When the jungle man came in, Jeff said, "Put him to bed. I'll be in to see him in a little while. You, throw away that sten gun and stick your hands close to that light. You're going to assist me with the operation."
"Me?" shrilled the young man.
"Yes. Turn the palms of your hands to the light. If you don't follow my directions, if you make the slightest mistake, you will have killed your master." Jeff examined the eyes in the solution. A neat job of removal, he thought. Plenty of surrounding meat to fill in the spaces. The one way to play this was as if the plan had worked. "Come here, stupid, let me show you the correct way to hold the hose."
As he pruned unnecessary tissue from the right eye, and injected the cell-stimulating pro-op into the six loosely hanging muscles that would turn it, Jeff tried to find out, without giving his plan away, what had passed between The Assassin and Konrad, presuming that they found Konrad. But the earless one was so nervous his replies didn't make sense.
V
A grenade exploded outside, followed by a moaning voice. A mountain man burst into the operating room. "We can't hold them much longer. They must have finished the boys at the Coliseum because now there are hundreds of them. They're shooting at the house down the block. Pretty soon they'll figure out this is the house. Hurry it up."
Deliberately Jeff forgot the outside world and concentrated on the operation. With steady hands he drew out the end of the optic nerve like a small white worm and brought it close to the cross street of nerves in the old man's forehead, the optic chiasma. Wielding the high frequency sound nozzle with more speed than care, he eroded plenty of working area from the frontal bone. If he lived, this old man's forehead would be a veritable silver mine.
Nudging the earless one to use the suction hose so he could see what he was doing, Jeff slid the eye closer into its socket. He cranked down the reflection viewer and focused its rays through the eyeball. Now he had to work down through the cut between eye and forebrain and the going, even with the help of the semi-robot's steady hand, was uncertain. He didn't bother too much with the muscles, just sewed them in and injected the growth catalyst. The arteries he sealed neatly together, squinting through the micro of the reflection viewer and focusing tediously on each one. A lot of blood was leaking down the old man's cheek though. If Taen were there to help he'd order a small transfusion.
As he worked on the second eye, The Assassin grew paler. Jeff gave him a hypo.