Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 — page 9: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“F56 has just been asking for you,” said the attendant. “Your patient isn’t standing it very well.” : : | V67 nodded gravely. He was conscious of an intense cerebral curiosity, but sympathy and compassion were alien to his mood. The astravasin was circulating freely in his blood-stream. With ceremonious precisiongne removed his tunic and asked the attendant for his antiseptic suit and mask. The attendant opened a numbered drawer in a metal cabinet at his elbow, and handed V67 a folded rubber garment and a black surgical mask. — The mask was a cumbersome contrivance that went completely over his head. It had eyeholes of violet glass, and a long, twisted breathing-tube that >. terminated in a square metallic box in the region of the wearer’s navel. In appearance it was strikingly like the Western European gas masks of the World Wars of 1914, 1936, 1967 and 1987 in the primitive artifacts wing of the Museum of Historical Antiquities on Level K97. Having adjusted the mask and pulled the thin rubber antiseptic garment up over his shoulders, V67 nodded to the attendant and passed into the « operating-room. The operating-room was bathed in a diffused purple light. It was heavily impregnated with hylofoam, that powerful and dangerous anesthetic which exerted a numbing influence on the lower nerve centers, leaving them almost insensible to pain and yet with sufficient vitality to relay messages to the brain and spinal cord. Its action was insidious and curious. It entered the blood- stream by absorption through lungs and skin, and altered the vitalistic con- tent of individual cells in every organ and tissue of the human body. Invented in the Twenty-third Century, it had displaced all the cruder anesthetics of an earlier age. | | It had one disadvantage: it did not completely do away with pain. But as the victim of its fumes remained in full possession of his faculties and could even discourse rationally with his dissectors, the surgical workers who refused to countenance its use were branded as Twentieth Century sentimentalists, or worse. : | V67 walked slowly across the vast, dome-ceilinged operating-room in the direction of Table 4R6. He breathed deeply of the pure oxygen which circu- lated beneath his antiseptic mask, and stopped occasionally to greet associates as he passed between the long tiers of tables. ‘Three hundred and twenty-four operations were in progress. Some of his associates were selecting and arranging their_ instruments, ee others were actually at work on the glands of their human subjects, and a _ few were busy rectifying blunders, or guarding against future mistakes by dissecting the dead. When he arrived at Table 4R6 the tall form of Gland Surgeon F56 arose © from a stooping posture, laid down a gleaming metallic instrument, and advanced to greet him: “You're ten minutes late,’ he said -reproachfully, through the audition tube in the lower left-hand corner of his mask. “You know Vm too nervous to work past my schedule. My nerves are all shot. Why didn’t you relieve me?” “Tm sorry, F56,” said V67. “I was sun-bathing in a sky garden, and you 7 comichooksicon)