“Have you looked there?” Miriam pointed to the cupboard above head height at the back of the surgery.
“Not yet.”
“Well, do so.” She disappeared back into the ward leaving him to open the cupboard and extract the special blankets he found. Angrily he took out all there were, carried them into the ward, and dumped them at the foot of the bed. Perspiration was glistening on McPrince’s forehead; her eyes were closed.
“Look, she’s hot,” said Bellini truculently.
“She’s not. She’s frozen — shivering,” hissed Miriam. Carefully she covered McPrince with blankets while Bellini wandered round the small dimly lit room wondering what to do. He couldn’t believe that they were the only people alive on the Mayburg, but neither could he account for the absence of traffic in the corridor outside.
There remained a cold fantasy in his mind that he, Miriam and McPrince were speeding towards Mars in a giant coffin without food and with air slowly bleeding away until eventually they would join the rest of the ghosts patrolling the ship. Bellini was a great believer in ghosts. In his short life he had seen them, heard them and experienced them. He was an imaginative youth, very romantic, very emotional, and a believer in everything he read. He was religious, he believed in the existence of evil spirits and ghosts; in free love and also in the beauty of one and only true love; he was a fervent Marxist, a democrat, and a Royalist; anything that could be presented to him persuasively he was.
Bellini was young, and full to the brim with the thrust of life and he went wherever it pushed him. His imagination began to give him pictures of Captain Able sitting at the ship’s control desk his dead finger pressed on the ‘drive’ button and his dead eyes staring blindly at the ever enlarging sphere of Mars on the screen. He saw, too, the passenger lounge full of decoratively sprawled young ladies all dead. His young spirit insisted he do something, and yet he was afraid of the death that waited outside the door.
He struck the wall nearest him a blow with the ball of his hand (not his fist) and then rushed back into the surgery, found some more steel rods, and began hammering again at the door.
The noise roused McPrince and she groaned at the pain her involuntary movement caused. She looked into Miriam’s face hovering above her,
“My arm,” she said, “You must set it.”
Miriam drew away in horror. “Oh, no.” she breathed, “I couldn’t. It would hurt you.”
McPrince screwed her face up to fight a scream of pain and exasperation, “Don’t be foolish, girl. I’ll tell you how to do it,” She panted a little and then carefully moved her good arm across until she touched the broken arm. Slowly, with several winces she felt her way up the limb. “It’s the humerus. That’s easy. A light local. Some splints. I’ll do it myself.”
Miriam did not move.
“Get the splints,” repeated McPrince tiredly. “You’ll find them in cupboard number three.” And when Miriam slowly turned towards the door, “And bring me the hypogun…and the box of ampoules with it.” She was so exhausted she could not have said more even if Miriam had refused to go. She had completely forgotten her plan to fake an accident to herself. The irony was lost on her.
Her thoughts wavered like mirages, fading in and out of her control. How had her arm broken? What was the hole in the ward wall? Who was this steward? Why was he here? It was too much for her bruised head to hold and she lost hold of reasoning until a voice penetrated her awareness: “Are these them?” She opened her eyes. Miriam was holding up three very bent splint rods. McPrince gaped.
“They’re bent!” she whispered.
“Yes. Tony used them to hit the door.”
“Hit.…” Once again the strength to follow a line of thought failed her.
Miriam held up the hypogun. “Is this it?”
“Yes.” Miriam slanted a box of plastic bullets. “And these?” McPrince roused.
“Let me see.” She forced her head off the pillow and examined the lines of tubes. Slowly her good hand came up and she pointed to one tube. “This one, Load the gun.” She subsided; she looked asleep.
Miriam extracted the little tube and then took up the gun. Fearfully she Examined it, her first reaction being to ask Bellini to load it, but then recollection of his sulky-boy’s face stopped her and determinedly she turned the thing round and round pressing and pulling its parts. A panel above the trigger popped open and disclosed a cut-away section of tube that obviously fitted the bullet. Carefully she slipped the bullet in and closed the panel. Now what? The splints. She took them into the surgery and showed them to Bellini.
“These are no good. You’ve bent them—”
“No good for what?”
“As splints. They should be straight — you’ll have to bend them straight again.”
“They’re steel!” he expostulated. “I can’t bend steel.”
“You bent them once — now unbend them!”
He laughed caustically. “That’s different. It’s one thing to put a random bend in rods like these, it’s another to get it out again unless you’ve got a vice and tools. Women don’t understand things like that.” He laughed again.
“I understand that she’s got a broken arm and unless we set it and splint it for her she’s going to be in agony and finish up with a useless arm. Well, if you can’t straighten those we’ll have to find something else,”
“What?” asked Bellini unhelpfully. He stood looking at her with a slight smile, almost a sneer, on his lips.
“Anything straight,” she said,
He took something from his pocket and held it up. “Like this pencil?”
Instant rage hit her. She struck the pencil from his hand with one swinger and followed it up with a swinger from the opposite direction, He staggered and sat down with a thump.
“Get up you useless weed,” she screamed at him, “Get up and do something.” She assisted him with a kick to his left thigh. “Make a splint or I’ll bend this straight over your head.” She held one of the steel rods high over him, murder in her eyes.
“Don’t!” he gasped. He scrambled away from her like a crab and then ran to the other end of the room, “You’ve gone mad!” he shouted back. “How did I know what they were? You’re bloody mad!”
She ran two steps towards him with the steel rod back behind her head ready to smash his brains.
“All right. All right!” he shouted. “I’ll find something, Put that thing down.”
Satisfied, she turned back but she was panting with the effort she had expended. In the ward she bent over McPrince. “Are you warmer?”
McPrince nodded.
“Tell me what I have to do.”
McPrince’s shapely face was haggard. She breathed rapidly and shallowly, making a great effort to rally her thoughts.
“When you have the splints ready shoot me with the gun. I will show you where. Then I will position the bones. Then you must bind the splints to the arm and then to my body. That is all.”
“Will it hurt you?”
“Not much.”
Miriam studied the tired face and softly wiped away perspiration. “Is there anything I can give you for the shock?” she murmured. “Something to make you sleep?”
“Afterwards,” answered McPrince. She lifted her head slightly. “What is he doing? Where are the splints? What is happening?”
In one determined, sinuous movement Miriam was off the side of the bed and at the ward door. Bellini had taken a sliding door from one of the cupboards and was trying to break it into strips. His teeth were bared in manic frustration at the toughness of the plastic. He threw it on the floor and stamped on it, and when he saw her looking at him he gave a gurgle close to tears, picked up the door and hurled it across the room. Bottles and beakers crashed and bounced on the floor.