“Every day?” confirmed the doctor. “Without fail?”
“E’ery ’ay,” insisted the sailor.
“I cannot cure your ailment if you lie to me.”
“E’ery ’ay, ’oc!” the sailor emphatically repeated.
The doctor issued a wheezing, skeptical harrumph through pursed lips as he further probed the bloody mouth. The wooden depressor easily bruised the irritated, spongy gums. A single hair drifted from the midshipman’s scalp and slowly pinwheeled onto the examination table.
“And your excrement?” asked the doctor, withdrawing the tongue depressor.
“Loose, I think,” said the midshipman. “But I don’t look at it after.”
“Check it,” said the doctor. “Tell me what you see. Better still, leave it in the bowl and summon me.”
“Yes, Herr Doctor,” said the midshipman, knowing full well the action would announce his difficulties to the rest of the tightly-quartered crew and invite open ridicule. Life on board a Kriegsmarine underseebooten was difficult, the misery of others often the only entertainment, anything to distract from the ever-present specter of death.
The doctor shook his head. The boy must be lying or confused. The cause: scurvy, or some other nutritional deficit. Maybe the vitamins they took on in Norway were contaminated or otherwise lacking — perhaps even sabotaged. Even the most determined propaganda couldn’t mask the havoc American and British advances wreaked with German supply chains and the increasingly inconsistent and slipshod quality of German manufacture, to say nothing about the darkening disposition of the conquered races on which the war effort relied.
“Very well,” sighed the doctor, scribbling a short note to check in on the young man in a few hours’ time. It wouldn’t do to keep him longer; the cause of the strange ailment remained elusive for now. Best to find him after his duty shift and probe further. “Where is your bunk?”
“I’m not supposed to say,” said the sailor.
The doctor gritted his teeth. More foolishness, maddeningly expected. “Midshipman,” he said, “do not be a horse’s ass.”
“I bunk in the aft torpedo room,” said the young man, and then stole a look back and forth, as though anyone larger than a footstool could have stowed away in the tiny compartment. He continued his statement with a whisper. “On top of the ray gun.”
“The what?” asked the doctor, genuinely baffled by this new nonsense.
“You know we have no torpedoes in the torpedo room,” said the sailor. “Left ’em back in Trondheim before our departure for Japan. Couldn’t take them, see? We needed space for all the… um… special crates.”
Doctor Goering nodded. He’d seen the boxes — radar detectors, prototype rifles, aviation turbine engines, technical plans, and similar marvels. The cargos were the best technologies that Reich scientists could offer, only to be born away from Fatherland soil for use by the Asiatics. It was all luftschloss to the doctor. Castles in the sky. The idea that the massing mongrel hordes of America and Australia could be turned back by a single, yellow race armed with German-made x-ray guns and jet planes.
“So?” asked the doctor.
“I’m sleeping on top of a ray gun,” said the midshipman. “It has to be the cause of everything! What else could cause my sickness? No one else is afflicted! Marvelous, no? If this happens when one merely sleeps upon the weapon, just imagine it discharged upon the Americans! We could roast entire divisions where they stand!”
Carried away by his own mirth, the midshipman made a few imbecilic zapping noises toward imagined enemy troops, until finally, he was silenced by the doctor’s profound lack of corresponding amusement.
“You’re dismissed,” said the doctor. “I will call on you in a few hours. Do you remember what I said?”
“Continue taking my vitamins,” said the sailor glumly, unhappy that his pet theory had not gained traction with the doctor.
“And?”
“Keep my scheisse in the bowl until you inspect it.”
“Dismissed,” said the doctor, shepherding the sailor out of the medical cabin. For a moment, he stood leaning out into the main corridor, the hollow spine of the submarine connecting every compartment. Diesel and grease-stained men shuffled their way through net-hung fruits and breads, passing each other in the cramped quarters with silent familiarity, moving with the eerie synchronicity of scavenging ants.
The doctor adjusted his uniform and walked the three meters to the captain’s quarters, doffing his hat as he knocked at the door to the cabin that doubled as the armory.
“Kommen,” came a familiar voice from the other side of the thin wooden door. Captain Duckwitz needed not request the identity of the knocker — only one of the top lieutenants, chief engineer, or the doctor himself would ever consider interrupting the captain in his private quarters.
Doctor Goering pressed open the door, stepped inside, and latched it behind him. The captain, with rows of Mauser pistols and rifles, signal guns, hand grenades, and several matte-black MP40 submachine guns racked behind him, looked up from a handwritten letter, his weary grey eyes meeting the gaze of the ship’s doctor. Two Japanese katana swords hung from the rack as well, conspicuous and out-of-place amongst the futuristic weapons.
Captain Duckwitz was just twenty-eight, too young for his authoritative mannerisms and steely bearing, too young for the weight of responsibility or the wrinkles around the corners of his unusual eyes. The doctor’s daughter had expressed genuine horror upon finding the captain’s tender age — how can a man not yet thirty, not yet married and with no children even contemplate the rigors of command? But in these waning days of the kreigsmarine, command was earned through survival. Survival through hard-won skill and wily intelligence, and in Duckwitz’s case, ably demonstrated over three bitterly-fought tours.
“What can I do for you, my learned friend?” asked the captain with a wry, gravelly voice as he gestured the doctor to sit on the edge of the bunk beside the desk. Doctor Oskar Goering smiled, but did not sit.
It was true, at least part of the statement — they were indeed friends. Doctor Goering found himself in the rare position as the one man in Kapitanleutnant Duckwitz’s command with near total autonomy, a position that allowed him to become the captain’s foil and confidant. Mutual trust allowed forbidden discussions on the increasingly erratic instructions from German High Command, the confusing, divergent orders, collapsing morale, and the unimaginable implications of national surrender.
“It may be the usual malingering,” grumbled the doctor. “But two of the crew have been afflicted by a strange illness originating from the aft torpedo room.”
The handsome captain nodded, his grey eyes piercing the wall of his quarters. He ran a hand through his brown hair — hair too long for regulations — as he considered the statement. The doctor noticed the captain’s hand absent-mindedly tapping a single folded letter bearing a decryption stamp from the radio officer. Another coded communication from the Fatherland — what new and futile insanity could this one demand?
“Is this a bad time?” asked the doctor, noticing the captain’s distraction.
“For Germany perhaps,” said the captain. “We live in difficult days. But you are always welcome in my quarters. I take it you have never seen this affliction previously?”
“I have not,” said the doctor. “But diseases manifest themselves differently in every man. There is no reason to assume it is new or unknown.”
“If it is new and you are the discoverer, it must bear your name,” mused the captain. “They’ll call it Oskar Goering’s disease.”