Reluctantly she stepped forward, and feeling more ridiculous than she had since a lowly intern, she put her hand on O'Hara's broad forehead.
"Is that all you did?" Brandeis asked superciliously, with a tolerant smile to the others when there was no patient reaction.
Bardie fought a desire to turn and run. Grimly she replaced her hand and honestly duplicated the incident. "Roger O'Hara! Roger!" She let her fingers drift backward from his forehead to his crisp, curly hair, then down the side of his face. When the faint smile again touched his lips, she didn't know if she was pleased or if she'd prefer the deck to open up and swallow her. But an experiment was an experiment. "Roger, wakey-wakey, lad." And once again the brows moved into the most imperceptible of frowns as his head inched away from her. "I know you're in there. Open up!" Bardie paused, cleared her throat. "At least, that's about what I said."
There was a long and embarrassing pause as her colleagues absorbed action and reaction.
"And that's all you did?" Brandeis asked, frowning.
Bardie contented herself with a noncommittal nod, recovering her professional poise.
"That's more response than any one else has had," the duty nurse said approvingly. Bardie's collar alarm burred quietly. "My shift. Doctors. Excuse me." She was out of the bay as fast as was dignified.
Most of the casualties she and Jessup attended that shift were fairly routine: amputations, the savage lacerations of the latest Khalian mankind-mangler. There was satisfaction in saving all the lives, but Bardie suffered from a most insistent hallucination: O'Hara's smile on nearly every patient.
At the end of her shift, she went back to bay 22, bed 4 and read the latest chart entries. Technically Roger O'Hara had not regained consciousness. There was no one else in the bay. Feeling decidedly self-conscious, Bardie stroked his forehead, entangling his curls in her fingers, then let her fingers ride down the side of his face. The faint smile appeared,
"Roger," she said softly, caressingly, "you're in there. Please don't keep hiding. It's all right to wake up. You're in your own body. We're not allowed to disembody you, you know. That's why you have the option. But you're all right. Really, you are! You're still in one piece and recovering far better than could be expected."
She repeated the caress and he stirred, a deep "mmmm" starting in his throat, as he licked his lips.
"Thataboy, Roger." She dipped her fingers in the water glass and passed it across his lips, which surprisingly were not as dry as they ought to be. "C'mon, Roger. Wake up." Again the frown. "Don't want to wake up, do you? Well, it's okay to. You'll be just fine. Only wake up. I think Brandeis has some ideas about you, flyboy, that you wouldn't like at all. So I really do advise you to wake up." The frown was deeper, Roger's head turned as if resisting the request. "Do it for me, will you, Roger? Wake up for Bardie, will you?" She smoothed his hair back, fondling it, testing its softness and the way it curled tightly about her finger. "You're some mother's son, Roger. C'mon, sweetheart, open your eyes!" She made her tone wheedlingly loving. The eyelids trembled and the muscles in his cheeks and temples moved. "It's really okay to wake up, Roger."
She chuckled. "You sure don't like that word, do you?" The frown obediently appeared but it was deeper now. "I wonder why. The call to duty, or merely back to life again. A guy who looks like you wouldn't have much trouble with life. And you'll be out of this war - that is, if you decide to… rouse!" She grinned as she substituted a synonym. Then, out of pure mischief, remembering what Jessup had originally called him, she bent forward, "Roger, Sleeping Beauty," and kissed him on the lips.
Simultaneously she heard movement just beyond her and saw his eyelids flutter open, blinking wildly to focus. She slipped from the bed and out of the bay before she could be hailed. Safely back in her cubicle, she dialed up bay 22, bed 4 and saw the alert readings of the alpha waves. Sleeping Beauty had awakened.
She got her wish to be so busy in the final days of her contract that she had no time to think beyond the moment's work. She woke that last morning on the Elizabeth Blackwell with a feeling of such intense relief that she had survived her two years that she was almost in tears. To restore her composure, she used her entire day's water ration in the shower and shampooed her hair, blowing it dry and attempting to style it as a going-home preparation. She dressed in the smart unitunic, tight-fitting pants, and boots, clothes she hadn't worn during her entire tour of duty. She even put on a touch of the scent that had lain unused on the shelf of her locker. Then she stuffed a clean shipsuit and briefs into her bag and the few personal things she'd been allowed to bring, and that was that.
"Hey, dress blues match your eyes. Nice!" Nellie said, widening her eyes appreciatively when she walked into the wardroom. Two of the other off-duty surgeons accorded her a long whistle before they served her the traditional farewell jigger of fleetjuice.
There were some letters consigned to her to bring home. Then Bardie left a good-bye message on the wardroom screen for the rest of her MASH friends before it was time to take the shuttle that would bring her on the first leg of her homeward journey. Nellie insisted on going with her to the air lock.
"Oh, Stitches, I'll never have another as good as you, I'm sure I won't," Nellie said, unexpectedly sobbing in their farewell embrace.
Bardie held her off, rather chuffed that the case-hardened nurse had such a sentimental streak. "How many surgeons have you survived so far, Nellie?"
"It doesn't matter," Nellie said, gulping. "It's you I'll miss."
"Not if the next one is handsome!"
"Speaking of," Nellie said, her sobs miraculously staunched as she looked down the ramp, "here's Sleeping Beauty himself!"
Bardie cast a glance over her shoulder and saw, in the stream of wounded being evacuated on this shuttle, Lt. Roger Elliott Christopher O'Hara on an antigrav seat being guided by Naffie, who was chatting affably to his charge. The pilot wore a pleasant enough expression but the slight furrow to his brows indicated more tolerance than interest. So he hadn't been one for Naffie after all. Awake, though still semirecumbent, and responding, Roger O'Hara was really too good-looking for anyone's peace of mind. And his hair curled outrageously over a still-pale face.
"Amazing recovery," Nellie went on. "Brandeis had hoped to make him a special study case. I heard he woke up the moment he found out."
Bardie hurried the good-byes as much as she could, wanting somehow to get aboard the shuttle before Roger arrived at the air lock. She succeeded, wondering during the takeoff procedures why she had run like a startled virgin at the sight of him.
Her reaction puzzled her all through the long, boring run to the relief vessel. Then, just as the shuttle locked on to the mother hospital ship, she realized what had startled her: of all the men and women she had operated on, Lt. Roger O'Hara was the only one whose face she recognized. And it hadn't that much to do with the Sleeping Beauty aspect of their patient-doctor relationship. She did ward rounds frequently enough, but the patients were bay and bed numbers, wound descriptions, severity categories that she forgot as soon as she moved on to the next wounded body. And it couldn't have anything to do with kissing the man, or his startling return to consciousness as a result of that method of resuscitation. It certainly couldn't have anything to do with him being a sleeping beauty, a frog prince, or a humpty-dumpty.
Fortunately the usual well-organized confusion as the wounded were the first to be disembarked broke into that remarkable revelation. Bardie caught a brief glimpse of O'Hara being air-cushioned out, his eyes closed. She wondered briefly if he'd made the trip all right: two weeks was not long enough to mend his desperate wounds.