The 13th Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by Lester Del Rey

  He nodded and handed them back. We can use you, Dr.—”

  “Brown—professional name, Dr. Ferrel. And I’m used to being called just Nurse Brown.”

  Jenkins cut in on the formalities. “Sue, is there any news outside about what’s going on here?”

  “Rumors, but they’re wild, and I didn’t have a chance to hear many. All I know is that they’re talking about evacuating the city and everything within fifty miles of here, but it isn’t official. And some people were saying the Governor was sending in troops to declare martial law over the whole section, but I didn’t see any except here.”

  ***

  Jenkins took her off, then, to show her the Infirmary and introduce her to Jones and the two other nurses, leaving Ferrel to wait for the sound of the siren again, and to try putting two and two together to get sixteen. He attempted to make sense out of the article in the Weekly Ray, but gave it up finally; atomic theory had advanced too far since the sketchy studies he’d made, and the symbols were largely without meaning to him. He’d have to rely on Jenkins, it seemed. In the meantime, what was holding up the litter? He should have heard the warning siren long before.

  It wasn’t the litter that came in next, though, but a group of five men, two carrying a third, and a fourth supporting the fifth. Jenkins took the carried man over, Brown helping him; it was similar to the former cases, but without the actual burns from contact with hot metal. Ferrel turned to the men.

  “Where’s Beel and the litter?” He was inspecting the supported man’s leg as he asked, and began work on it without moving the fellow to a table. Apparently a lump of radioactive matter the size of a small pea had been driven half an inch into the flesh below the thigh, and the broken bone was the result of the violent contractions of the man’s own muscles under the stimulus of the radiation. It wasn’t pretty. Now, however, the strength of the action had apparently burned out the nerves around, so the leg was comparatively limp and without feeling; the man lay watching, relaxed on the bench in a half-comatose condition, his eyes popping out and his lips twisted into a sick grimace, but he did not flinch as the wound was scraped out. Ferrel was working around a small leaden shield, his arms covered with heavily leaded gloves, and he dropped the scraps of flesh and isotope into a box of the same metal.

  “Beel—he’s out of this world, Doc,” one of the others answered when he could tear his eyes off the probing. “He got himself blotto, somehow, and wrecked the litter before he got back. Couldn’t take it, watching us grapple ’em out—and we hadda go in after ’em without a drop of hootch!”

  Ferrel glanced at him quickly, noticing Jenkins’ head jerk around as he did so. “You were getting them out? You mean you didn’t come from in there?”

  “Heck, no, Doc. Do we look that bad? Them two got it when the stuff decided to spit on ’em clean through their armor. Me, I got me some nice burns, but I ain’t complaining—I got a look at a couple of stiffs, so I’m kicking about nothing!”

  Ferrel hadn’t noticed the three who had traveled under their own power, but he looked now, carefully. They were burned, and badly, by radiations, but the burns were still new enough not to give them too much trouble, and probably what they’d just been through had temporarily deadened their awareness of pain, just as a soldier on the battlefield may be wounded and not realize it until the action stops. Anyway, atomjacks were not noted for sissiness.

  “There’s almost a quart in the office there on the table,” he told them. “One good drink apiece—no more. Then go up front and I’ll send Nurse Brown in to fix up your burns as well as can be for now.” Brown could apply the unguents developed to heal radiation burns as well as he could, and some division of work that would relieve Jenkins and himself seemed necessary. “Any chance of finding any more living men in the converter housings?”

  “Maybe. Somebody said the thing let out a groan half a minute before it popped, so most of ’em had a chance to duck into the two safety chambers. Figure on going back there and pushing tanks ourselves unless you say no; about half an hour’s work left before we can crack the chambers, I guess, then we’ll know.”

  “Good. And there’s no sense in sending in every man with a burn, or we’ll be flooded here; they can wait, and it looks as if we’ll have plenty of serious stuff to care for. Dr. Brown, I guess you’re elected to go out with the men—have one of them drive the spare litter Jones will show you. Salve down all the burn cases, put the worst ones off duty, and just send in the ones with the jerks. You’ll find my emergency kit in the office, there. Someone has to be out there to give first aid and sort them out—we haven’t room for the whole plant in here.”

  “Right, Dr. Ferrel.” She let Meyers replace her in assisting Jenkins, and was gone briefly to come out with his bag. “Come on, you men. I’ll hop the litter and dress down your burns on the way. You’re appointed driver, mister. Somebody should have reported that Beel person before. The litter would be out there now.”

  The spokesman for the others upended the glass he’d filled, swallowed, gulped, and grinned down at her. “O.K., doctor, only out there you ain’t got time to think—you gotta do. Thanks for the shot, Doc, and I’ll tell Hoke you’re appointing her out there.”

  * * * *

  They filed out behind Brown as Jones went out to get the second litter, and Doc went ahead with the quick-setting plastic cast for the broken leg. Too bad there weren’t more of those nursing doctors; he’d have to see Palmer about it after this was over—if Palmer and he were still around. Wonder how the men in the safety chambers, about which he’d completely forgotten, would make out? There were two in each converter housing, designed as an escape for the men in case of accident, and supposed to be proof against almost anything. If the men had reached them, maybe they were all right; he wouldn’t have taken a bet though. With a slight shrug, he finished his work and went over to help Jenkins.

  The boy nodded down at the body on the table, already showing extensive scraping and probing. “Quite a bit of spitting clean through the armor,” he commented. “Those words were just a little too graphic for me. I-713 couldn’t do that.”

  “Hm-m-m.” Doc was in no mood to quibble on the subject. He caught himself looking at the little box in which the stuff was put after they worked what they could out of the flesh, and jerked his eyes away quickly. Whenever the lid was being dropped, a glow could be seen inside. Jenkins always managed to keep his eyes on something else.

  They were almost finished when the switchboard girl announced a call, and they waited to make the few last touches before answering, then filed into the office together. Brown’s face was on the screen, smudged and with a spot of rouge standing out on each cheek. Another smudge appeared as she brushed the auburn hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist.

  “They’ve cracked the converter safety chambers, Dr. Ferrel. The north one held up perfectly, except for the heat and a little burn, but something happened in the other; oxygen valve stuck, and all are unconscious, but alive. Magma must have sprayed through the door, because sixteen or seventeen have the jerks, and about a dozen are dead. Some others need more care than I can give—I’m having Hokusai delegate men to carry those the stretchers won’t hold, and they’re all piling up on you in a bunch right now!”

  Ferrel grunted and nodded. “Could have been worse, I guess. Don’t kill yourself out there, Brown.”

  “Same to you.” She blew Jenkins a kiss and snapped off, just as the whine of the litter siren reached their ears.

  In the surgery again, they could see a truck showing behind it, and men lifting out bodies in apparently endless succession.

  “Get their armor off, somehow, Jones—grab anyone else to help you that you can. Curare, Dodd, and keep handing it to me. We’ll worry about everything else after Jenkins and I quiet them.” This was obviously going to be a mass-production sort of business, not for efficiency, but through sheer necessity. An
d again, Jenkins with his queer taut steadiness was doing two for one that Doc could do, his face pale and his eyes almost glazed, but his hands moving endlessly and nervelessly on with his work.

  Sometime during the night Jenkins looked up at Meyers, and motioned her back. “Go get some sleep, nurse; Miss Dodd can take care of both Dr. Ferrel and myself when we work close together. Your nerves are shot, and you need the rest. Dodd, you can call her back in two hours and rest yourself.”

  “What about you, doctor?”

  “Me—” He grinned out of the corner of his mouth, crookedly. “I’ve got an imagination that won’t sleep, and I’m needed here.” The sentence ended on a rising inflection that was false to Ferrel’s ear, and the older doctor looked at the boy thoughtfully.

  Jenkins caught his look. “It’s O.K., Doc; I’ll let you know when I’m going to crack. It was O.K. to send Meyers back, wasn’t it?”

  “You were closer to her than I was, so you should know better than I.” Technically, the nurses were all directly under his control, but they’d dropped such technicalities long before. Ferrel rubbed the small of his back briefly, then picked up his scalpel again.

  A faint gray light was showing in the east, and the wards had overflowed into the waiting room when the last case from the chambers was finished as best he could be. During the night, the converter had continued to spit occasionally, even through the tank armor twice, but now there was a temporary lull in the arrival of workers for treatment. Doc sent Jones after breakfast from the cafeteria, then headed into the office where Jenkins was already slumped down in the old leather chair.

  The boy was exhausted almost to the limit from the combined strain of the work and his own suppressed jitters, but he looked up in mild surprise as he felt the prick of the needle. Ferrel finished it, and used it on himself before explaining. “Morphine, of course. What else can we do? Just enough to keep us going, but without it we’ll both be useless out there in a few more hours. Anyhow, there isn’t as much reason not to use it as there was when I was younger, before the counter-agent was discovered to kill most of its habit-forming tendency. Even five years ago, before they had that, there were times when morphine was useful, Lord knows, though anyone who used it except as a last resort deserved all the hell he got. A real substitute for sleep would be better, though; wish they’d finish up the work they’re doing on that fatigue eliminator at Harvard. Here, eat that!”

  Jenkins grimaced at the breakfast Jones laid out in front of him, but he knew as well as Doc that the food was necessary, and he pulled the plate back to him. “What I’d give an eye tooth for, Doc, wouldn’t be a substitute—just half an hour of good old-fashioned sleep. Only, damn it, if I knew I had time, I couldn’t do it—not with R out there bubbling away.”

  The telephone annunciator clipped in before Doc could answer. “Telephone for Dr. Ferrel; emergency! Dr. Brown calling Dr. Ferrel!”

  “Ferrel answering!” The phone girl’s face popped off the screen, and a tired-faced Sue Brown looked out at them. “What is it?”

  It’s that little Japanese fellow—Hokusai—who’s been running things out here, Dr. Ferrel. I’m bringing him in with an acute case of appendicitis. Prepare surgery!”

  Jenkins gagged over the coffee he was trying to swallow, and his choking voice was halfway between disgust and hysterical laughter. “Appendicitis, Doc! My God, what comes next?”

  III

  It might have been worse. Brown had coupled in the little freezing unit on the litter and lowered the temperature around the abdomen, both preparing Hokusai for surgery and slowing down the progress of the infection so that the appendix was still unbroken when he was wheeled into the surgery. His seamed Oriental face had a grayish cast under the olive, but he managed a faint grin.

  “Verry ssorry, Dr. Ferrel, to bother you. Verry ssorry. No ether, pleasse!”

  Ferrel grunted. “No need of it, Hoke; we’ll use hypothermy, since it’s already begun. Over here, Jones… And you might as well go back and sit down, Jenkins.”

  Brown was washing, and popped out again, ready to assist with the operation. “He had to be tied down, practically, Dr. Ferrel. Insisted that he only needed a little mineral oil and some peppermint for his stomach-ache! Why are intelligent people always the most stupid?”

  It was a mystery to Ferrel, too, but seemingly the case. He tested the temperature quickly while the surgery hypothermy equipment began functioning, found it low enough, and began. Hoke flinched with his eyes as the scalpel touched him, then opened them in mild surprise at feeling no appreciable pain. The complete absence of nerve response with its accompanying freedom from post-operative shock was one of the great advantages of low-temperature work in surgery. Ferrel laid back the flesh, severed the appendix quickly, and removed it through the tiny incision. Then, with one of the numerous attachments, he made use of the ingenious mechanical stitcher and stepped back.

  “All finished, Hoke, and you’re lucky you didn’t rupture—peritonitis isn’t funny, even though we can cut down on it with the sulphonamides. The ward’s full, so’s the waiting room, so you’ll have to stay on the table for a few hours until we can find a place for you; no pretty nurse, either—until the two other girls get here some time this morning. I dunno what we’ll do about the patients.”

  “But, Dr. Ferrel, I am hear that now ssurgery—I sshould be up, already. There iss work I am do.”

  “You’ve been hearing that appendectomy patients aren’t confined now, eh? Well, that’s partly true, Johns Hopkins began it quite awhile ago. But for the next hour, while the temperature comes back to normal, you stay put. After that, if you want to move around a little, you can; but no going out to the converter. A little exercise probably helps more than it harms, but any strain wouldn’t be good.”

  “But, the danger—”

  “Be hanged, Hoke. You couldn’t help now, long enough to do any good. Until the stuff in those stitches dissolves away completely in the body fluids, you’re to take it easy—and that’s two weeks, about.”

  The little man gave in, reluctantly. “Then I think I ssleep now. But best you should call Mr. Palmer at once, pleasse! He musst know I am not there!”

  Palmer took the news the hard way, with an unfair but natural tendency to blame Hokusai and Ferrel. “Damn it, Doc, I was hoping he’d get things straightened out somehow—I practically promised the Governor that Hoke could take care of it; he’s got one of the best brains in the business. Now this! Well, no help, I guess. He certainly can’t do it unless he’s in condition to get right into things. Maybe Jorgenson, though, knows enough about it to handle it from a wheel chair, or something. How’s he coming along—in shape to be taken out where he can give directions to the foremen?”

  “Wait a minute.” Ferrel stopped him as quickly as he could. “Jorgenson isn’t here. We’ve got thirty-one men lying around, and he isn’t one of them; and if he’d been one of the seventeen dead, you’d know it. I didn’t know Jorgenson was working, even.”

  “He has to be—it was his process! Look, Ferrel, I was distinctly told that he was taken to you—foreman dumped him on the litter himself and reported at once! Better check up, and quick—with Hoke only half able, I’ve got to have Jorgenson!”

  “He isn’t here—I know Jorgenson. The foreman must have mistaken the big fellow from the south safety for him, but that man had black hair inside his helmet. What about the three hundred-odd that were only unconscious, or the fifteen-sixteen hundred men outside the converter when it happened?”

  Palmer wiggled his jaw muscles tensely. “Jorgenson would have reported or been reported fifty times. Every man out there wants him around to boss things. He’s gotta be in your ward.”

  “He isn’t, I tell you! And how about moving some of the fellows here into the city hospitals?”

  “Tried—hospitals must have been tipped off somehow about the radioactives in the flesh, and th
ey refuse to let a man from here be brought in.” Palmer was talking with only the surface of his mind, his cheek muscles bobbing as if he were chewing his thoughts and finding them tough. “Jorgenson—Hoke—and Kellar’s been dead for years. Not another man in the whole country that understands this field enough to make a decent guess, even; I get lost on Page 6 myself. Ferrel, could a man in a Tomlin five-shield armor suit make the safety in twenty seconds, do you think, from—say beside the converter?”

  Ferrel considered it rapidly. A Tomlin weighed about four hundred pounds, and Jorgenson was an ox of a man, but only human. “Under the stress of an emergency, it’s impossible to guess what a man can do, Palmer, but I don’t see how he could work his way half that distance.”

  “Hm-m-m, I figured. Could he live, then, supposing he wasn’t squashed? Those suits carry their own air for twenty-four hours, you know, to avoid any air cracks, pumping the carbon-dioxide back under pressure and condensing the moisture out—no openings of any kind. They’ve got the best insulation of all kinds we know, too.”

  “One chance in a billion, I’d guess; but again, it’s darned hard to put any exact limit on what can be done—miracles keep happening, every day. Going to try it?”

  “What else can I do? There’s no alternative. I’ll meet you outside No. 4 just as soon as you can make it, and bring everything you need to start working at once. Seconds may count!” Palmer’s face slid sideways and up as he was reaching for the button, and Ferrel wasted no time in imitating the motion.

  * * * *

  By all logic, there wasn’t a chance, even in a Tomlin. But, until they knew, the effort would have to be made; chances couldn’t be taken when a complicated process had gone out of control, with now almost certainty that Isotope R was the result— Palmer was concealing nothing, even though he had stated nothing specifically. And obviously, if Hoke couldn’t handle it, none of the men at other branches of National Atomic or at the smaller partially independent plants could make even a half-hearted stab at the job.