What was a whole lot worse than humbling was the thought that maybe if Bernie had known what he was doing he might have been able to save the kid and who knew how many others. Maybe he wouldn’t have, but he didn’t know enough even to figure out what the disease was. Maybe cholera? He thought he’d read somewhere that cholera had something to do with diarrhea and most everyone who had this had that.
The street was muddy and there was a bit of a taint to the air. Not just from the house where the boy was. Suddenly Bernie remembered a cartoon he’d seen somewhere with this cowboy apologizing to his horse as he hammered a cork into the horse ass. Something about an EPA regulation. That’s what he was smelling. Not really a barnyard smell. Not quite. An outhouse smell, that was it. The whole city of Moscow smelled faintly of outhouse. The problem was that Bernie didn’t know if it meant anything. He just didn’t know.
“Okay, asshole,” Bernie muttered to himself. “What do you know? You must know something that will help.”
There was one thing that he was pretty sure of. Bleeding didn’t actually help any disease he’d ever heard of. Maybe gangrene or something like that, but not an illness. He waved at one of the guards. “Listen, Pavel, I don’t know all that much about medicine but this much I do know. In my time we’ve known for centuries that bleeding people who are sick doesn’t help. I’ll write Prince Vladimir for confirmation, but I’m not waiting for an answer. The next time I see one of these guys bleeding someone with this, I’m going to bleed them. Cut their throat from ear-to-ear and bleed them right out.” Bernie looked Pavel dead in the eye and Pavel went a little pale.
Then Bernie continued. “I know it’s not their fault. Doctors were still bleeding people in the Revolutionary War and that’s like 1776. But it doesn’t work! And it makes the patient weaker, more likely to die. If I have to take down a few of these guys to make it stop, I’m still saving lives.”
Well, Bernie was in it now. He’d made his first medical pronouncement and it was a doozie. He knew that he wasn’t going to be able to leave it at that.
In all the doctor shows back up-time, the doctors wore masks when they were doing surgery and he knew that when there was fear of an epidemic in places like Japan sometimes people wore masks. He knew that that was because some diseases were transmitted by air, by people sneezing on each other or even breathing on each other. Was this disease like that? Bernie didn’t know. He knew that in hospitals and restaurants they were fussy about washing your hands. And he remembered something about childbed fever being carried by doctors who didn’t wash their hands. Besides, all the hospital shows always had doctors and nurses washing their hands and wearing rubber gloves before and after they treated anyone. If the masks didn’t help, washing hands might. Or the other way around. Maybe if he could get people to do both it might help keep this sickness from spreading.
Bernie started improvising. He sent one of the guards back to the Dacha to get anything they had on diagnosing disease. And while they were there, to pick up Anatoly Fedorov, the apothecary and Vitaly Alexseev, the barber-surgeon, who were staying at the Dacha.
It turned out that there was almost nothing in the Dacha about diagnosing or treating disease. However, Anatoly and Vitaly had known Bernie for months by now and had talked to him before about up-time medical and sanitary practices. So while they weren’t entirely convinced of the importance of such things, they had at least been exposed to the germ theory of disease. They’d even seen a couple of pictures of cells. Not photographs, but drawings copied from up-time books.
It was in their interest that the up-time techniques worked. It would give them an advantage over their competitors. This, it seemed, would make a decent test case. So they supported Bernie’s recommendations. For the next weeks Bernie, the guards, and the medical community, such as it was in seventeenth-century Moscow, fought a holding action against an enemy everyone except Bernie knew too well. Bernie worked as hard as anyone and in the process got up close and personal with the grinding poverty and squalor of seventeenth-century Russia.
Were they successful? Who could say? The annual spring epidemic of typhoid fever was less severe in 1632 than it had been in 1631. Fewer people caught it and fewer of those who caught it died.
The reason for fewer deaths could have been the washing of the hands. It could have been the masks. And it could have been the boiled water with a touch of salt and sugar that Bernie called Gatorade that they gave to the sick to try to stave off dehydration. It could be those things made a difference. It could also be the placebo effect of Bernie’s masks and his being an up-timer touched by God. Or it might have just been a mild year.
The little boy died barely a day into the fight. But, though he would never know it, he left a legacy for Russia. By the time Bernie returned to the Dacha he knew that his getting it right made a difference. That difference was the difference between life and death. Not just for little kids who might catch a disease but for thousands of other kids and adults. Kids who would go hungry without better plows, or better crops. Craftsmen who couldn’t get their goods to market without better roads. What had been a job for Bernie Zeppi had become a calling.
Chapter 18
May 1632
Bernie missed the progress meeting where Andrei Korisov announced the AK1. He was still in Moscow. Andrei didn’t let Bernie’s absence slow him down in the least. He didn’t believe that Bernie either needed, or deserved, much of the credit. “There is some loss of force from the gap between the firing chamber and the barrel, but surprisingly little. And a shield to protect the stock from outgassing must be installed. There is some danger from outgassing, but, again, the shield, plus moderate care, should avoid any serious problems?”
Natasha didn’t scream at the man. Four of the servants in the Dacha had been debilitated by the squirts of gas from the gap between firing chamber and the barrel, and one poor lad had been killed when the firing chamber had broken though the stock and hit him in the head. What she really wanted to do was have Andrei Korisov shot with his own gun, but she couldn’t. He was a deti boyar, and one of Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev’s at that. It was early days yet, but Sheremetev was starting to get interested in the Dacha and what it was producing.
She wanted Andrei Korisov out of the Dacha, but she couldn’t do it by punishing him for the people his experiments had hurt. Suddenly, she knew what to do. Vladimir had friends in the army and so did Boris. Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev was arguing that the arming of Russia shouldn’t be left in the Dacha, and he probably already had the full particulars about Andrei Korisov’s cut-up gun. In a few weeks, she would make a trip to Moscow, visit some of Vladimir’s friends in the army and, perhaps, Boris. Meanwhile, she held her face steady while Andrei Korisov gloated over his new toy.
Then she went on to the next person.
“I’ve produced electrical sparks, miniature lightnings,” Lazar Smirnov said. “But I can’t tell yet if they are producing the electromagnetic waves the papers talk about. I’ve made a crystal radio set, but I have no way of telling if it works. Certainly, one of them doesn’t, because the sparks aren’t making the crystal set make noise, which, if I’m reading all this right, it should.”
“What about the heating units?” Natasha asked.
“I think they’re too big for the batteries, Princess,” Lazar said. “I’ll know more when Bernie gets back and translates these pamphlets for me.”
The princess looked over at Filip, knowing what he was going to say.