Stewards of the Flame Read Free Page B

With that added to repeated blood samplings, he’d felt more needles than he could count. The feeling of sensitive inner parts, however, had not been dulled. His stomach hurt. His throat hurt, though the apparatus thrust into his windpipe had long since been withdrawn. His ass and a good portion of his gut hurt—what he’d once thought a mere vulgar expression had been carried out all too literally.
    Wearily he forced his eyes open, sensing someone’s approach. To his relief, it was Carla who stood beside him. “Keep your spirits up,” she said gently, straightening the sheet with which he’d at last, mercifully, been covered. “This phase lasts just one more day.”
    “What will they do to me tomorrow?” he asked, feeling that there was little left they could do. In addition to getting a variety of scans, they had directly examined every nook and cranny of his body’s interior; not only all orifices, but arteries had been explored. They had inserted miles of tubing. They had injected dyes, taken tissue samples. They had probed the very marrow of his bones.
    Now, for the night anyway, he had been granted respite, perhaps only because the supervising doctors were tired. There seemed to be an endless succession of technicians and interns. Last night he had been left alone, but hardly at peace; he’d undergone violent purging in preparation for this morning’s intestinal studies. Tonight the only procedure in progress appeared to be IV feeding, necessitated by the past two days’ required fast and the fact that his stomach was too badly abused from inner inspection to hold liquid nourishment. Tomorrow . . .
    “What will they do tomorrow?” he repeated, for Carla’s face was averted; she seemed reluctant to reply.
    “You don’t want to know.”
    “Yes, I do. Nothing’s worse than trying to guess.” This woman would be honest, he felt. She would not resort to stock, patronizing phrases. Perhaps she might even offer reasons .
    She pressed his hand with cool, smooth fingers. “Biopsies of internal organs to start with, I think. The ones they couldn’t reach with endoscopy. Liver, kidney and so forth.”
    “You’re kidding. Needles in my liver ? But there’s nothing to look for, no symptoms that would suggest—”
    “They don’t wait for symptoms. There might be something wrong, you see, that could be found long before symptoms showed up.”
    “But there isn’t. I’m healthy! At least I assume so—they haven’t by any chance discovered a problem, have they?” Dismaying as that thought was, it was almost better than the idea of so much invasive work having being done by mistake.
    “No!” Carla exclaimed. “Don’t start thinking that way, Jesse! There is nothing wrong with your body. The problem is with the system we’ve got here. It can’t tolerate an incomplete file.”
    “You mean all this is done to every patient who’s admitted for some minor complaint?” She wasn’t a psychologist after all, he realized, for she didn’t speak as a member of the system’s hierarchy.
    “To every citizen of this colony,” Carla replied. “Not all at once like this, of course. And not so many invasive tests for young people. Besides telemetry of data from our homes, we have scheduled checks and rechecks according to age.”
    “Oh, my God, Carla. That’s carrying annual physicals too far.”
    She said slowly, “Not really—it’s the logical extension of the concept.” She paused, almost as if waiting for a retort.
    “Well, it’s a tradeoff between stress and benefit,” Jesse said, trying to be tactful. “Not to mention economics. The chances of finding anything serious enough to warrant such tests on a routine basis must be pretty small.”
    “That’s not the point. The theory is that preventing illness is worth any cost, either in discomfort or in resources.”
    “I’m not sure I feel up to arguing with you, but there’s a flaw in that logic. If you subject people to this much