To Sail Beyond the Sunset (60 page)

If not, it would be enough and more than enough simply to have Father alive again.

I had gone back through the gate to Boondock when I heard Gwen Hazel’s voice: “Godiva’s Horse to all stations. Deety reports bandits in the air and forming up. Expect sirens in approx eighty minutes. Acknowledge.”

Gwen Hazel was standing beside me by the gates in the hospital, but this was a communication check as much as an intelligence. My own comm gear was simple: a throat mike not buried but merely under a bandage I did not need; a “hearing aid” that was not one and an antenna concealed by my clothes. I answered, “Blood’s a Rover to Horse, roger.”

I heard, “British Yeoman to Horse, roger. Eighty minutes. One hour twenty minutes.”

I said, “Blood to Horse. I heard Gretchen’s roger. Should I?”

Gwen Hazel shut off transmission and spoke to me, “You shouldn’t hear her until you both shift to Coventry 1941. Mau, will you please go through to Coventry for a second comm check?”

I did so; we established that Gwen Hazel’s link to me, 44
^th
C to 20
^th
C, was okay, and that I now could not hear Gretchen—both as they should be. Then I went back to Boondock, as I was not yet gowned or masked. There was one point in the transition where something tugged at one’s clothes and my ears popped—a static baffle against an air-pressure inequality, I knew. But ghostly, just the same.

Deety reported that the bombers’ fighter escort was becoming airborne. The German Messerschmitts were equal to or better than the Spitfires, but they had to operate at the very limit of their range—it took most of their gasoline to get there and get back; they could engage in dogfighting only a few minutes—or wind up in the Channel if they miscalculated.

Gwen Hazel said, “Dagmar. Take your station.”

“Roger wilco.” Dagmar went through, gowned, masked, and capped—not yet gloved…although God knows what good gloves would do in the septic conditions we would experience. (Protect us, maybe, if not our patients.)

I tied Woodrow’s mask for him; he did so for me. We were ready.

Gwen Hazel said, “Godiva’s Horse to all stations, sirens. British Yeoman, activate gate and shift time. Acknowledge.”

“Yeoman to Horse, roger wilco!”

“Horse to Yeoman, report arrival. Good hunting!” Hazel added to me, “Mau, you and Lazarus can go through now. Good luck!”

I followed Lazarus through…and swallowed my heart. Dagmar was gowning Father. He glanced at us as we came out from behind that curtain, paid us no further attention. I heard him say to Dagmar, “I haven’t seen you before, Sister. What’s your name?”

“Dagmar Dobbs, Doctor. Call me ‘Dag’ if you like. I just came up from London this morning, sir, with supplies.”

“So I see. First time in weeks I’ve seen a clean gown. And masks—what swank! You sound like a Yank, Dag.”

“And I am, Doctor—and so do you.”

“Guilty as charged. Ira Johnson, from Kansas City.”

“Why, that’s my home town!”

“I thought I heard some tall corn in your speech. When the Heinies go home tonight, we must catch up on home town gossip.”

“I don’t have much; I haven’t been home since I got my cap and pin.”

Dagmar kept Father busy and kept his attention—and I thanked her under my breath. I didn’t want him to notice me until the raid was over. No time for Old Home Week until then.

The first bombs fell, some distance away.

I saw nothing of the raid. Ninety-three years ago, or eight months later that same year, depending on how you count it, I saw bombs falling on San Francisco under circumstances in which I had nothing to do but look up and hold my breath and wait. I’m not sorry that I was too busy to watch the bombing of Coventry. But I could hear it. If you can hear it hit, it is too far away to have your name on it. So they tell me. I’m not sure I believe them.

Gwen Hazel said in my ear, “Did you hear Gretchen? She says they got sixty-nine out of seventy-two of the first wave.”

I had not heard Gretchen. Lazarus and I were busy with our first patient, a little boy. He was badly burned and his left arm was crushed. Lazarus got ready to amputate. I blinked back tears and helped him.

Eternal Now

I am not going to batter your feelings or mine by describing the details of that thousand-year night. Anything agonizing you have ever seen in the emergency room of a big-city hospital is what we saw, and worked on, that night. Compound fractures, limbs shattered to uselessness, burns—horrible burns. If the burns weren’t too bad we slathered them with a gel that would not be seen here for centuries, put dressings over the affected areas, and had them carried outside by civil-defense stretcher bearers. The worst cases were carried in the other direction by Cas and Pol—behind that curtain, through a Burroughs-Carter-Libby gate, to Ira Johnson Hospital in Boondock, and (for burn cases) shifted again to Jane Culver Burroughs Memorial Hospital in Beulahland, there to spend days or weeks in healing, then to be returned to Coventry at “All Clear” this same night.

All of our casualties were civilians, mostly women, children, and old men. The only military (so far as I know) around or in Coventry were Territorials manning AA guns. They had their own medical setup. I suppose that in London a first-aid station such as ours would probably be in the underground. Coventry had no tube trains; this aid station was merely sandbags out in the open but it was safer, perhaps, than it would have been in a building—one that might burn over it. I’m not criticizing. Everything about their civil defense had a make-do quality about it, a people with their backs to the wall, fighting gallantly with whatever they had.

In our aid station we had three tables, operating tables by courtesy, in fact plain wooden tables with the paint scrubbed right off them between raids. Father was using the one nearest the entrance; Woodrow was using the one nearest the curtain; the middle one was used by an elderly Englishman who was apparently a regular for this aid station: Mr. Pratt, a local veterinary surgeon, assisted by his wife, “Harry” for Harriet. Mrs. Pratt had unkind things to say about the Germans during the lulls but was more interested in talking about the cinema. Had I ever met Clark Gable? Gary Cooper? Ronald Colman? Having established that I knew no one of any importance she quit trying to draw me out. But she agreed with her husband when he said it was decent of us Yahnks to come over and help out…but when were the States going to come into the war?

I said that I did not know. Father spoke up. “Don’t bother the Sister, Mr. Pratt. We’ll be along a bit late, just like your Mr. Chamberlain. In the meantime please be polite to those of us who are here and helping.”

“No offense meant, Mr. Johnson.”

“And none taken, Mr. Pratt. Clamp!”

(Mrs. Pratt was as good an operating nurse as I’ve ever seen. She was always ready with what her husband needed without his asking for it—long practice together, I suppose. She had fetched the instruments he used; I assume that they were tools of his animal practice. That might bother some people; to me it made sense.)

Mr. Pratt was at the table that we had expected would be used by Jubal and Jill. (Our research on fine details was less than perfect, since it came from questioning people after the war was over.) So Jubal went out into the anteroom where the wounded waited and worked on triage, tagging the cases Cas and Pol were to carry through to Boondock—the ones who would otherwise have been allowed to die untreated, as being beyond hope. Jill gave a hand to both Dagmar and me, especially with anesthesia, such as it was.

Anesthesia had been a subject of much discussion at our Potemkin Village drills. It was bad enough to show up in the twentieth century with anachronistic surgical instruments…but Boondock anesthetic gear and procedures? Impossible!

Galahad decided on pressure injectors supplying metered amounts of “neomorphine” (as good a name as any—a drug not available in the twentieth century). Jill moved around the station and in the anteroom, injecting the damaged and the burned, and thereby left Dagmar and me with our hands free for surgery assistance. She made one try at helping Mrs. Pratt, but was waved away—Mrs. Pratt was using something I had not seen since 1910 or thereabouts: a nose cone with drops of chloroform.

The work went on and on. I wiped off our table between patients, until the towel I was using was so soaked with blood that it was doing more harm than good.

Gretchen reported a spotty kill on the second wave—sixty bombers attacked, forty-seven shot down. Thirteen bombers dropped at least one stick before being hit. Gretchen’s girls were using particle beams and night-sight gear; the usual effect was to blow up the plane’s gasoline tanks. Sometimes the bombs went off at the same time; sometimes the bombs exploded on hitting the ground; sometimes the bombs did not explode, leaving a touchy problem for bomb-disposal experts the next day.

But we saw none of this. Sometimes we would hear a bomb drop nearby and someone would remark, “Close,” and someone would answer, “Too close,” and we would continue working.

A shot-down plane makes a different sort of explosion from a bomb…and a fighter from a bomber. Mr. Pratt said that he could tell the crash of a Spitfire from the crash of a Messerschmitt. Probably he could. I could not.

The third wave broke into two formations, so Gretchen reported, and came in from southwest and southeast. But her girls now had practice in using what was essentially an infantry weapon against targets they were not used to, under conditions where they must be sure that they had bombers in their sights, not Spitfires. Gretchen described this one as a “skeet shoot.” I made note to ask her what that meant, but I never did.

There were lulls between waves, but not for us. As the night wore on we dropped farther and farther behind; they brought in victims faster than we could handle them. Jubal grew more liberal in tagging, and routed to Ishtar and her teams more and more of the less severely wounded. It made our help more blatant but it surely saved more lives.

During the fourth wave of bombing, sometime early in the morning, I heard Gretchen say, “Yeoman to Horse, emergency.”

“What is it, Gretchen?”

“Something—a piece of plane, probably—hit our gate.”

“Damage?”

“I don’t know. It disappeared. Whoof! Gone.”

“Horse to Yeoman, disengage. Evacuate via gate at aid station. Can you find it? Range and bearing?”

“Yes, but—”

“Disengage and evacuate. Move.”

“But, Hazel, it is just our gate we’ve lost. We can still take out any bombers that come over.”

“Hold. Bright Cliffs, answer. Deety, wake up.”

“I am awake.”

“Research showed four waves, no more. Is Gretchen going to have any more targets?”

“One moment—” (It was a long moment.) “Gay says she can’t see any bombers warming up on the ground. We now have signs of dawn in the east.”

“Horse to all stations, disengage. Blood, wait for Yeoman, then evacuate…bringing Prime with you. Use injector if necessary. All stations, report.”

“Cliffs to Horse, roger wilco; here we come!”

“Yeoman to Horse, roger wilco. Father Schmidt is leading; I’m chasing.”

“Blood to Horse, roger wilco. Hazel, tell Ishtar to get all cases back here now…or she’s got some unscheduled immigrants.”

The next few minutes were hilarious, in a Grand Guignol fashion. First the terribly burned cases came pouring back through the incoming gate, on their own feet and now quite well. Surgery cases followed them, some with prostheses, some with grafts. Even the last cases, ones that Galahad and Ishtar and other surgical teams were currently working on, were patched up somehow, pushed through to Beulahland, there to be finished and to stay for days or weeks—and then sent back through to Coventry only minutes after Hazel ordered an end to the operation.

I know that it was only minutes because none of Gretchen’s troops had arrived from less than a mile away. Those girls move at eight miles per hour at field trot (3.5 meters per second). They should have made it in about eight or nine minutes, plus whatever time it took to get down that tower. I heard later that some of the civil-defense wardens tried to stop them and question them. I don’t think the girls hurt anyone very badly. But they didn’t stop.

They came pouring in, Maid Marians with long bows (disguised particle projectors), dressed for Nottingham Forest, led by Friar Tuck complete with tonsure, and followed by Gretchen, dressed also for a Robin Hood pageant and wearing a big grin.

She paused to slap Dagmar on her fanny as she passed Father’s table, nodded at the Pratts, who were already stupefied by the procession of recovered patients going the other way. She stopped at Woodrow’s table. “We did it!”

All three tables were bare at that moment; we had reached that wonderful point where no more wounded were waiting. Jubal came in from the anteroom, said, “You did indeed.”

Gretchen hugged me. “Maureen, we did it!” She pulled my mask down and kissed me.

I bussed her back. “Now get your tail through that gate. We’re on minus minutes.”

“Spoilsport.” She went on through, followed by Jubal and Gillian.

“All Clear” started sounding. Mr. Pratt looked at me, looked at the curtain, said, “Come, Harry.”

“Yes, Pa.”

“Goodnight, all.” The old man plodded wearily away, followed by his wife.

Father said in a gruff voice, “Daughter, why are you here? You should be in San Francisco.” He looked at Woodrow. “You, too, Ted. You’re dead. So what are you doing here?”

“Not dead, Dr. Johnson. ‘Missing in action’ is not the same as dead. The difference was slight but important. A long time in hospital, a long time out of my head. But here I am.”

“Mmrrph. So you are. But what is this charade? People in costumes. Other people trotting back and forth like Piccadilly Circus. Hell of a way to run an aid station. Am I out of my head? Did we take a direct hit?”

Hazel said in my ear, “Come through, all of you! Now!”

I subvocalized, “Right away, Hazel.” Dagmar had moved until she was behind my father. She had her injector ready; she queried me with her eyes. I shook my head a quarter of an inch. “Father, will you come with me and let me explain?”