By the time they were done, poor Wallenstein was exhausted and more than willing to go back to his bed while Tom and George “consulted” and “made their calculations and charts” to present to him the following day.
In reality they went back to the Roths’, and Tom holed up with the radio and the closely-written pages of notes, consulting not with the stars, but with Dr. Nichols back in Magdeburg. Some things were obvious-Wallenstein had gout, for instance, a common complaint among nobles whose diets were worse than any American teenager who lived on fast food. His heart was definitely dodgy. By process of elimination, they figured he had a chronic infection somewhere.
“The heart’s going to kill him eventually,” Nichols said, “I’d say three, four years.” Tom clearly heard the frustration in Nichols’ voice, and he sympathized. Things that could have been treated with a couple generic prescriptions up-time were deadly now, and sometimes he could tell it grated on the Doc that Tom often knew more about what worked in the here and now than he did, with all of his experience and medical knowledge. “But you’ve got foxglove to keep him going, and the point is mostly to get the baby past the danger zone of infancy, according to Mike and Ed.”
“We can improve his diet some, if I put enough mystical spin on it. Garlic and kelp might clear up that infection, especially if it’s his tonsils; heck, I know I can make a Lister’s Fluid he can gargle with. Or if it’s in an infected tooth, maybe Edith can get him to get the tooth pulled.” Tom rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. “I’ll see what I can figure out. He’s a tough old bastard, and he might surprise us. Look how long Henry the Eighth lasted, and he not only had a lot of the same problems, he had an abscessed leg too.”
“I hate this,” Nichols said, after a long pause. “I hate knowing that I know what to do, if only I had a modern operating theater, if only I had the right drugs, if only-”
“Don’t beat yourself up, Doc,” Tom interrupted. “Look at it this way. You and me, we’re still managing to save people no one down-time could before.” He said that, and he knew as he said it that it wouldn’t help much. Nichols was a real doctor; he had never been in medicine for the money, but because medicine was his calling. “And have patience. We’re getting antibiotics. We’ve got chloramphenicol and even some small amounts of penicillin. We’ll get there.”
“Providing quacks like Gribbleflotz don’t kill them first,” Doc said sourly. “All right, I’ve used up my allotted time. Good luck.”
Tom didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye; the voice of someone else, calling another station, immediately filled the speakers. He turned off the set, gathered up his notes, and headed for bed. Enough for now; tomorrow they’d start treatments and see if their guesses were going to work.
The treatments had begun to work. Tom really had not expected such a quick result, but already Wallenstein’s color was better, his breathing had eased thanks to the rosemary-infused steam he was inhaling, and Tom thought his BP might be going down. That might have been partly the placebo effect, partly the effect of just getting some of the king’s other conditions under control.
Whatever, there was progress, and it was beginning to look as if he and George would be able to go back to Grantville and leave things in Edith’s hands.
Which was, of course, the moment when everything went pear-shaped.
“I’m going to kill him,” George said for the fifty-sixth time. “I am going to mug Gribbleflotz in a dark alley, tear out his liver, and feed it to him.”
Dr. Gribbleflotz had been closeted with the king all morning, and the longer he was in there, the more convinced Tom became that things were not looking good for Chakras versus Kirlian.
Still. They had an ace in the hole, and that was Edith. Wallenstein trusted her as he trusted no one else.
But George was pacing up and down the antechamber they had been sent to wait in, muttering. Tom had never seen him this agitated before. Something more was going on here than Tom was aware of, obviously, but if George wasn’t going to say anything-
That was when Edith entered the room, and she didn’t even have to say anything; the expression on her homely face told both of them everything they needed to know.
George was already angry-but it was Tom who suddenly felt himself overcome with fury.
“Come on,” he growled, “Follow my lead.” And before Edith could say or do anything at all, he charged towards the king’s private chambers. Fortunately, Edith managed to sprint ahead of them, or they might have gotten skewered on the halberds of Wallenstein’s guards.
As it was, when they burst through the doors together, both Gribbleflotz and the king nearly jumped out of their skins.
“Thanks be to the Lord Jesus!” Tom bellowed. “I am here in time! Gupta! The violet ray! This is an emergency!”
And he leapt, not for the king, but for Gribbleflotz.
“Doctor, God save us,” he shouted, pulling the first thing he could lay his hands on out of his sleeve-it was an atomizer full of Lister solution-and spraying Gribbleflotz liberally. “Your chakras are fluctuating so dangerously that we felt the effects in the antechambers!”
George meanwhile had fished out the little flashlight they’d put a tiny scrap of blue theatrical gel on and was playing it into Gribbleflotz’s startled eyes.
“I beg your pardon, Majesty,” Tom continued, waving a quartz crystal point all over Gribbleflotz’s upper torso. “We dared not wait any longer. Your devoted doctor has put his own life in jeopardy by treating so many sufferers. His Mishawaka is utterly drained, his Sheboygan enlarged, and the rest of his chakras so muddled it is a wonder he has not collapsed before now!”
“They are?” Gribbleflotz managed, face stricken with doubt. “It is?”
Now George took over. “When you drink wine at dinner, do you sometimes feel dizzy when you rise, sahib?” he asked, earnestly, carefully mangling his German. “Do you find yourself waking in the night with a terrible need to relieve yourself? Do you find yourself stumbling over nothing? Do you sometimes forget a word or a name that you know as well as your own?”
Gribbleflotz paled. The doubt on his face was erased by slowly growing fear.
George had managed to palm one of his little lights, and he suddenly thrust it at Gribbleflotz’s belly, where it began to flash most alarmingly. “Sahib! Dr. Thomas!” George screamed in panic. “The Mishawaka! There is no time! I must operate!”
Before anyone in the room could react, Tom shoved Gribbleflotz down into a chair, and ruthlessly yanked up or tore open his clothing, exposing a very pale belly. In an instant, George had plunged his fingers into that belly, as both the king and Gribbleflotz’s eyes bulged and the king’s guards backed away, making furtive signs against evil.
One of them fainted dead away as George pulled his hand back out, bloody and sticky, and opened them to reveal a mass of what looked like bloody hair and things best left unidentified. “You see!” George shouted. “You see! It was almost too late!”
Gribbleflotz fainted dead away.
Back in Grantville at last, Tom and George gave the president of the State of Thuringia-Franconia their reports in person. Ed Piazza had come up from the new provincial capital at Bamberg to hear their report, on his way to Magdeburg. He’d pass the information along to Mike Stearns and Rebecca Abrabanel later, when the current political ruckus settled down. The dynastic situation in Bohemia was important but not exactly an urgent matter.