'Bonjour,' O'Doull replied. 'What seems to be your trouble, Monsieur?'
'Well, I have this rash.' Lacroix pulled up his shirt sleeve to display his left biceps. 'I've tried home remedies on it, but they don't do much good.'
'I'm not surprised-that's ringworm,' O'Doull said. 'You should keep it covered as much as you can, because it can spread. I'll give you a prescription to take to the pharmacy. Put it on twice a day, and it should clear things up in a month or so.'
'A month?' the baker said in dismay. 'Why not sooner? If you give me a shot or some pills, can't I get rid of it in a few days?'
People knew there were new medicines that could cure some ailments quickly and easily. Naturally, people thought the new medicines could cure any ailment quickly and easily. But things didn't work that way. O'Doull spent a while explaining the difference between microbes and fungi. He wasn't sure Lacroix got it. The baker left carrying the prescription but shaking his head.
After a case like that, writing about the work O'Doull had done during the war didn't seem so bad. That, at least, had mattered. This? While he was sewing and splinting and cutting, he'd looked forward to this with a fierce and simple longing. Now that he had it again, he discovered the danger of getting exactly what you thought you wanted. It could prove as unfortunate in real life as in fairy tales.
He was home with Nicole. That was as good as it always had been. But his practice…After you'd spent time as a battlefield surgeon, prescribing ringworm salve didn't seem the same.
Another patient came in. Franзoise Boulanger had arthritis. And well she might-she was seventy-seven, and she'd worked hard all her life. She hurt, and she had trouble moving. O'Doull didn't have much to offer her: aspirin to take the edge from pain and inflammation, heating pads and warm baths to soothe a little. He would have given her the same advice before the Great War. If he'd been practicing before the War of Secession, he would have substituted laudanum for aspirin. Franзoise might have got hooked on the opiated brandy, but it would have done as much for her pain as the little white pills did, maybe more.
Leaning on her cane, she shuffled out of the office. Is this what I've got to look forward to for the rest of my professional life? God! If he could have brought Nicole with him, he would have run for Alabama and a military hospital.
A little boy with strep throat made him feel happier. Penicillin would take care of that, and would make sure the kid didn't come down with rheumatic fever or endocarditis. O'Doull felt he'd earned his fee there and done some real good. All the same, he wasn't used to taking it easy any more. He wondered if he ever would be.
A corporal waited on the platform when Abner Dowling got off the train at the Broad Street station. Saluting, the noncom said, 'I'll take you to the War Department, sir.'
'Obliged,' Dowling said. The corporal grabbed his suitcase, too. It wasn't heavy, but Dowling didn't complain. Ten years earlier, he knew he would have. He still wasn't as old as George Custer had been when the Great War broke out, but he needed only another six years.
Philadelphia looked better than it had the last time he was there. More craters were filled in. More ruined buildings were torn down. Of course, the superbomb hadn't gone off right here.
'How are things on the other side of the river?' he asked.
'Sir, they're still pretty, uh, fouled up.' The corporal would have said something strong talking with one of his buddies. As he braked for a red light, he added, 'That's such a big mess, God knows when they'll set it to rights.'
'I suppose,' Dowling said.
'Believe it, sir. It's the truth.' The corporal sounded missionary in his zeal to convince.
Dowling already believed. He'd spent too much time talking with Henderson V. FitzBelmont to do anything else. FitzBelmont wasn't the most exciting man ever born-an understatement. But he'd put a superbomb together while the United States was doing their goddamnedest to blow Lexington off the map. Dowling didn't like him, but did respect his professional competence. So did the U.S. physicists who'd interrogated him. They were impressed he'd done as much as he had under the conditions in which he had to work.
The War Department looked a lot better than it had when the Confederates tried their best to knock it flat. Now repairmen could do their job without fighting constant new damage. The concrete barriers around the massive structure remained in place. No C.S. diehards or Mormon fanatics or stubborn Canucks-rebellion still flared north of the border-could grab an easy chance to auto-bomb the place.
Dowling walked from the barricades up to the entrance. He wheezed climbing the stairs. His heart pounded. He was carrying a lot of weight around, and he'd just reminded himself how young he wasn't. I made it through the war, though. That's all that-well, most of what-really counts.
Despite the stars on his shoulder straps, he got frisked before he could go inside. The soldiers who patted him down didn't take anything for granted. When Dowling asked about that, one of them said, 'Sir, the way things are, we'll be doing this forever. Too many assholes running around loose-uh, pardon my French.'
'I've met the word,' Dowling remarked. The enlisted men grinned.
A corporal in a uniform with creases sharp enough to shave with took Dowling down into the bowels of the earth to John Abell's office. These days, the more deeply you were buried, the bigger the wheel you were. And Abell was a bigger wheel-he now sported two stars on his shoulder straps.
'Congratulations, Major General,' Dowling said, and stuck out his hand.
'Thanks.' The General Staff officer's grip was stronger than his slender build and pallid face would have made you think. He'd been fair almost to the point of ghostliness even before he started impersonating a mole. But he had to be really good at what he did to rise as high as he had without a field command. Well, that was nothing Dowling hadn't already known.
'What's the latest?' Dowling asked.
'We finally have a handle on the rising in Saskatoon,' Abell answered. 'They surrendered on a promise that we'd treat them as POWs-and that we wouldn't superbomb the place.'
'Good God!' Dowling said. 'Were we thinking of it?'
'No-but the Canucks don't need to know that,' the younger man replied.
'Well, well. A use for superbombs I hadn't thought of,' Dowling said. 'Just knowing we've got 'em on inventory is worth something.'
'Indeed,' Abell said. 'Speaking of which, how is Professor FitzBelmont?'
Before answering, Dowling asked, 'Am I allowed to talk about that with you?'
Abell's smile was cold, but his smiles usually were. 'Oh, yes. That's one of the reasons you were ordered back here.'
'He's a more than capable physicist, and he had some good engineers working under him,' Dowling said. 'That's the opinion of people who ought to know. What with as much of this town as he blew up, I'd say they're right.'
'What do we do with him?' Abell asked.
'He's kind of like a bomb himself, isn't he? All that stuff he knows…Damn good thing Featherston didn't want to listen to him at first. Damn good thing. If the Japs or the Russians kidnapped him, I'd flabble,' Dowling said. 'And he'd sing. He'd sing like a nightingale. He'd probably think it was…interesting.'
'Our German allies don't want the Russians getting a superbomb,' Abell said. 'Nobody wants the Japanese getting one.'
'Except them,' Dowling said.
'Yes. Except them.' John Abell jotted something in a notebook. Even upside down, his script looked clear and precise. 'Probably about time for him to have an unfortunate accident, don't you think? Then we won't have to worry about what he's up to and where he might go-or, as you say, might be taken.'
What had he just written down? Kill Henderson FitzBelmont, the way someone else might have written eggs, salami, Ѕ pound butter? Dowling didn't know, but that was what he would have bet. And Abell wanted his opinion of the idea, too. What was he supposed to say? What came out of his mouth was, 'Well, I think we've learned about as much from him as we're going to.'
Abell nodded. 'That was my next question.'
'If we're going to do this, it really does have to look like an accident,' Dowling said. 'We give the diehards a martyr if we screw up.'
'Don't worry about it. The people we use are reliable,' Abell said. 'Very sad, but if the professor tried to cross
