"Well, I haven't had time yet to really study his skeleton, but…"
"Better take a week off and study it. I've studied a lot of people in the last sixtyfive years, and I'll match my experience against your knowledge of bones, any time. Not saying that he will fall this trip, you understand—just playing safe."
18: Advanced Training
Kinnison came to—or, rather, to say that he came half–to would be a more accurate statement—with a yell directed at the blurrily–seen figure in white which he knew must be a nurse.
"Nurse!" Then, as a searing stab of pain shot through him at the effort, he went on, thinking at the figure in white through his Lens.
"My speedster! I must have landed her free! Get the space–port…"
"There, there, Lensman," a low, rich voice crooned, and a red head bent over him. "The speedster has been taken care of. Everything Is on the green, go to sleep and rest' "Never mind your ship," the unctuous voice went on. "It was landed and put away…"
"Listen, dumb–bell!" snapped the patient, speaking aloud now, in spite of the pain, the better to drive home his meaning. "Don't try to soothe met What do you think I am, delirious? Get this and get it straight I said I landed that speedster free. If you don't know what that means, tell somebody that does. Get the space–port—get Haynes—get…"
"We got them, Lensman, long ago.' Although her voice was still creamily, sweetly sofa, an angry color burned into the nurse's face. "I said everything is on zero. Your speedster was inserted, how else could you be here, inert? I helped do it myself, so I know she's inert'
"QX." The patient relapsed instantly into unconsciousness and the nurse turned to an interne standing by—wherever that nurse was, at least one doctor could almost always be found.
"But my ship…"
"Dumb–bell" she flared. "What a sweet mess he's going to be to take care of I Not even conscious yet, and he's calling names and picking fights already!"
In a few days Kinnison was fully and alertly conscious. In a week most of the pain had left him, and he was beginning to chafe under restraint In ten days he was "fit to be tied," and his acquaintance with his head nurse, so inauspiciously begun, developed even more inauspiciously as time went on. For, as Haynes and Lacy had each more than anticipated, the Lensman was by no means an ideal patient.
Nothing that could be done would satisfy him. All doctors were fat–heads, even Lacy, the man who had put him together. All nurses were dumb–bells, even—or especially? "Mac," who with almost superhuman skill, tact, and patience had been holding him together. Why, even fat–heads and dumb–bells, even high–grade morons, ought to know that a man needed food!
Accustomed to eating everything he could reach, three or four or five times a day, he did not realize—nor did his stomach—that his now quiescent body could no longer use the five thousand or more calories that it had been wont to burn up, each twentyfour hours, in intense effort He was always hungry, and he was forever demanding food.
And food, to him, did not mean orange juice or grape juice or tomato juice or milk. Nor did it mean weak tea and hard, dry toast and an occasional anemic softboiled egg. If he ate eggs at all be wanted them fried, three or four of them, accompanied by two or three thick slices of ham.
He wanted—and demanded in no uncertain terms, argumentatively and persistently—a big, thick, rare beefsteak. He wanted baked beans, with plenty of fat pork. He wanted bread in thick slices, piled high with butter, and not this quadruply—and unmentionably—qualified toast. He wanted roast beef, rare, in big, thick slabs. He wanted potatoes and thick brown gravy. He wanted corned beef and cabbage. He wanted pie—any kind of pie—in large, thick quarters. He wanted peas and corn and asparagus and cucumbers, and also various other– worldly staples of diet which he often and insistently mentioned by name.
But above all he wanted beefsteak. He thought about it days and dreamed about it nights. One night in particular he dreamed about it—an especially luscious porterhouse, fried in butter and smothered in mushrooms—only to wake up, mouth watering, literally starved, to face again the weak tea, dry toast, and, horror of horrors, this time a flabby, pallid, flaccid poached egg! It was the last straw.
"Take it away," he said, weakly, then, when the nurse did not obey, he reached out and pushed the breakfast, tray and all, off the table. Then, as it crashed to the floor, he turned away, and, in spite of all his efforts, two hot tears forced themselves between his eyelids.
It was a particularly trying ordeal, and one requiring all of even Mac's skill, diplomacy, and forbearance, to male the recalcitrant patient eat the breakfast prescribed for him. She was finally successful, however, and as she stepped out into the corridor she met the ubiquitous interns.
"How's your Lensman?" he asked, in the privacy of the diet kitchen.
"Don't call him my Lensman!" she stormed. She was about to explode with the pent–up feelings which she of course could not vent upon such a pitiful, helpless thing as her star patient. "Beefsteak! I almost wish they would give him a beefsteak, and that he'd choke on it—which of course he would. He's worse than a baby. I never saw such a…such a brat in my life. I'd like to spank him—he needs it. I'd like to know how he ever got to be a Lensman, the big cantankerous clunker! I'm going to spank him, too, one of these days, see if I don't!"
"Don't take it so hard, Mac," the interns urged. He was, however, very much relieved that relations between the handsome young Lensman and the gorgeous redhead were not upon a more cordial basis. "He won't be here very long. But I never saw a patient clog your jets before."
"You probably never saw a patient like him before, either. I certainly hope he never gets cracked up again."
"Huh?"
"Do I have to draw you a chart?" she asked, sweetly. "Or, if he does get cracked up again, I hope they send him to some other hospital," and she flounced out.
Nurse MacDougall thought that when the Lensman could eat the meat he craved her troubles would be over, but she was mistaken. Kinnison was nervous, moody, brooding, by turns irritable, sullen, and pugnacious. Nor is it to be wondered at. He was chained to that bed, and in his mind was the gnawing consciousness that he had failed. And not only failed—he had made a complete fool of himself. He had underestimated an enemy, and as a result of his own stupidity the whole Patrol had taken a setback. He was anguished and tormented. Therefore.
"Listen, Mac," he pleaded one day. "Bring me some clothes and let me take a walk. I need exercise."
"Uh uh, Kim, not yet," she denied him gently, but with her entrancing smile in full evidence. "But pretty quick, when that leg looks a little less like a Chinese puzzle, you and nursie go bye–bye."
"Beautiful, but dumb!" the Lensman growled. "Can't you and those cockeyed croakers realize that I'll never get any strength back if .you keep me in bed all the rest of my life? And don't talk baby–talk at me, either. I'm well enough at least so you can wipe that professional smile off your pan and cut that soothing bedside manner of yours."
"Very well—I think so, too!" she snapped, patience at long last gone. "Somebody should tell you the truth. I always supposed that Lensmen had to have brains, but you've been a perfect brat ever since you've been here. First you wanted to eat yourself sick, and now you want to get up, with bones half–knit and burns half–healed, and undo everything that has been done for you. Why don't you snap out of it and act your age for a change?"
"I never did think nurses had much sense, and now I know they haven't." Kinnison eyed her with intense disfavor, not at all convinced. "I'm not talking about going back to work. I mean a little gentle exercise, and I know what I need."