They still planned to hold some segments of the tower together with standard very-heavy-duty explosive bolts. In an emergency, the bolts could be fired to break the tower into manageable segments that would float around in the upper atmosphere until they could be collected and destazed or reassembled. A little of the explosive was inside the Morse tapers, ready to push them apart to be sure the segments separated.
Lee was working with a couple of their new manufacturing engineers to automate the stazing and insertion of the segments so they could turn it into a rapid assembly process. They had an eye toward making it into a system that could also be used to put up buildings when skyscraper architects finally got excited about Stade.
Kaem’s phone spoke in his earbud, “You have a call from Dr. Gerald Horton.”
Kaem said, “He’s the one applying for grants to study stasis in medicine, right?”
“That’s correct.”
“I’ll take it… Dr. Horton, what can I do for you?”
“I just thought I’d bring you up to date on some events here at the hospital regarding the stazer.”
“Okay. Nothing bad I hope?”
“Well, no. After thinking about it a lot, I started worrying about how there were going to be patients who would benefit from being stazed even though it wasn’t approved for use yet. Um, what I mean is that some patients, you know they’re going to have a horrible outcome or death from strokes or blood loss or… a multitude of other conditions or events. It’s become more and more obvious to me that if we could pause their deterioration until we’re ready, we could make a huge difference in their outcomes. By that, I mean that we’d staze them until we’re ready to give, for instance, clot busters to stroke patients or till we have plenty of blood and a surgeon ready to stop the bleeding in trauma victims…”
“Yeah. We’ve talked about this before.” Kaem said, feeling as if his time was being wasted going over it again.
“But…” Horton sounded frustrated, “I’ve realized it isn’t ethical to wait until we had approval to use your device. A lot of people would die in the meantime. People we could’ve saved.”
“That bothers me too,” Kaem said.
“So, I met with the ethics committee and they agreed that in the absence of evidence that something bad was happening during stasis, it would be unethical not to staze patients in such time-critical situations.”
“Oh, it’s good that they agree. Isn’t it?”
Horton snorted a little laugh, “It’s going to make it difficult to randomize patient to treatment without stasis. We’ll be limited to animal studies to look for ill effects.”
Kaem didn’t say anything for a moment, then said, “That’s certainly fine with me. I’ve thought that all along. I’ve been worrying about all the people who might be saved with stasis, but wouldn’t be because we were waiting to do studies. And, I sure as hell think it’s unethical to randomize people to delayed treatment instead of stasis.”
Horton said, “So then, the day before yesterday, Morgan Warfield, was on shift with me. You’ll remember he was the doc who was so opposed to using the stazer?”
“Hard man to forget,” Kaem said dryly.
“Anyway, he had a stroke, right there at work in the ED while he was talking to me. Unfortunately, there were other critical patients waiting for the scanners so we couldn’t even evaluate him in a timely fashion.”
“Oh, no,” Kaem responded, dismayed. “What’d you do?”
“I stazed him.”
“You stazed Warfield?! Even though he was personally opposed to stasis?”
“Well, he’d made an offhand, mostly joking, comment to me that there was such a backlog for the scanners that night that we might have to staze some people who were waiting in line. That suggested he wasn’t as opposed anymore. Anyway, we stazed him until he could be scanned. Then stazed him again as soon as he came out of the scanner and until he could get to the interventional neuroradiology suite and have clot-busting drugs and a stent for the vascular block that was causing his stroke.”
Kaem blinked, “I’m not sure I understood all that. Did it work?”
“Yeah!” Horton exclaimed with a relieved laugh. “I just left his room. Other than a little clumsiness of speech, it’s hard to tell he had a major stroke two days ago! And, believe it or not, he said he was an idiot to have objected to stasis in the first place. I’ve never seen the man change his mind so abruptly!”
They talked a few more minutes. Kaem congratulated Horton on his triumph, despite the fact there would certainly be more battles to fight.
Kaem had resumed his way back to his table when, suddenly, a clinking sound came from over at Arya’s desk. Everyone raised their heads and looked around. They’d been told that the clink indicated a significant deposit coming in, and since Arya had worked out a profit-sharing program for their employees a few weeks ago, everyone knew a big deposit meant a bonus in their next paycheck. The clinks may not be loud but it was amazing how well everyone had learned to hear them. There was another clink, then another, then they turned into a rush of clinking coins. Arya stood and smiled around at all the people staring at her. “The money’s come in for the booster Norm cast down at GLI last week. Let’s give him a hand.” She clapped once and that sound was immediately overwhelmed by a roar of excited applause from the rest of the room.
When the room calmed, Kaem said,
