The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “A hoax.” Dimly, through the door, Knecht could hear a low pitched hum. The floor seemed to be vibrating, ever so slightly. He thought he could detect a faint whiff of ozone in the air. He studied the doctor’s face, but saw no sign of awareness.

  “Certainly a hoax. That was obvious. But to what purpose? Simply to laugh at the foolish doctor? Perhaps. But perhaps more. I could see but two possibilities, logically. The message was to make me do something or to prevent me from doing something.”

  Knecht nodded. “That does seem logical.” The night air was cool, but he could feel the sweat running down his back, staining his shirt. The humming rose in pitch.

  “Logic is a useful tool,” Ochsenfuss agreed inanely. “As nearly as I could tell, the only thing the message made me do was to ride down the Mountain and back up. That did not seem to benefit anyone.”

  “Is there a point to this, Herr Doctor?” Knecht felt jumpy. Abruptly, the humming rose sharply in pitch and dropped in volume, sounding oddly like the whistle of a railroad train approaching and receding at the same time. Then it was gone. Knecht suppressed the urge to turn around. He swallowed a sigh of relief.

  “What remains?” Ochsenfuss continued. “What was I prevented from doing? Why treating Kelly, of course. And who has been my opponent in the treatment? The Festungskommandant. So, since my return, I have been watching.”

  Knecht took the cigar from his mouth and stared. “You spied on me?”

  Ochsenfuss laughed. A great bellow. He slapped Knecht’s shoulder. “No, I pay you a high compliment. No one could watch you for long without you becoming aware of the fact. A sense shared by all scouts who survive. No, I followed Vonderberge. When you met him at the storeroom, I retired. It was obvious what you intended to do.”

  Knecht flushed. “And you told no one?”

  Ochsenfuss sucked on his cigar. “No. Should I have?” He paused and pointed the stub of his cigar at the cell door. “He’s not coming out, you know.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Your friend, Vonderberge. He’s not coming out. He’s gone.”

  Knecht turned and stared at the door. “You mean he took the equipment and left Kelly behind?”

  “No, no. They left together. If they stayed close, if they hugged, they would both be inside the field.”

  “Guard!” bellowed Knecht. “Open this door!” The guard came pounding down the corridor. He unlocked the door and he and Knecht crowded inside. The cell was empty. Knecht saw that Ochsenfuss had not bothered to look. The guard gave a cry of astonishment and ran to fetch the watch-sergeant. Knecht stepped out and looked at the doctor.

  The doctor shrugged. “I told you he would reject reality if he could.”

  “Explain that!” Knecht pointed to the empty cell.

  Ochsenfuss blew another smoke ring. “He ran from reality.” With a sudden motion, he kicked the cell door. It swung back and banged against the wall. “This is reality,” he said harshly. “Vonderberge has fled it. How else can I say it?”

  “Obviously, the other worlds are no less real. The evidence is there, now.”

  “What of it? It is the flight that matters, not the destination. What if the next world fails to please him? Will he reject that reality as well?”

  A squad of soldiers came pelting from the guardroom. They pushed past Knecht and Ochsenfuss and crowded into the cell. Their sergeant followed at a more majestic pace.

  “How long have you known,” Knecht asked Ochsenfuss, “that the other worlds were real?”

  Ochsenfuss shrugged. “Long enough.” He laughed. “Poor, dull-witted Ochsenfuss! He cannot see a fact if it bit him on the nose.” The Hexmajor’s lips thinned. “Granted, I am no physical scientist, but what Kelly said went against everything I had ever read or heard. Later, I came to know I was wrong.” Another shrug. “Well, we grow too soon old and too late smart. But I ask you, why did Vonderberge believe? He was correct from the beginning, but he believed before he had any real proof. He believed because he wanted to believe. And that, too, is madness.”

  “And Schneider?”

  “Schneider never believed. He was making a bet. Just in case it was true. He was playing games with my patient!”

  Knecht could see genuine anger now. The first real emotion he had ever seen in the Hexmajor. He saw the General for a moment through the Doctor’s eyes. It was a side of Konrad he did not care for.

  They spoke in an island of calm. Around them soldiers were searching, looking for tunnels. Schneider would be coming soon, Knecht realized. Perhaps it was time to leave, to postpone the inevitable. He and the Doctor walked to the front of the guardhouse but they went no further than the wooden portico facing the parade ground. There was really no point in postponement.

  Knecht leaned on the railing, looking out over the parade ground. A squad of soldiers marched past in the dusk: full kit, double-time. Their sergeant barked a cadence at them. Idly, Knecht wondered what infraction they had committed. Across the quadrangle, the Visiting Officers’ Quarters were dark.

  “So why, after you knew, did you continue to treat him?” He looked over his shoulder at the Doctor.

  Ochsenfuss waved his hands. The glowing tip of his cigar wove a complex pattern in the dark. “You read his journal. Do you really suppose he has found his way home this time? No, he goes deeper into the forest of time, hopelessly lost. And Vonderberge with him. Six worlds he had visited already and in what? In three of them, he was in danger. The next world may kill him.”

  “But…”

  “Tchah! Isn’t it obvious? He was driven to try. He had friends, family. His darling Rosa. Left behind forever. He could not bear the thought that he would never, ever see her again. How could he not try? How could he not fail? With me he had a chance. I saw it and I took it. If I could make him accept this world as the only reality, forget the other, then he might have adjusted. It was a daring thing to try.”

  Knecht looked back out at the parade ground. There had been a fourth possibility, after all. A refugee, but one slowly going mad. Lightning bugs flashed in the evening air. “It was daring,” he agreed, “and it failed.”

  “Yes, it failed. His senses worked for me: everything Kelly saw and heard told him this world was real; but in the end there were too many memories. I could not tie them all off. Some would remain, buried under the false ones, disturbing him, surfacing in his dreams, eventually emerging as psychoses. I restored his memories, then. I could do no more to help him, so I made no effort to stop you.”

  Knecht’s mind was a jumble. Every possible action was wrong. Whether Kelly had been the person he claimed to be, or a madman, Schneider had done the wrong thing. Ochsenfuss had been wrong to try and obliterate the man’s true memories. As for himself, all he and Vonderberge had accomplished was to turn him out into a trackless jungle. Oh, we all had our reasons. Schneider wanted defense. Ochsenfuss wanted to heal. Vonderberge wanted escape. And I … Knecht wasn’t sure what he had wanted.

  “We could have kept him here, without your treatment,” he told Ochsenfuss. “So the General could have learned more.” Knecht was curious why the Doctor had not done that.

  As if on cue, the door of the VOQ burst open. Knecht could see Schneider, dressed in pants and undershirt, framed in its light. Schneider strode toward the guardhouse, his face white with rage and astonishment.

  Ochsenfuss smiled. “Kelly would have lost what sanity he had left. If we had not given him the way home, we have at least given him hope. And…” He looked in Schneider’s direction. “While I am a logical man, I, too, have feelings. Your General thought to make me the fool. So, I made a medical decision in my patient’s best interest.”

  Knecht could not help smiling also. “Perhaps I can buy you a drink tomorrow, in the officers’ club. If we are both still in the army by then.” His cigar had gone out. He looked at it. “I wonder what world they are in now.”

  “We will never know,” replied Ochsenfuss. “Even if they try to come back and tell us, this worl
d is a twig in an infinite forest. They will never find us again. It will be bad for you, Rudi, if you cannot bear not knowing.”

  Knecht threw his cigar away. He was a scout. It would be bad for him, not knowing.

  DEAN WHITLOCK

  The Million-Dollar Wound

  Here’s an unsettling look at an uncomfortably near future society where they’ve taken the idea of cost-efficiency a bit too far, and given an ugly new meaning to the old slogan, good to the last drop.

  This was new writer Dean Whitlock’s first published story. He has subsequently sold several more stories to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and Aboriginal SF. You will be hearing a lot more about him in the future, too. Whitlock lives in Post Mills, Vermont.

  THE MILLION-DOLLAR WOUND

  Dean Whitlock

  “Hell,” Billy said, “it’s only a year. I can make it through a year.” He killed his beer and threw the can at the box of empties. “Besides, if I’m lucky, I’ll get the million-dollar wound.”

  He grinned at Frank and me, expecting agreement. We looked at each other and looked back, faces blank. He looked amazed.

  “Shit. What the hell do they teach you in medic school? The million-dollar wound is your ticket home. A clean shot through a thigh muscle, a little blood, a little hurt. Keep it clean and it heals right up, but first they give you a Purple Heart and send you Stateside. My grandfather got one in Viet Nam. He was drafted, too, same as us.”

  He popped open another warm beer, drank the suds off the top, and grimaced. “This pedro beer is real piss.”

  Frank and I finished ours and took more. “Help if it was cold,” Frank said. He went back to his book, and I put a couple of cans in the freezer with the blood.

  “Shit, nothing would help this crap,” Billy replied. But he kept drinking it.

  Billy was the kid of the unit, or looked it. Small, blond, big grin, bright eyes. He took a lot of crap in boot camp and learned to give it back. Drink hard, swear hard, punch a few shoulders to show you’re tough. He was a draftee, too, and that didn’t help in a platoon full of volunteers. When our medic unit got attached to his group, he started hanging out with us off duty. We drank a lot of that warm Bolivian beer together.

  Frank and I weren’t really draftees. Frank was premed, as he used to call it. He couldn’t afford college, so he was getting his training the hard way. He was thin and dark, with blue growth on his chin two minutes after shaving, and he spent a lot of time reading textbooks. I was a CO. I came out of college with an English degree and a choice of immediate employment: war plant, nuke plant, medic, or jail. No Canadian refuge, this war. I took medic, I guess, because I thought somebody had to balance the killing. Anyway, we weren’t volunteers, and that suited Billy. We got to be friends, even.

  “So Grampa got out whole,” Frank said.

  “Yeah. Spent the rest of his tour in Germany. Drinking real beer.”

  “How long was he in ’Nam? Before he got the million-dollar wound, I mean.”

  “Six months.” Billy laughed. “Hell, he was halfway home, anyway, wasn’t he? I got eleven months and three days to go, and I haven’t even been shot at.”

  “They had shorter months in ’Nam,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “R and R counted,” I told him. “When Gramps went down to Saigon for a week, it was still combat time. He could go for a month to Tahiti and it was still part of the year.”

  “Shit,” Billy threw his can at the box. “Figures the army would nix that one. I gotta spend 365 days on the line.”

  Frank nodded. “And we’ve got 730 each.”

  “With ten sick days,” I added.

  “Shit. And you guys can’t even shoot back.”

  * * *

  Patrol was hard work. We were northeast of La Paz, in the foothills near the Mamoré. The terrain was rough and broken, high fields separated by forest and deep ravines. It was hot during the day, cool at night. It rained a lot for weeks and then baked for weeks. The people lived in small houses, raised potatoes, mined copper and tin, and soon enough they started shooting at us. Sometimes it was guerrillas and sometimes it was coke farmers, but the bullets did the same thing. Billy and his unit kept busy shooting back, and Frank and I cleaned up after them.

  We were in a quiet area, at least. Short bursts of fire. A few flesh wounds, mostly Band-Aid stuff. One guy tripped, rolled down a hill, and broke his leg. Frank and I slapped on the plaster and carried the dumb ox four miles up to a flat place where a chopper could land.

  The first bad one stepped on a blender. That’s a spring-mounted trap that closes on your leg and shreds it from the hip down. He screamed, and somebody else shouted “Medic!” and Frank and I went running up to the head of the column. There was a lot of blood and a lot of pain, and the rest of the unit stood around watching with sick looks while four of them held him down and pried the damn thing open. Then the sergeant shouted them into a defensive formation, and Frank and I tried to stop the bleeding. Frank got real businesslike, pumping in morphine and plugging holes like it was a plastic dummy in training. He had good hands, Frank. He would have made a good surgeon. I just poured on gel and handed him staples and tried not to throw up.

  We developed that into a pattern. Frank played doctor and I played nurse and the unit played soldier. Frank took it real seriously, treated each man like he was the only patient we had. Then the fighting got serious, and two weeks later, with nine months and thirteen days to go, Billy got his million-dollar wound.

  Frank was doctoring at the other end of the line, so I hauled my kit over to Billy. What could I say? He was lying there with a dark stain spreading down his pants and a big grin on his face. I cut the cloth away and wiped off the blood. There was a pair of holes in his thigh, the front one small and tidy, the back one big and ragged. But it had missed the bone and the artery and he knew it.

  “Gramps would be proud,” I told him. “Do you need morphine?” His smile was getting strained.

  He nodded. “Might as well celebrate.” I pumped him up and sprayed on some gel, and we sent him off with the rest of the wounded.

  * * *

  Three weeks later he was back, with a Purple Heart and a pair of tiny scars on his leg. No limp, no pain, no Germany. And no more sick days. He had nine months and three days left.

  He told us a little bit about it one evening over some beers.

  “They took some muscle and skin from my other leg and stuck it in the hole. Then they soaked me in some kind of soup like that shit you guys are always spraying around and shined these big blue lights on my leg.”

  Frank was real interested. “What did they give you to eat?”

  “Mostly crap. And pills. All the time pills. But no morphine. Not even aspirin. Bastards.”

  “Did they use massage?”

  “Shit no. They made me lift weights with my foot.”

  “What did it feel like under the lights?”

  “Hot, I guess.” He took another drink. “Mostly it just hurt. Can’t feel a damn thing now, though,” He rubbed his leg as though he wanted it to hurt. “Shit, it’s like it never happened.”

  I handed him another can. “Looks like you’ll have to go for the two-million-dollar wound.”

  He laughed sharply. “Right. Next time I’ll ask the pedros to blow my whole leg off. Then the army can send me home to grow a new one.”

  We all laughed a little and started making jokes about the wrong size leg, and what else they could grow back. It wasn’t all that funny, but all we could do about it was laugh. The soldier who’d stepped on the blender came back a little later, too, and more of the wounded. The once-wounded. They went back out on patrol and they were a lot more careful. And Frank and I got to work on some of them again.

  Billy took his second hit about a month later. Just shy of seven months to go. I remember because Frank and I had scraped the big red crosses off our helmets the night before. Frank started c
arrying a rifle about then, too. The guerrillas had started shooting medics. Maybe they recognized all the rebuilt GIs and thought we were doing the fixing. What did we know? We just poured on gel, pumped them up, and tried to keep them alive until the chopper came.

  We had moved farther to the northeast, still near the river, where the hills were less rugged and ravines more forested. We started using napalm on the guerrillas, too, and they started using it back. Probably our own stuff. They didn’t have planes and choppers to drop it from, so they canned it and lobbed it in with skeet throwers. The guys called them Frisbees. If you were good, you could hit them in the air, but they splattered fire on anything underneath. If you let them hit, they burned less territory.

  Billy was at the front of the line—God knows why, because he never volunteered for that kind of duty. The pedros were above us and started firing down on the trail. Luckily, they started shooting as soon as they saw the lead man. Lucky for the rest of us, at least. Billy hit the bushes and started firing back, while the rest of us went into the trees and gave cover. Then they lobbed in the napalm. Two Frisbees, maybe three, they put a pool of fire right on Billy. We heard him screaming, and then he came running out, the right side of his body and both boots on fire.

  You can’t stamp out napalm. It sticks to you. We had special blankets and a spray that foamed, and we smothered Billy as fast as we could. His clothes saved most of him from real damage, but his hands weren’t covered, and neither was his face. His right hand was charred to the bone, and three fingers gone. His right cheek started to flake away, and the ear, too, and he had third-degree burns from his neck up into his hair. When we took his helmet off, part of his scalp came with it. There wasn’t much we could do but give him morphine, cover him with gel, and get him out fast. He kept his eyes shut—they were both still there, thank God—and held his left hand in a fist up under his mouth, muttering to himself and crying. I thought he was praying at first, but he got louder whenever we jolted the stretcher or touched him. I could hear him moaning, “Oh Shit, oh shit, oh shit.” over and over again. Even Frank was shaken.