Kiss Kiss Read Online Free Page A

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.
      
“I’m really serious about it, William. Would you care to
consider a proposition?”
      
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
      
“Then listen and I’ll tell you. Will you listen to me?”
      
“Go on then, if you like. I doubt I’ve got very much to lose
by hearing it.”
      
“On the contrary, you have a great deal to gain—especially after you’re dead .”
      
I am sure he was expecting me to jump when he said this,
but for some reason I was ready for it. 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 mouth.
      
“This is a thing, William, that I’ve been working on quietly
for some years. 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. I’m
at the stage now where I’m ready to have a go with a man.
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.”
      
Landy leaned forward and placed both hands on the edge
of my bed. He has a good face, handsome in a bony sort of
way, with none of the usual doctor’s look about it. You know
that look, most of them have it. It glimmers at you out of
their eyeballs like a dull electric sign and it reads Only I can
save you . But John Landy’s eyes were wide and bright and
little sparks of excitement were dancing in the centres of them.
      
“Quite a long time ago,” he said, “I saw a short medical film
that had been brought over from Russia. It was a rather
gruesome thing, but interesting. 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. Now the thing is this: that dog’s
head, sitting there all alone on a sort of tray, was alive . The
brain was functioning. They proved it by several tests. For
example, when food was smeared on the dog’s lips, the tongue
would come out and lick it away; and the eyes would follow
a person moving across the room.
      
“It seemed reasonable to conclude from this that the head
and the brain did not need to be attached to the rest of the
body in order to remain alive—provided, of course, that a
supply of properly oxygenated blood could be maintained.
      
“Now then. My own thought, which grew out of seeing
this film, was to remove the brain from the skull of a human
and keep it alive and functioning as an independent unit for
an unlimited period after he is dead. Your brain, for example,
after you are dead.”
      
“I don’t like that,” I said.
      
“Don’t interrupt, William. Let me finish. So far as I can
tell from subsequent experiments, the brain is a peculiarly
self-supporting object. It manufactures its own cerebrospinal fluid.
The magic processes of thought and memory which go on
inside it are manifestly not impaired by the absence of limbs
or trunk or even of skull, provided, as I say, that you keep
pumping in the right kind of oxygenated blood under the
proper conditions.
      
“My dear William, just think for a moment of your own
brain. It is in perfect shape. It is crammed full of a lifetime of
learning. It has taken you years of work to make it what it is.
It is just beginning to give out some first-rate original ideas.
Yet soon it is going to have to die along with the rest of your
body simply because your silly little pancreas is riddled with
cancer.”
      
“No thank you,” I