'That's not putting it quite straight,' I answered. 'It seems to me there'd be some doubts as to whether I were dead or alive by the time you'd finished with me.'
'Well,' he said, smiling a little, 'I suppose you're right about that. But I don't think you ought to turn me down quite so quickly, before you know a bit more about it.'
'I said I don't want to hear it.'
'Have a cigarette,' he said, holding out his case.
'I don't smoke, you know that.'
He took one himself and lit it with a tiny silver lighter that was no bigger than a shilling piece. 'A present from the people who make my instruments,' he said. 'Ingenious, isn't it?'
I examined the lighter, then handed it back.
'May I go on?' he asked.
'I'd rather you didn't.'
'Just lie still and listen. I think you'll find it quite interesting.'
There were some blue grapes on a plate beside my bed. I put the plate on my chest and began eating the grapes.
'At the very moment of death,' Landy said, 'I should have to be standing by so that I could step in immediately and try to keep your brain alive.'
'You mean leaving it in the head?'
'To start with, yes. I'd have to.'
'And where would you put it after that?'
'If you want to know, in a sort of basin.'
'Are you really serious about this?'
'Certainly I'm serious.'
'All right. Go on.'
'I suppose you know that when the heart stops and the brain is deprived of fresh blood and oxygen, its tissues die very rapidly. Anything from four to six minutes and the whole thing's dead. Even after three minutes you may get a certain amount of damage. So I should have to work rapidly to prevent this from happening. But with the help of the machine, it should all be quite simple.'
'What machine?'
'The artificial heart. We've got a nice adaptation here of the one originally devised by Alexis Carrel and Lindbergh. It oxygenates the blood, keeps it at the right temperature, pumps it in at the right pressure, and does a number of other little necessary things. It's really not at all complicated.'
'Tell me what you would do at the moment of death,' I said. 'What is the first thing you would do?'
'Do you know anything about the vascular and venous arrangement of the brain?'
'No.'
'Then listen. It's not difficult. The blood supply to the brain is derived from two main sources, the internal carotid arteries and the vertebral arteries. There are two of each, making four arteries in all. Got that?'
'Yes.'
'And the return system is even simpler. The blood is drained away by only two large veins, the internal jugulars. So you have four arteries going up - they go up the neck of course - and two veins coming down. Around the brain itself they naturally branch out into other channels, but those don't concern us. We never touch them.'
'All right,' I said. 'Imagine that I've just died. Now what would you do?'
'I should immediately open your neck and locate the four arteries, the carotids and the vertebrals. I should then perfuse them, which means that I'd stick a large hollow needle into each. These four needles would be connected by tubes to the artificial heart.