It showed a dog’s head completely severed from the body, but with the normal blood supply being maintained through the arteries and veins by means of an artificial heart. It was a rather gruesome thing, but interesting. ‘Quite a long time ago,’ he said, ‘I saw a short medical film that had been brought over from Russia. But John Landy’s eyes were wide and bright and little sparks of excitement were dancing in the centres of them. It glimmers at you out of their eyeballs like a dull electric sign and it reads Only I can save you. You know that look, most of them have it. He has a good face, handsome in a bony sort of way, with none of the usual doctor’s look about it. Landy leaned forward and placed both hands on the edge of my bed. It’s a big idea, and it may sound a bit far-fetched at first, but from a surgical point of view there doesn’t seem to be any reason why it shouldn’t be more or less practicable.’
I’m at the stage now where I’m ready to have a go with a man. one or two others here at the hospital have been helping me, especially Morrison, and we’ve completed a number of fairly successful trials with laboratory animals. ‘This is a thing, William, that I’ve been working on quietly for some years. I lay quite still, watching his face and that slow white smile of his that always revealed the gold clasp of an upper denture curled around the canine on the left side of his month. I am sure he was expecting me to jump when he said this, but for some reason I was ready for it. ‘On the contrary, you have a great deal to gain – especially after you’re dead.’ I doubt I’ve got very much to lose by hearing it.’ ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’‘Then listen and I’ll tell you. Would you care to consider a proposition?’ The way he was staring at me, and studying me, and appraising me with a queer kind of hungriness, I might have been a piece of prime beef on the counter and he had bought it and was waiting for them to wrap it up. ‘Well,’ he said, and I could see him watching me carefully, personally, I don’t believe that after you’re dead you’ll ever hear of yourself again unless…’ – and here he paused and smiled and leaned closer- ‘…unless, of course, you have the sense to put yourself into my hands. ‘Idon’ really see why they should send me there.’ ‘You never know, my dear William.’ ‘I doubt it,’ I said, ‘though it would be comforting to think so.’ And then what? Do you believe you’ll go to heaven?’
room, and then they’ll take you out and cremate you.’ ‘You’re going to expire right here in this. In a way it was refreshing to have a visitor brave enough to touch upon the forbidden subject. Correct?’Ĭoming from Landy, the question didn’t seem especially unkind. ‘Look,’ he aid, pulling up a chair beside the bed. Perhaps I should explain to you here that although John Landy has He came in strong and smiling, and he strode up to the bed and stood there looking down at me with a wild bright glimmer in his eyes, and he said, ‘William, my boy, this is perfect. He didn’t creep in on his toes, sheepish and embarrassed, not knowing what to say, like all my other visitors. That was six weeks ago, on a Tuesday morning, very early, long before your visiting time, and the moment he entered I knew there was some sort of madness in the wind. So here I was with somewhere between one and six months left to live, growing more melancholy every hour and then, all of a sudden, in comes Landy. A surgeon can operate if it has not spread too far but with me, not only did I leave it too late, but the thing had the effrontery to attack me in the pancreas, making both surgery and survival equally impossible. Cancer is one of the few remaining diseases that these modern drugs cannot cure. I need not waste time upon them except to admit at once how foolish I was not to have gone earlier to my doctor. The details of the illness that struck me down so suddenly in my middles life.
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