew couldn't get an answer.
    Dr Semyon Petrovitch himself had to explain. He pointed to the oscilloscope Lew stood near. The lines were jagged and harsh, like jarring interruptions of a honking horn during a peaceful symphony.
    'You're shooting waves into the brain, right?' said Lew McCardle, trying to fathom what had caused the emotional outburst. Petrovitch's eyes, too, held tears, filling up the lower rim.
    'No. Not going in. Coming out. We are receiving brain waves. Those may be thoughts,' he said. And then with great strength, forcing the words out again, overcome by his own wonder, he said, his voice hoarse as though he had been yelling, possibly within his own mind, screaming out prayers that only a doctor might scream to a god he did not believe in, Semyon Petrovitch said:
    'I think it thinks.'
    Lew McCardle felt his body very weak, and he waited for the sine curve to reappear in a smooth, easy, gentle, hill pattern. Jagged peaks continued. The body was not yet dead. It now had one more death coming to it.
    At this time, at this place, for now, it lived. And maybe thought A doctor clamped the thigh wound.
    I am dead. But if I know I am dead, then I am not dead. Yet I will soon be dead. I am in the snows and the cold of the barbaric North, and I do not hear the legionnaire who has brought me here, nor see those who have stripped me of garments and left me defenceless against an invincible cold that even fe lls men swathed in animal skin. I feel warm. But I have heard barbarians and other Germans of the north country say the final grip of the snow death is feelings of warmth and goodness. They call it the blanket of the snow god. Romans laugh at these German gods, although some legions on the Danube border in Gaul honour them. The Roman will honour any god, I suspect, because he believes in none of them. Nor do I.
    We passed the last Roman camp months ago. It does not matter. It could have been years ago. Why am I not dead yet ? I have accepted it. Yet my throat feels the strong hard beak of a bird tear at it, and my stomach burns like molten bronze. This cannot be death. I feel pain, a familiar companion, and the certain proof of life.
    I hear dog-bark grunts of a