"But we can't, man!" Lacy exclaimed. "You've got to be under a general for this job--we can't have you conscious. You're raving, I think. It will work, surely; it always has. Let us try it, anyway, won't you?" "Sure. It'll save me the trouble of holding the block, even though it won't do anything else. Go ahead." The attendant physician did so, with the same cool skill and to the same end point as in thousands of similar and successful undertakings. At its conclusion: "Gone now, aren't you, Kinnison?" Lacy asked, through his Lens. "No," came the surprising reply. "Physically, it worked. I can't feel a thing and I can't move a muscle, but mentally I am as wide awake as I ever was." "But you shouldn't be!" Lacy protested. "Perhaps you were right, at that--we can't give you much more without danger of collapse. But you've _got_ to be unconscious! Isn't there some way in which you can be made so?" "Yes, there is. But why do I have to be unconscious?" Kinnison asked curiously. "To avoid mental shock--seriously damaging," the surgeon explained. "In your case particularly the mental aspect is much graver than the purely physical one." "Maybe you're right but you can't do it with drugs. Call Worsel; he has done it before. He had me unconscious most of the way over here, except when he had to give me a drink or something to eat. He's the only man this side of Arisia who can operate on my mind." Worsel came. "Sleep, my friend," he commanded, gently but firmly. "Sleep profoundly, body and mind, with no physical or mental sensations, no consciousness, no perception even of the passage of time. Sleep until someone having authority to do so bids you awaken." And Kinnison slept; so deeply that even Lacy's probing Lens could elicit no response. "He will _stay_ that way?" the surgeon asked in awe. "Yes." "For how long?" "Indefinitely. Until one of you doctors or nurses tells him to wake up, or until he dies for lack of food or water." "We will see to it that he gets nourishment. He would make a much better recovery if we could keep him in that state until his injuries are almost healed. Would that do him harm, think you?" "None whatever." Then the surgeons and the nurses went to work. Lacy was not guilty of exaggeration when he described Kinnison as being a "ghastly mess." He was all of that. The job was long and hard. It was heartbreaking, even for those to whom Kinnison was merely another case, not a beloved personality. What they had to do they did, and the white marble chief nurse carried on through every soul-wrenching second, through every shocking, searing motion of it. She did her part, stoically, unflinchingly, as efficiently as though the patient upon the table were a total stranger undergoing a simple appendectomy and not the one man in her entire universe suffering radical dismemberment. Nor did she faint--then. * * * * *