The doctor pulled up the left sleeve of his white coat. His arm had scars that made nasty look like an understatement. 'I was in a motorcar crash ten years ago,' he said. 'I know what I'm talking about-and now we can do things for burns they didn't dream of back then.'
'Can you use your hand?' Pound asked.
'Thumb and first two fingers,' the doctor replied. 'The tendons and nerves to the others are pretty much shot, but I've got the important ones, anyhow. You don't have that worry-I know your toes work.'
'Uh-huh,' Pound said unenthusiastically. He knew they worked, too; the therapists made him wiggle them. That made him forget about the rest of his pain-it felt as if a flamethrower were toasting them.
'Just hang on,' the doctor said. 'It's a bitch while it's going on, but it gets better. You have to give it time, that's all.'
Pound couldn't even tell him to go to hell, because the other man had been through what he was in the middle of now and had come out the other side. 'It is a bitch,' was as much as he thought he could say.
'Oh, I know,' the doctor answered quietly. 'I still miss the needle sometimes, but I'll be damned if I go back to it…and you can take that any way you please.' He nodded and walked on to the next patient.
He looked like such a mild little fellow, too: the kind who slid through life without anything much ever happening to him. Which only proved you never could tell. Michael Pound had seen that plenty of times with soldiers he got to know. He wondered why he was so surprised now.
He wished he could get up and do things, but he was stuck on his back-or sometimes, to stave off bedsores, on his stomach. The therapists said he could put weight on his feet in a couple of weeks. He looked forward to that, and then again he didn't. Till you'd been through a lot of pain, you didn't understand how much you wanted to stay away from more.
In the meantime, he had magazines and newspapers and the handful of books in the hospital library. He voraciously devoured them. He also had the wireless. He would have listened to news almost all the time. The other guys in the ward plumped for music and comedies and dramas. Pound endured their programs-he couldn't try throwing his weight around, not unless he wanted everybody else to hate him. But the news was all that really mattered to him.
Sometimes the other burned men gave in to him, too, especially in the middle of the night when they were all too likely to be awake and when the regular programs were even crappier than they were the rest of the time. And so he was listening to a news program when a flash came in.
'We interrupt this broadcast,' said the man behind the mike. 'This just in from the BBC-the Churchill government has fallen. Parliament voted no confidence in the Churchill-Mosley regime that has run the United Kingdom for more than ten years. Pending elections, a caretaker government under Sir Horace Wilson has been formed. Wilson has announced that his first action as Prime Minister will be to seek an armistice from the Kaiser.'
The room erupted. A nurse rushed in to quiet the whoops and cheers. When she found out what had happened, she let out a whoop herself.
'They only had two!' Pound said.
'Two what?' the nurse asked.
'Two bombs,' Pound and two other guys said at the same time. Pound went on, 'They had two, and the second one didn't go off where they wanted it to, and that was it. Now the Germans can blow up their cities one at a time, and they can't hit back.'
'Wow,' the nurse said. 'Are you a general? You talk like a general.'
'I'm a lieutenant,' he answered. 'I've got gray hair 'cause I was a sergeant for years and years. They finally promoted me, and they've been regretting it ever since.'
She laughed. 'You're funny, too! I like that.'
He wished he had a private room. Maybe something interesting would have happened. The ward didn't even boast curtains around the beds. Whatever they did to you, everybody else got to watch. After a while, you mostly didn't care. This once, Pound might have.
'Only Featherston left,' said the man in the next bed.
'What do we do when we catch him?' somebody asked.
'String him up!' The answer came from Pound and several other wounded soldiers at the same time. It also came from the nurse. She suggested stringing the President of the CSA up by some highly sensitive parts of his anatomy. Coming from most women, that would have shocked Pound. He'd seen that nurses had mouths at least as raunchy as those of soldiers. It made sense: nurses saw plenty of horrors, too.
'My God,' someone else said. 'The war really is just about over.'
Nobody made any snide comments about that. Maybe the other men in the ward had as much trouble taking it in as Michael Pound did. The war had consumed his whole being for the past three years-and before that, when he'd been down in Houston before it returned to the CSA, he might as well have been at war.
He wondered what he'd do when peace finally broke out. Would the Army want to keep a first lieutenant with gray hair? The service needed some grizzled noncoms; they tempered junior officers' puppyish enthusiasm. But he'd never be anything more than a junior officer himself, and he was much too goddamn old for the role.
If they turned him loose, if they patted him on the back and said, Well done-now we'll go use up somebody else, what the hell would he do then? He had no idea. The thought was frightening enough. The Army had been his life since he was eighteen years old.
They couldn't just throw him out…could they?
'Shit,' another burned man said. 'This fuckin' war's never gonna be over-excuse my French, miss.'
'I've heard the words before,' the nurse said dryly.
The soldiers laughed. The one who'd been talking went on, 'It won't be. Honest to God, it won't. Maybe the Confederate government finally surrenders, yeah, but we'll stay on occupation duty down here forever. Lousy bushwhackers and diehards won't start singing 'The Star-Spangled Banner' tomorrow, and you can take that to the bank. We have grandchildren, they'll be down here shooting at waddayacallems-rebels.'
Three or four guys groaned, probably because they thought the burned man was likely to be right. Michael Pound felt like cheering, for exactly the same reason. He didn't-everybody else would have thought he was nuts. But he felt like it. If the war, or something a lot like the war, went on and on, the Army wouldn't have any excuse to throw him out on his ear.
Well, it wouldn't have any excuse except maybe that he'd made himself too obnoxious for the brass to stand. Not without pride, he figured he was capable of that.
'Once we get done licking the Confederates, do we go after the Japs next?' asked the guy in the next bed.
If the General Staff of the burn ward of the military hospital outside Chattanooga had their way, the answer to that one was no. Pound wouldn't have minded seeing the Sandwich Islands, but not as a way station to a battle somewhere even farther off in the Pacific. The Japs had their sphere, and the United States had theirs, and as long as neither side poached on the other that was fine with him.
He did say, 'I bet they're working overtime in Tokyo, trying to figure out how to build a superbomb.'
'Wouldn't you be?' said the soldier next to him.
'You bet I would,' Pound answered. 'As long as we've got it and they don't, it's a club we can use to beat them over the head. I bet the Tsar's telling all his scientists they're heading for Siberia if they don't make one PDQ, too. If the Germans have one and the Russians don't, they're in big trouble.'
He wondered whether Austria-Hungary would try to make one. Berlin was the senior partner there, and had been since the early days of the Great War. Germany had saved Austria-Hungary's bacon against the Russians then, and again this time around. But Vienna had some clever scientists, too. You never could tell, Pound decided with profound unoriginality.
'Before long, everybody and his mother-in-law's going to have those…miserable things.' A soldier had mercy on the nurse's none-too-delicate ears. 'How do we keep from blowing each other to kingdom come?'
That was a good question. It was probably the question on the minds of the striped-pants set these days. If the diplomats came up with a halfway decent answer, they would earn their salaries and then some.
Michael Pound thought about the CSA's rockets. If you could load superbombs onto bigger, better ones, you could blow up anybody you didn't like, even if he didn't live next door. Wouldn't that be fun?
Could you make a rocket shoot down another rocket? Airplanes shot down airplanes…some of the time,
