Crucible: McCoy

by David R. George III

  Here too, though, things could have been worse. Mr. Duncan could’ve fired people outright, but instead, he’d cut everybody’s work hours and pay. That had made life harder for all the folks in town, including Phil and Lynn, but it had also left everybody in the same situation.

  Phil turned onto Main Street and parked in front of Town Hall. As he got out of the truck, he saw Len walking on a path through the commons. Phil waved, and Len waved back. A while ago, Phil had been surprised to find out that his friend didn’t know how to drive, and so he’d taught him. The experience still made him laugh when he thought back on it, though he would never want to go through it again. More than anything else, Len’s surprisingly colorful language had startled and amused him. He’d eventually learned, but even though Doc Lyles had offered him the use of his car—Lyles rarely drove anymore himself—Len still seemed to want to walk everywhere.

  Phil headed up the stairs to Town Hall. The doors had been propped open, probably because of the day’s heat. He stepped inside and crossed the small lobby to the short, wooden half-wall that closed in a few rows of wooden chairs and the desks—just tables, really—beyond them. The three members of the town council—Bill Jenkins, Audie Glaston, and Gregg Anderson, who currently served as mayor—worked here when they did town business, though Phil saw none of them right now. He did see Judy Bartell, the town clerk, sitting at her desk just ahead, chatting with Jefferson Donner. Phil had come into town specifically to see Judy.

  Reaching down and opening the small door in the half-wall, he started toward her desk. When she saw him, she said, “Hey, Phil,” and Jeff Donner looked over and greeted him as well.

  “How y’all doing today?” Phil asked as he reached the pair.

  “Hot,” Judy said. Short, with a doughy, freckled face and curly red hair that was almost orange, the older woman fanned herself with a stack of papers. Phil saw that the tall windows on either side of the room had been opened, but the air just seemed to sit there anyway.

  “Hot and then some over to the forge,” Jeff said. About Phil’s age, the tall blacksmith had a lean muscular body and always seemed to have three days’ growth on his face. “When you gonna bring in Piedmont and Belle Reve for shoeing?”

  “I’ll have to see,” Phil said, “but we ain’t been working ’em, so…” He shrugged.

  “I know, I know,” Jeff said. “Nobody in town’s farming much at all, and so no one needs their animals shoed or their tools fixed.” He didn’t sound angry, but frustrated.

  Phil shrugged again. “Sorry, Jeff.”

  “Aw, it’s not your fault,” Jeff said, clapping a hand on Phil’s shoulder. “I just wish things could be like they was.”

  “Ain’t that right?” Judy agreed. They all nodded along with her. Though it didn’t help matters any, for some reason it made Phil feel better to hear other folks talk about how things had changed.

  “Well, I guess I should be getting back,” Jeff said. “If someone does come by, I don’t wanna miss any business.” Phil and Judy said their good-byes, and Jeff Donner headed out.

  “I suppose you know why I’m here, Judy,” Phil said once the blacksmith had left.

  “Yes, indeedy,” Judy said, pulling a stack of papers over to her. “You always seem to be the last one in to get their check.” She pulled an envelope from the pile and handed it to him.

  “I don’t know, Judy,” Phil said. He took the envelope from her and, without looking at it, folded it in two and stuffed it into the back pocket of his dungarees. “I’m taking the money, and I guess it’s the right thing to do, but it just don’t seem right.” As soon as President Roosevelt had taken office in 1933, he’d worked with Congress to pass one law after another aimed at helping people beaten down by the terrible economic times in the country. One of the first ideas he’d proposed had been the AAA: the Agricultural Adjustment Act. In order to keep the prices of certain crops—including cotton—from falling too low, Roosevelt had decided that the government needed to control the supply of those crops. The AAA actually allowed the government to pay farmers not to plant their land. Most still planted some, though with Phil working at the mill, it had worked out best for him and Lynn to leave all their land fallow. Sometimes when he thought about it, Phil guessed it seemed reasonable, but then he’d get to thinking that fewer crops meant less for the mill to process, which meant less income, which meant they had to cut costs, which then affected the workers. It all seemed connected and complicated and impossible to fix all at once.

  “Things is tough,” Judy said. She pushed the stack of papers to the side and picked up the large ledger sitting on the side of her desk. She opened it to a marked page, then turned it around and set it down before Phil. “You got to take the money,” she said. “Now give me your John Hancock.” She uncapped a fountain pen and handed it to him, then pointed to an empty line on the page. He leaned down and signed his name.

  “I know, you’re right,” he said. “But I’m like Jeff: I wish things could be like they was.”

  “I think everybody does,” Judy said. “But ain’t that the way of life? Everything always changing?”

  “Yeah, I suppose so,” Phil said. “I suppose so.” He set the fountain pen down on the ledger. “Guess I ought to get this in the bank afore Mister Roosevelt changes his mind.”

  “Say hey to Lynn for me,” Judy said.

  “I will,” Phil said. “Hey to Jimmy and Bo.” Jim Bartell, Judy’s husband, worked as Sheriff Gladdy’s deputy, and her son Bo, who had to be almost twenty-one now, worked down at the mill, out in the storehouse with Billy Fuster.

  Phil made his way back outside and down the Town Hall steps. Under the bright sun, and with a pocketful of money he would have traded for a field full of cotton, he started across the commons, headed for the Palmetto Mutual Bank and Trust.

  His black doctor’s bag in hand, McCoy walked along one of the gravel paths that wound through the commons. He’d just come from the Gladdy house, out on Riverdale Road, down Church Street in the opposite direction from Tindal’s Lane. There, he’d diagnosed Dwight, the town’s sheriff, with bronchitis. He’d prescribed aspirin, as analgesic and antipyretic, and cough syrup, as antitussive and expectorant. McCoy had carried both medications with him after Beth Gladdy had come by to request a house call and she’d described Dwight’s symptoms.

  Now, making his way through the commons, he saw Phil Dickinson waving to him from in front of Town Hall. McCoy waved back, then watched Phil pad up the steps and go inside. Other people outside this afternoon greeted him as well, most calling him “Doc” or “Doctor,” even those who’d called him by his given name when he’d first come to Hayden. He’d been sharing the duties of town physician for just a few months short of two years now, and he’d been readily accepted in that role.

  While that time had been fulfilling for McCoy, it had also proven particularly instructive. Absent the diagnostic tools he’d become accustomed to using in the twenty-third century, he’d been forced to return to the manual procedures he’d studied in medical school, but which he’d rarely employed in the field; in some cases, he’d even had to learn new methods—well, ancient methods, but new to him. He’d also needed to become familiar with the medical instrumentation and pharmacology of this era. Initially, the primitive state of health care on 1930s Earth had frustrated him, but he’d quickly accepted it. He wasn’t going to invent the tricorder or the physiostimulator, or develop masiform-D, so he simply needed to identify and understand the tools available to him. He did this by observing Dr. Lyles, by asking questions, and by reading the Journal of the American Medical Association, Hygeia, and the other professional publications to which Lyles subscribed.

  McCoy reached the southeast corner of the commons, waited for Ducky Jensen to drive by in his pale yellow Studebaker, then headed diagonally across the intersection to Dr. Lyles’s house. Since the two men had begun working together, the elder physician had allowed McCoy the use of his office, which had worked out well. He walke
d past the low picket fence and turned up the stone path. The wooden sign sitting on a post in the front yard still declared “WILLIAM LYLES, M.D.”

  McCoy opened the door and stepped inside. “Doctor Lyles,” he called, “I’m back.” Though they had known each other for two and a half years and had worked together for all but the first eight months of that time, they still addressed each other by their titles. It wasn’t that they didn’t like each other, or that they didn’t relate to each other in a personal way—although even when they spoke privately, it tended to involve medicine on one level or another. On the one hand, though, Lyles seemed to want to maintain a professional relationship between them, and on the other, he for the most part kept to himself. According to Phil, the good doctor had essentially withdrawn socially after the death of his wife fifteen years earlier; she and several other people in Hayden had died of “consumption,” the old name given to tuberculosis.

  “Doctor Lyles?” McCoy called again. He stopped in the hall and listened for any sound, but heard only the loud mechanical beating of the grandfather clock from up ahead in the living room. Lyles might be in the privy out back, he supposed, or perhaps he’d been asked to make a house call.

  McCoy walked down the hall and through the first doorway on his right, into the examining room. He set his bag down on the small table just inside and—

  For a second, McCoy froze. Lyles lay on the floor beside the examination table, collapsed onto his left side, his head and neck leaning awkwardly against the cabinets lining the far wall. McCoy grabbed his bag back up and dashed across the room, throwing himself onto his knees beside the doctor. He took hold of his shoulders and gently shook him. “Doctor Lyles, can you hear me?” he said.

  No response.

  McCoy eased Lyles away from the cabinets and flat onto his back. He quickly opened his medical bag and pulled out his stethoscope, even as he noted that the doctor’s chest did not rise and fall, indicating that he had stopped breathing. McCoy set the earpieces of the scope in his ears, but before using the device, he reached up to Lyles’s neck, just below the angle of his jaw, and felt for a carotid pulse. He found none.

  Aware of the seconds ticking away, McCoy pulled the doctor’s shirt open with a jerk, causing several buttons to snap off and fall to the floor. Utilizing the bell of the stethoscope, he carried out the standard auscultation sequence, moving the bell to different locations on Lyles’s chest: left laternal sternal border, apex, base right, base left. He then repeated the cycle with the diaphragm. Doctor Lyles’s heart beat, but very irregularly and with varying intensity, an arrhythmia so severe that it indicated ventricular distress.

  “Damn,” McCoy muttered. In the Enterprise’s sickbay, or in any twenty-third-century hospital on Earth, a portable defibrillator would’ve provided a strong chance of restoring the doctor’s regular, rhythmic heartbeat. Right here, right now, though, McCoy knew that almost no such chance existed.

  Unwilling to give up without doing everything he could, he began cardiopulmonary resuscitation. He tilted the doctor’s head back, pinched his nostrils closed, leaned in, and covered Lyles’s mouth with his own. McCoy exhaled slowly, once, twice, making sure that the doctor’s chest rose in response. Then he shifted over, placed the heels of his hands one atop the other in the center of Lyles’s chest, locked his elbows, and administered compressions. After he pushed down the third time, the doctor vomited, a direct result of the CPR. McCoy quickly reached down and cleared his mouth, then turned Lyles’s head so that he wouldn’t aspirate the regurgitated food into his lungs. As the sour whiff of partially digested food reached him, McCoy resumed the chest compressions, completing fifteen in all.

  Lyles didn’t respond.

  McCoy repeated the sequence, from the two breaths of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the dozen and a quarter chest compressions. Then he did it a third time, and a fourth. Finally, he rechecked the doctor’s vital signs.

  Nothing.

  McCoy lowered himself from his knees to the floor and leaned back against a cabinet. He pulled off his stethoscope, wiped his mouth, then let out a long, loud sigh. His arms tired from his exertions, he sat that way for a few minutes. He felt sad, not because he’d lost a patient—though he hated that, he had also learned the need to distance himself emotionally from such events—but because he’d lost somebody who had made a tremendous difference in his life. Without Dr. Lyles, McCoy doubted that he would be practicing medicine again.

  After a while, McCoy placed his stethoscope back in his bag, then retrieved some towels and cleaned up the doctor’s face and the vomitus on the floor. Then he washed his own hands and face. Finally, he headed out into Hayden and back across the commons, to the sheriff’s office. Dwight Gladdy was home with bronchitis, but his deputy, Jimmy Bartell, would be on duty. McCoy would find him and report the death of Dr. Lyles.

  Twenty-Nine

  2273

  Driven by magnetic levitation, the monorail glided smoothly along the elevated track, past the main campus of Earth’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nogura peered through the window at the interconnecting set of ultramodern towers, illuminated in the night, and wondered if they would still be standing three days from now—or if anything at all would be left on Earth. The enormous destructive force headed for the planet had effortlessly fended off an attack by three Klingon K’t’inga-class warships, then had destroyed them with apparent ease. Attempts both to contact the object and to identify it had met with no success, and the speed with which it traveled and the course it took left only one Federation starship within interception range. Just completely redesigned and refitted, Enterprise would launch ahead of schedule, with no shakedown cruise, no adequate trials of its new warp drive, no opportunity for its crew to acclimatize to the ship in a deployed setting. All of which had led Nogura to agree to Admiral Kirk’s request—his demand, really—to assume command of his old vessel.

  As the maglev passed a tract of woodland, barely visible in the scant light of the railway, Nogura turned in his seat and checked the map displayed on a screen in the bulkhead. He saw that the monorail had entered the grounds of Emory University and that his destination would be next. He’d come the width of the continent at Kirk’s request as well, transporting from Starfleet’s headquarters in San Francisco to its military operations facility in Atlanta. From there, he’d boarded the maglev and ridden it north to Druid Hills, where he would find the object of his pursuit.

  Nogura cursed himself for his shortsightedness. Kirk, the gambling, swashbuckling starship commander, had demonstrated a great deal more prudence in his role as chief of Starfleet Operations than in his previous position. He still took risks, but only under circumstances far more advantageous than when he’d taken them during his time as Enterprise’s captain. Kirk had recommended against sending both Exeter and Potemkin to deal with the Albasynnia affair, thereby leaving this sector essentially unprotected, even if only for a short time. Nogura had overruled him. Considering the power now headed directly for Earth, though, Kirk had clearly been right.

  Up ahead, Nogura saw the interior lights of a seven-story building. As the maglev neared, it suddenly darted off the main track and swung onto a station branch. The building loomed above, until the monorail slid beneath an overhang and skimmed to a stop. Past just two people waiting on the platform, signs indicated that Nogura had reached the Bruggeman-Johnson Medical Research Center. As soon as the maglev’s doors opened, he exited and crossed to the building’s entrance.

  Inside, Nogura approached security and identified himself, verifying his claim with hand and retina scans. Though Starfleet did not control or even manage Emory University, he knew that Starfleet Medical often worked closely with its School of Medicine’s Research Division. The admiral’s rank and position therefore eliminated whatever bureaucratic hurdles might otherwise have slowed or even impeded his access to one of Emory’s researchers. After issuing him a visitor’s badge, a guard consulted a directory, then escorted him to a th
ird-floor lab.

  Nogura entered alone. Within, he found a large, low-ceilinged room, filled with an array of high-tech devices he did not recognize, and an assortment of low-tech equipment he did: test tubes, beakers, burners, and the like. On the far side of the room, a string of windows reached from wall to wall and looked out on the ECDC’s brightly lighted towers in the distance. To the left, a wide viewscreen dominated the wall and currently displayed a mix of alien characters and three-dimensional chemical diagrams, neither of which the admiral could read, though he thought he recognized the former. Standing before the screen, on the other side of a long counter from Nogura, stood two figures, one Andorian, one human. Both wore white smocks over their clothes, with what appeared to be identification badges pinned to their breast pockets. They looked in his direction.

  “May we help you?” the Andorian asked, a breathy quality to his voice. Heavyset, he had pale blue skin and a bald pate. His white antennae moved in a way that Nogura could not interpret.

  “I’m here to see Doctor McCoy,” the admiral said. Initially, Nogura had expected to visit the doctor in his home, but a check of his research schedule with an Emory official had shown him working in his lab late tonight. He couldn’t recall ever meeting McCoy, but he’d reviewed his personnel file after his conversation with Kirk. Nogura knew him on sight, despite the full beard and mustache he now wore.

  “Admiral Nogura,” McCoy said, obviously recognizing him as well. The doctor paused, clearly unsure why Nogura had come to see him, and perhaps not wanting to know. “May I introduce my colleague, Chirurgeon Shivol.”