The Face-Changers Read Online Free PDF

going to try to do something himself – slip this wounded man the keys to his car? She seemed to notice Carey only when his foot moved out of the square. “Wait.”
    “What?”
    “You still haven’t answered my question. What do you care?”
    He winced. “A hundred reasons.” He seemed to search his memory for one. “Remember I told you how I was almost washed out of surgical residency?”
    “When they left you to sew somebody up and instead you went in again and redid the operation?”
    “That’s close enough. I saw signs that the patient was hemorrhaging internally, so I opened the sutures and stopped it. The surgeon I was assisting said I’d performed a procedure I wasn’t trained for, endangered a patient, and so on.”
    “But this man saved you?”
    “You know what he said? The charge that I wasn’t trained was absurd, because I had just watched an outstanding surgeon perform the operation. It didn’t work. Finally, he said if I went, he went.”
    “So you feel you have to do something because you owe him?”
    “I’m sure that’s partly true. I hope it is, anyway. But he didn’t do that to save me. He believed that my career wasn’t as important as somebody’s life – no surprise – but that his career wasn’t either.” Carey was silent for a second, then said,
    “That’s part of it, anyway. I know he’s a good man, who certainly didn’t do this.”
    “What’s the rest of it?”
    “I guess it’s a feeling I have… a hunch.” Carey’s brows knitted. “In the last few years he’s been doing research.”
    “You mean he’s indispensable or something?”
    “Nobody’s indispensable.” He paused. “This is going to be hard to put into words without sounding foolish. See all those?” He waved his arm at the collection of medical publications that lined the shelves over his desk. She recognized the familiar covers of the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet.
    “Looks as though there’s plenty of research going on.”
    “Right. The articles are short – just brief summaries of important things people discover in a month, doing medical research in a thousand places at once. It’s impossible to keep up with all of it in even one specialty. But if one person could somehow hold a fair portion of it in his head at once and make the connections between discoveries that seem unrelated, and had the skills, and had the power to put it all into play, we just might make the next giant step.”
    “What giant step?”

    He waved his arm in frustration. “That’s just it. We don’t know, exactly – can’t know until it happens. It’s like describing the wheel while you’re waiting for somebody to invent the wheel.” He glanced at Jane, then began again.
    “What if somebody invented a method that causes normal tissue cells to replicate quickly – the way some cancer cells do, only faster – so that surgical incisions would heal in hours rather than weeks or months?”
    “You tell me.”
    “Surgeons like me could do things that we would never dare try now: virtually nothing would kill a patient if you could keep him alive for twelve hours. It might very well make procedures like kidney or heart transplants into historical oddities.”
    “The man down the hall is the one who’s going to do that?”
    “We don’t know if anyone will. He’s doing research in that area. It’s rare for a person like him to turn to basic research, so there’s been a lot of speculation, some tantalizing rumors. A few surprising early results have been published.”
    “So he might?”
    “All I’m sure of is that he’s something that seldom comes along. Twenty or thirty years ago, he was already one of the very best practicing surgeons in the country – the best hands, a temperament that was all concentration, an immediate understanding of the ways each technical advance could have been used to save the last patient, and how he would use it to save the next one. He’s still doing it,