КатеринаК

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→"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."

→"You have other nurses."

→"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."

→"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."

→"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." She tried to smile with her bloodless lips and the glitter in her eyes increased as she stared at him. "And you?"

→"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 hesitated. "After maternities?"

→"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 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..."

→"Have you sorted them, nurse?"

→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 gray color. Once it had been white, and had long ago abandoned any effort to appear attractive.

→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.

→John Gibson had 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.

→Chapter One

→Two lives were at stake and he had to make a—decision...

→by E. C. Tubb

→Decision