by E. C. Tubb
And yet, despite his obvious agony, his face was strangely calm as if he felt an inward wonder and a sense of awe. And, seeing that, the crowd grew more savage than before.
They threw things. They snatched up fruit and stones and flung them with all their strength at the helpless man. They cursed him, and mocked him, shouting vile obscenities and then, someone who owned a gun produced it and opened fire at the man nailed to the tree.
He aimed at the legs but his aim was bad, the bullet hitting higher than intended. The Reverend John Parish jerked against his tree then slumped against the nails, a fresh wound added to those on hands and feet. A wound high on the left side over the heart.
And no man there felt shame at what he had done.
DECISION
John Gibson always thought that the waiting room of the General Mercy Hospital must be similar to the annex to hell. It was a large room, the floor of stamped dirt puddled with wet, the walls of cracked and broken concrete seeping with moisture and mottled with slimy lichen and creeping moss, the roof a mass of splintered beams pierced by a single, dirt-encrusted skylight. A few rough benches rested against the walls and, sitting on the benches, squatting on the floor, pressed against the walls or humped into corners, waited the most concentrated distillation of human misery the world had ever known.
John sighed as he saw them, feeling the grit of fatigue rasp his eyeballs and the burning discomfort of too many sleepless nights churn his stomach.
It wasn’t the assembled misery which upset him—he had seen too much misery in his half-century of life—it was the growing knowledge that there wasn’t anything he could do to alleviate it, that there wasn’t anything anyone could do. He looked at the woman at his side.
She was thin, too thin, but that was normal now. Her eyes glistened with drug-induced wakefulness and her hands quivered in constant motion as she toyed with a set of cards so marked, erased and marked again as to be almost indecipherable. She wore a smock of a drab grey colour. Once it had been white, and had long ago abandoned any effort to appear attractive.
“Have you sorted them, nurse?”
“Yes, doctor.” She didn’t look at him, but there was no mistaking the despair in her voice. “It’s getting worse. Two hundred and eight this morning. About seventy stand a chance of being helped, the rest....”
“We must do what we can.” John reached for the cards. “I’ll take maternity. Collins, flesh wounds and minor injuries. Fenshaw chronic illness, radiation sickness, incurable and internal diseases. Send them in strict waiting-rotation; some of these poor devils have been waiting two days now.”
“Yes, doctor.” She hesitated. “After maternities?”
“The hard ones; use your discretion.” He gripped her shoulders and turned her to look at him, smiling into her eyes. “One other thing, Sally, and this is important. We don’t want you cracking up on us, so go easy on the Benzedrine, will you?”
“Yes, doctor.” She tried to smile with her bloodless lips and the glitter in her eyes increased as she stared at him. “And you?”
“I’ll manage.” He patted her shoulder. “You’ve got to get some rest, Sally. We need you too much for you to take chances.”
“Yes, doctor.” The title came with the ease of ingrained habit but the hunger in her eyes left no doubt as to the word she would rather have used. “It’s nice of you to say that, but I can always be replaced—you can’t.”
“Where could I find another trained nurse?” John shook his head. “There may be some more doctors around but you’re more than just a doctor. You are a diagnostician now, and you save us an endless amount of time. No, Sally, I’d rather lose Collins or Fenshaw than you.”
“You have other nurses.”
“I know that.” He smiled at her again, shaking her gently as he gripped her shoulders. “I’m not going to flatter you, Sally, so you can stop fishing for compliments. You know how much you mean to me.”
She flushed, a rising tide of of red suffusing her sallow features and restoring for a moment something of her lost beauty. For a moment she clung to him; then, as habit and ingrained duty overcame desire, reached for the cards and began to call out names.
The procession to hell began.
It had begun three years before, when the soughing whine of falling missiles had painted the night with flame and mushroom clouds of smoke. It had begun when London vanished in a cloud of radioactive glory, when Liverpool and Newcastle, Glasgow and Manchester, Bristol and Portsmouth and a dozen other big cities had glowed and slumped and ran into heaps of molten slag. It had begun within the space of twelve hours in which half the population had died with merciful swiftness and it had carried over for another seven days, during which three quarters of the remainder had spewed out their lives in uncontrollable vomiting.
But it hadn’t ended there.
A man can lose a leg and he will live. A man can have his limbs severed, his eyes taken out, his ears destroyed, his senses dulled and rendered useless, and still he can remain a reasoning, intelligent entity. But no nation can have the heart and guts ripped from it and hope to recover, to carry on as usual, to remain a close-knit unity. England was dead—but it was a long time dying.
John wished that he had died with it.
He sat at his desk and stared at the file of maternity cases Sally had sent in from the waiting room. They were all the same, dull-eyed, indifferent, without imagination or the subtle something which would inevitably have driven them from their tiny villages into the big cities. They accepted life as it came and already most of them were ridden with superstition. Tiredly he went through the routine, knowing that he could have been an African witch doctor, masked and mumbling incantations, for all the impression he was making.
Blood counts. Geiger tests. Tracer elements. Albumen reaction. Teeth and skin. Wasserman and smear. Test for diabetes, for cancer, for radiation sickness. Test for vitamin deficiency, for calcium lack, for malnutrition. He didn’t have to test for intelligence.
“How are you feeling?”
“Sick, doctor.”
“You’ll get over that. Now this is what you must do. Drink plenty of milk, boil all water, wash frequently, eat plenty of vegetables, stay away from all radioactive areas, refrain from lifting heavy weights, don’t wear tight clothing. Don’t drink too much. Get plenty of rest. You understand?”
“Yes, doctor.”
They didn’t, of course; how could they? Drink plenty of milk—when a cow was something most of them had only heard of. Wash frequently—when there was no soap. Stay away from radioactive areas—when they didn’t know the meaning of the word. Plenty of vegetables—nettles, lettuce, berries, some wizened fruit. All hard to gather. All hard to cook—and there were plenty of rusty cans still to be found—if you went into the radioactive areas. Don’t drink too much—when it was their only pleasure. Rest— how?
He watched them file out, knowing that half of their expected children would carry the inheritance of their parents’ gift of blindness, distorted bones, congenital disease as proved by the Wasserman and smear tests. And yet there was nothing he could do to prevent it. No doctor can cure a patient if the patient won’t take the trouble to be cured. Even if he has the intent he still needs the essential drugs and medicines, and the drugs had vanished along with the thousand other needs of civilisation when the alphabet bombs had drifted down from the sullen clouds.
Tiredness clawed at him and he almost yielded to it, resting his head on his folded arms and closing his eyes, letting his body relax and slump against the edge of the desk. Memories came swimming to the forefront of his consciousness—white-tiled corridors and polished floors, rows of neat white beds and attentive, neat, white nurses. The gleam of sterile steel and the glare of brilliant lights. Ranked ampoules of drugs, the slender perfection of hypodermics, the miracle of modern surgery.
“John.”
He started, blinding and feeling the sudden pounding of his heart as he surged upwards from the desk. Col
lins stood before him, a steaming jug in one hand and some thick, cracked china cups in the other.
“Tea?”
“Thanks.” John rubbed his eyes and wondered if he should take another Benzedrine tablet. He decided against it. The supply was getting low and he had driven himself too far as it was. He sipped at the hot brew, grimacing at the herbal tang, and felt brief regret at lost pleasures. “How is it going?”
“As usual.” Collins shrugged. He was a young man, twenty years younger than John, and still had the cynical indifference of youth to the unfortunate. “I’ve looked at a few scratches and sewn up a few cuts; all I can do, really.” He sipped at his tea. “How’s the new generation?”
“They’ll arrive.” John tried not to show his irritation at the other’s levity. “If you’ve cleared your cases how about starting on the chronics?”
“Why?” Collins stared directly at the elder man. “What good will it do?”
“It will relieve me and Fenshaw for one thing. I won’t mention common humanity. If you haven’t heard of it yet it’s a bit late in the day to start.”
“I’m a realist, John. What possible good can we do to a man dying of radiation sickness? The only real mercy we can give him is the easy way out. The same applies to most of the other chronics out there. They are just wasting our time.”
“I see.” John stared down into his cup, not seeing the dark brown, almost transparent liquid it contained. “Carl?”
“Why do you insist on ascribing everything I say to the influence of Carl?” Collins set down his cup with exaggerated care. “I can think for myself, John. That I happen to believe that Carl is right in a lot of what he says is merely coincidence.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“You are a doctor, Collins,” said John quietly. “As such you took a certain oath. Must I remind you of it? Must I bring to your notice that bit about ‘comfort to the dying’? A doctor isn’t just a mechanic, Collins; he has a greater duty towards humanity than to repair their bodies—if they are repairable. Those people out there look towards us for help. Some of them have waited two or more days just to get to see us, some of them have travelled a long way. Are you asking me to turn them away? Is that the kind of man you think I am?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You inferred it. You think that I’m soft, weak; in fact you think that I’m a fool. You have thought so ever since I refused to fall in with your plan to make all patients bring us food and material before they could expect treatment. Mercy isn’t for sale, Collins. I told you that then, and I tell it to you now. Mercy is something you give away—or it isn’t mercy.”
“Mercy has nothing to do with it.”
“Mercy has everything to do with it. That is why we elected to become doctors—not for the fat fees we could expect from the job, but because we wanted to do something to help our fellow men. If you thought differently about it in the old days, then you shouldn’t be what you are. A doctor is a man of mercy, Collins, not a highwayman with a gun.”
“I don’t have to listen to this.” Collins stepped back from the desk, his thin features flushing with anger. “You’re living in the past, John, and you won’t admit it. How can we cure those wrecks out there? We’ve no penicillin, no sulfa drugs, no irradiation lamps, no special equipment. More important, of all we’ve no beds or staff, no nurses, nothing to take away what they are or to help them in any way. All we can do; is to kill them—or let them linger in agony for the remainder of their lives. Is that being stupid? I say that it makes good sense.”
“And so does Carl?”
“Leave Carl out of this.”
“Carl won’t stay out.” For the first time since the young man had entered the room John felt the surging warmth of anger. “Carl is a would-be despot, a dictator, an idealist if you like, but dangerous all the same. This is my hospital, Collins. Remember that. I made it what it is, settled here, cleared out the rooms and searched around for the few drugs and instruments we have. You weren’t here then. You don’t know what we had to do, Sally and I, to get this place going. It’s mine, and while I’m here you’ll do as I say. No one, remember that, no one will come here for help to be turned away. This is the General Mercy Hospital, not the local bargain counter, and if you don’t like it you know what you can do.”
“Maybe I will.”
“You’re not threatening me, Collins. A bad doctor is worse than no doctor at all. Go if you like, but while you remain here you’ll obey my orders.”
For a moment they stared at each other, the older man, his face sagging with fatigue, his body slumped with weariness, and yet with his eyes bright with the inner fires of his conviction. Collins stared back, hard, brash, certain that he was right, almost contemptuous of the other man’s idealism, and yet, as they stared at each other, it was the younger man who admitted defeat.
“Sorry, John. I suppose that I’m just too tired to think straight.”
“Forget it.” With victory came lassitude and a craving for peace and quiet away from the clash of wills and the storms of emotion. “We’re all overworked, but things may get better soon. When the midwives are trained and the visiting nurses established we should be able to take things a little easier. Anyway, I want to get started on the. medical school as soon as possible; the quicker we train some new blood the happier I will be.”
“What about them?” Collins jerked his thumb towards the waiting room. “You think that they will get less?
“We must tell them the truth. We’re only wasting their time and arousing false hopes by offering something to them we can’t accomplish.”
John flushed as he saw the expression in the other’s eyes. “‘I, too, can be a realist, Collins, but there is a big difference between handing a man a gun and telling him to shoot himself, and helping him to accept the inevitable with kindness and understanding. We can tell them the truth, but we needn’t be sadistic about it.”
“We should have a priest,” said Collins cynically. “They used to be pretty good at that sort of thing.”
“Yes,” agreed John shortly. He reached for the bell wire. “Let’s get back to work.”
* * * *
The first man was a victim of his own ignorance. He was dying and didn’t know why, but John could tell that he had blandly disregarded the overall command never to enter a contaminated area. He shook his head as he finished the tests.
“Can you cure me, doctor?”
The man leaned forward with pathetic faith in the power of the man in charge. “I feel sick and can’t work as hard as I did.”
“I’m sorry.” John hesitated at the naked panic in the man’s eyes. “You’ll have to take things very quietly from now on. Rest as much as you can, sleep all you want to, eat plenty of good food and get out in the sun.” He reached for the bell wire.
“Aren’t you going to give me something?”
“Nothing I can give you will do any good. Rest and food are all that can help you. I’m sorry.”
“But....”
“I’m sorry.”
It hurt to see him go, It hurt not to be able to give the lying words of comfort, the useless injections, the bottle of coloured water. Nothing could prevent the man’s death, but now, devoid of the trappings of faith, he would die cursing the ‘doctors’ who had refused to help him. Slowly John pulled the bell and signalled for the next patient.
A mother entered with a bundle in her arms. It wasn’t a baby she carried, but a ten-year-old boy, lank haired, loose mouthed, dangling limbed. Not an idiot; that would have been kinder; an idiot would have been taken care of in the old days and would have died as the rest lad died. Her son was a spastic, one of those unfortunates who, while mentally sound, had such poor control of their bodies as to be a constant burden on those around them.
There was nothing John could do.
The drugs hadn’t been invented to cure the condition, the schools to train spastics lad vanished with their staffs and all he could
do was to sympathise with the mother and express his regret. She left, carrying her cross, her eyes bitter with frustrated hope.
An old man was next, twisted and crippled with arthritis, ill-tempered through pain and hunger, truculent as he compared present conditions with his memories of snug, warm hospitals with their attentive nurses, sympathetic doctors, and the endless treatments which had made his illness a thing to while away the lengthening hours.
Then came a man with jaundice, a woman with varicose veins like swollen purple plums on her legs, a child with mastoid, another with rickets, a third with pus-filled oozing-eyes. A boy with a humped back and swollen throat, a man with diabetes, a woman with cancer of the breast, another with a dropped womb, a third with fatty heart. Two men with radiation sores and one with gangrene of the arm. A girl with milky white cataracts in her eyes and another with puerperal fever. A family suffering from tuberculosis, then a man with acute appendicitis....
John could do something about the jaundice, nothing about the varicose veins because the woman refused to allow an operation. He booked the mastoid for the theatre, told the mother of he boy with rickets to give him plenty of milk and green vegetables, shook his head over the ruined eyes. Nothing for the glandular trouble; the diabetes—there was no insulin; the cancer—too far gone for operation; the fatty heart. Nothing for the radiation sores, but amputation for the gangrene. Operation for the cataracts; no drugs for the fever; nothing for the tuberculosis. The man with appendicitis....
The hospital wasn’t geared for emergency operations.
John felt sick as he stared down at the limp figure on the improvised operating table. The operation was such a simple thing—with the correct equipment and staff.
The anaesthetic, the incision, the sutures and clamps, the scalpels, the forceps, the swabs, the brilliant lights and attentive nurses. Then the removal of the inflamed organ, the cleansing, the tying, sewing and final dressing. A few hours’ work, less than that, followed by ten days hospitalisation. As simple as having a tooth removed, as blowing a nose, as trimming an inconvenient toenail.
