“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. And 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?”
3
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 patient 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 besst you sshould call Mr. Palmer at once, please! 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 had 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!”