He didn’t get the chance to cudgel his brains over exactly how many years it was, because the PA system brayed, “Major O’Doull! Sergeant McDougald! Report at once to OR Three! Major O’Doull! Sergeant McDougald! Report at-”
“No rest for the wicked,” McDougald said.
“I thought that was ‘weary,’ ” O’Doull said.
“Works both ways, don’t you think?” McDougald was right about that, too.
They hastily scrubbed in and gowned and masked. Then they found what they were dealing with: a soldier who’d stepped on a mine. That was an even worse misfortune than it might have been, because the Confederates, or possibly the Devil, had come up with a new model. Instead of just exploding and blowing off a man’s foot or his leg, it bounced up to waist height and then burst… with the results they had in front of them.
The kid on the table was shrieking in spite of surely having had a morphine shot. He held his hands in front of his crotch like a maiden surprised, and wouldn’t move them no matter what. “My nuts!” he moaned. “It got my nuts!”
“You’re gonna be all right, son.” O’Doull feared he was lying through his teeth. He turned to McDougald and spoke in a quick, low voice: “Get him under.”
“Right, Doc.” In one swift, practiced motion, McDougald put the ether cone over the soldier’s face and turned the valve on the gas cylinder. The wounded man choked on the pungent fumes, but didn’t try to yank off the mask the way a lot of people did. His hands stayed right where they were till the ether got him and he went limp.
“Let’s see how bad it is,” O’Doull said grimly. Now he could move those blood-dripping hands. When he did, he wished he hadn’t. What he saw made him want to cover himself up the same way.
“How bad?” McDougald asked.
“Well, he won’t need to worry about getting a girl in trouble anymore-that’s for damn sure,” O’Doull answered. “I’ll see if I can put his dick back together well enough for him to piss through it. And he’s got some nasty belly wounds, too.”
“Remember we were talking about the Geneva Convention a while ago?” McDougald said as O’Doull, his mouth a tight line behind the mask, got to work.
“Yeah,” he answered absently, trimming mangled tissue as conservatively as he could. “What about it?”
“Nobody’d thought of Popping Paula back when they were hammering it out,” McDougald said. “Otherwise, it’d be on the list for sure.”
“It’s filthy, all right,” O’Doull agreed. “And you know what’s even worse? I bet you anything the engineer who came up with it got a bonus.”
“I won’t touch that,” McDougald said. “If you look at it the right way-or the wrong way, depending-it’s almost the perfect weapon. Who’d want to maybe trade his family jewels for a hundred-yard advance?”
“I’m just glad they don’t have many of those little toys here,” O’Doull said. “And we’ve got all their airstrips under our guns now, so they won’t be bringing in more.”
“Always parachute drops,” McDougald said helpfully. But there weren’t many of those anymore. Pittsburgh had cost the CSA a god-awful lot of transports. No more than a handful tried to make the trip these days; U.S. Wright fighters ruled the skies above western Pennsylvania.
Outside the hospital, the thunder of U.S. guns went on around the clock. O’Doull hardly noticed it. He might have looked up in surprise if it stopped. Incoming rounds were growing scarcer. That Confederate Army might have got into Pittsburgh. It didn’t look as if it would get out.
“How are you doing there?” McDougald asked after a while.
“Oh, he’ll live. I’m not so sure he’ll think that’s doing him a favor, though,” O’Doull said. “I think he’ll have a penis that works, even if he won’t get much fun out of it. I sure hope it works-otherwise, it’s catheter time.”
“Ouch.” McDougald winced. “Don’t even want to think about that.”
“It’s a bitch.” O’Doull used the smallest needles and finest catgut for his sutures. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done such delicate work. He wished he could have done more for the wounded soldier, but the essential parts were gone.
At last, the job was done. McDougald surveyed the site. “Well, I think you did about as much as anybody would have been able to,” he said.
“Yeah.” O’Doull gave back a somber nod. “I wish I could say more. I wish I had a drink, too.”
“Don’t blame you a bit. Why don’t you, once you get out of the OR?”
“When I come off, maybe I will,” O’Doull said. “Don’t want to do it now-odds are I’ll be operating again before long.”
“There is that,” McDougald allowed. “I’ll tell you something, though-I’ve known plenty of docs that wouldn’t have stopped for a second, let alone a minute. Some of the old-timers in the last war, the guys who’d been in the Army since 1880-hoo-boy!” He rolled his eyes.
“Yeah, I ran into some of those fellows, too,” O’Doull said. “This one surgeon named Schnitzler-I don’t think he drew a sober breath all the time I knew him. But put a wounded man in front of him and a scalpel in his hand and he’d do as good a job as anybody you’d ever want to meet. He could operate in his sleep. I think he did sometimes.”
“That’s the kind I mean,” McDougald said. “There’s the drunk who goes and drinks till he passes out. And then there’s the other kind, the guy who gets a buzz in the morning and stays buzzed all day long, and as long as he is, he’s fine.”
“Till his liver craps out on him, anyway,” O’Doull said.
“Oh, sure.” By the way McDougald said that, he took it for granted. “Of course, there are some of the first kind, too. Part of the way I learned surgery was when one of the docs who should have been doing it got too toasted to see, let alone operate. If I didn’t cut, this soldier was ruined for sure. If I did, maybe he had a chance. So I did, and he made it-and I thought, Son of a bitch! I can do this shit! I was hooked.”
“It grows on you, all right,” O’Doull agreed. “What happened to the drunken doctor?”
“He kept at it whenever he was sober enough to work,” McDougald answered. “After a while, people said I was doing better work than he was. I don’t know about that. He had the training, after all, and I was amateur city. But I sure was doing more work than he was, ’cause he got loaded more and more often.”
“They should have discharged the fool.” Though a Catholic, O’Doull had more than a little New England Puritan sternness in him.
Granville McDougald shook his head. “It was a war, Doc. If he was only a quarter of what he should have been, that was still a quarter of a surgeon more than they would have had if they canned him. Hell, he may be in the Army yet. He may be in the OR next door, for all I know.”
“He probably killed patients he should have saved,” O’Doull said.
“So have I,” McDougald said. He didn’t ask if O’Doull had. That was generous of him. Like any doctor, O’Doull had buried some of his mistakes. It came with being human. The most important thing was trying not to make the same mistake twice.
Hotel Street in Honolulu was a raucous, drunken place twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Sailors who had liberty got drunk and got laid, caring about nothing but the moment. George Enos, Jr., knew exactly how they felt. He should have-he was one of them.
He’d drunk enough to make the sidewalk seem to sway and twist under his feet like the Townsend’s deck in a heavy sea. But the pavement wasn’t listing-he was.
“Where do we go now?” he asked Fremont Dalby. He’d pretty much given up thinking on his own. If the gun chief could manage it, George would follow along.
Dalby made a production out of pondering. He’d taken plenty of antifreeze on board, too. “Well, do we want to drink some more, or do we want to screw?” he asked.
George frowned. He didn’t want to decide anything. He wasn’t sure he could decide anything. Fritz Gustafson settled things by walking through the next open door they passed.