Operation Chaos

VII

When I came to, I was prone on a cot in a hospital tent. Daylight was bright outside; the earth lay wet and steaming. A medic looked around as I groaned. “Hello, hero,” he said. “Better stay in that position for a while. How’re you feeling?”

I waited till full consciousness returned before I accepted a cup of bouillon. “How am I?” I whispered; they’d humanized me, of course.

“Not too bad, considering. You had some infection of your wounds—a staphylococcus that can switch species for a human or canine host—but we cleaned the bugs out with a new antibiotic technique. Otherwise, loss of blood, shock, and plain old exhaustion. You should be fine in a week or two.”

I lay thinking, my mind draggy, most of my attention on how delicious the bouillon tasted. A field hospital can’t lug around the equipment to stick pins in model bacteria. Often it doesn’t even have the enlarged anatomical dummies on which the surgeon can do a sympathetic operation. “What technique do you mean?” I asked.

“One of our boys has the Evil Eye. He looks at the germs through a microscope.”

I didn’t inquire further, knowing that Reader’s Big would be waxing lyrical about it in a few months Something else nagged at me. “The attack . . . have they begun?”

“The- Oh. That! That was two days ago, Rin-Tin Tin. You’ve been kept under asphodel. We mopped ’em up along the entire line. Last I heard, they we across the Washington border and still running.”

I sighed and went back to sleep. Even the noise as the medic dictated a report to his typewriter couldn’t hold me awake.

Ginny came in the next day, with Svartalf riding he shoulder. Sunlight striking through the tent flap turned her hair to hot copper. “Hello, Captain Matuchek, she said. “I came to see how you were, soon as I couldn’t get leave.”

I raised myself on my elbows, and whistled at the cigaret she offered. When it was between my lips, said slowly: “Come off it, Ginny. We didn’t exactly go on a date that night, but I think we’re properly introduced.”

“Yes.” She sat down on the cot and stroked my hair. That felt good. Svartalf purred at me, and I wished I could respond.

“How about the afreet?” I asked after a while.

“Still in his bottle.” She grinned. “I doubt if anybody ever be able to get him out again, assuming anybody would want to.”

“But what did you do?”

“A simple application of Papa Freud’s principles. it’s ever written up, I’ll have every Jungian in country on my neck, but it worked. I got him spinning out his memories and illusions, and found he had a hydrophobic complex—which is fear of water, Rover, not rabies—” y

“You can call me Rover,” I growled, “but if you call me Fido, gives a paddling.”

She didn’t ask why I assumed I’d be sufficiently close in future for such laying on of hands. That encouraged me. Indeed, she bushed, but went on: “Having gotten the key to his personality, I found it simple to play on his phobia. I pointed out how common a substance water is and how difficult total dehydration is. He got more and more scared. When I showed him that all animal tissue, including his own, is about eighty percent water, that was that. He crept back into his bottle and went catatonic.”

After a moment, she added thoughtfully: “I’d like to have him for my mantelpiece, but I suppose he’ll wind up in the Smithsonian. So I’ll simply write a little treatise on the military uses of psychiatry.”

“Aren’t bombs and dragons and elfshot gruesome enough?” I demanded with a shudder.

Poor simple elementals! They think they’re fiendish, but ought to take lessons from the human race.

As for me, I could imagine certain drawbacks to getting hitched with a witch, but “C’mere, youse.”

She did.

I don’t have many souvenirs of the war. It was an ugly time and best forgotten. But one keepsake will always be with me, in spite of the plastic surgeons’ best efforts. As a wolf, I’ve got a stumpy tail, and as a man I don’t like to sit down in wet weather.

That’s a hell of a thing to receive a Purple Heart for.