Part 17 (1/2)

His father started to shake his head, but checked himself. Quietly, he answered, ”All the people the n.a.z.i mamzrim mamzrim murdered.” murdered.”

Reuven didn't know what to say to that. In the end, he didn't say anything directly, but asked, ”Has Anielewicz had any luck finding his family?”

”Not the last I heard,” his father answered. ”And that doesn't look good, either. The fighting's been over for a while. Of course”-he did his best to sound optimistic-”a country's a big place, and I doubt even the verkakte verkakte Germans could keep proper records while the Lizards were pounding them to pieces.” Germans could keep proper records while the Lizards were pounding them to pieces.”

”Alevai you're right, and you're right, and alevai alevai they'll turn up.” Reuven walked around the last corner before their office. ”And now we've turned up, too.” they'll turn up.” Reuven walked around the last corner before their office. ”And now we've turned up, too.”

After the grim talk, Moishe Russie put on a smile. ”Bad pennies have a way of doing that. I wonder what we have waiting for us today.”

”Something interesting, maybe?” Reuven suggested, holding the door open for his father. ”When I started practice, I didn't think so much of it would be just... routine.”

”That's not always bad,” his father said. ”The interesting cases are usually the hard ones, too, the ones that don't always turn out so well.”

”Did you become a doctor so you could sew up cut legs and give babies shots and tell people with strep throats to take penicillin?” Reuven asked. ”Or did you want to see things you'd never seen before, maybe things n.o.body else had seen, either?”

”I became a doctor for two reasons: to make sick people better, and to make a living,” Moishe Russie answered. ”If I see a patient who's got something I've never seen before, I always worry, because that means I haven't got any knowledge to fall back on. I have to start guessing, and it's easier to guess wrong than it is to guess right.”

”You'd better be careful, Father,” Reuven said. ”You sound like you're in danger of turning into a conservative.”

”Some ways maybe,” Moishe Russie said. ”That's what general practice does-it makes you glad for routine. Consider yourself warned. If you wanted to stay radical your whole life long, you should have gone in for surgery. Surgeons always think they can do anything. That's because they get to play G.o.d in the operating room, and they have trouble remembering the difference between the One Who made bodies and the ones who try to repair them.”

They went into the office. ”Good morning, Dr. Russie,” Yetta the receptionist said, and then, ”Good morning, Dr. Russie.” She smiled and laughed at her own wit. Reuven smiled, too, but it wasn't easy. He'd heard the same joke every third morning since starting in practice with his father, and he was b.l.o.o.d.y sick of it.

His father managed a smile that looked something like sincere. ”Good morning,” he said, a good deal more heartily than Reuven could have done. ”What appointments have we got today?”

Yetta ran down the list: a woman with a skin fungus they'd been fighting for weeks, another woman bringing in her baby for a booster shot, a man with a cough, another man-a diabetic-with an abscess on his leg, a woman with belly pain, a man with belly pain... ”Maybe we can do both of those at once,” Reuven suggested. ”Two for the price of one.” His father snorted. Yetta looked disapproving. She liked her own jokes fine, no matter how often she repeated them. A doctor making jokes about medicine was almost as bad as a rabbi making jokes about religion.

”All right, we'll have enough to do today, even without the people who just drop in,” his father said. ”We'll have some of those, too, I expect; we always do.” Some people, of course, got sick unexpectedly. Others didn't believe in appointments, any more than Reuven believed in Muhammad as a prophet.

He got to see the woman with the stubborn skin fungus, a Mrs. Kratz. Yetta stayed in the room to make sure nothing improper occurred, as she did with all female patients. Custom aside, she could have stayed out. Reuven had no lecherous interest in Mrs. Kratz, and would have had none even without the fungus on her leg. She was plump and gray and older than his father.

”Here,” he said, and handed her a little plastic tube. ”This is a new cream. It's a sample, about four days' worth. Use it twice a day, then call and let us know how it's doing. If it helps, I'll write you a prescription for more.”

”All right, Doctor.” She sighed. ”I hope one of these creams works one of these days.”

”This one is supposed to be very strong,” Reuven said solemnly. The active ingredient, one new to human medicine, was closely related to the chemical the Lizards used to fight what they called the purple itch. He didn't tell that to Mrs. Kratz. He judged her more likely to take offense than to be delighted.

After she left, the man with a cough came in. Reuven's nose wrinkled. ”How much do you smoke, Mr. Sadorowicz?” he asked; the aroma that clung to the fellow's clothes gave him a head start on etiology here.

”I don't know,” Mr. Sadorowicz answered, coughing. ”Whenever I feel like it. What's that got to do with anything?”

Reuven delivered his standard lecture on the evils of tobacco. Mr. Sadorowicz plainly didn't believe a word of it. He didn't want to get an X-ray when Reuven recommended one, either. He didn't want to do anything Reuven suggested. Reuven wondered why the devil he'd bothered coming in. Mr. Sadorowicz departed, still coughing.

Yetta came in again. ”Here's Mrs. Radofsky and her daughter, Miriam. She's here for Miriam's teta.n.u.s booster.”

”All right,” Reuven answered. Then he brightened: Mrs. Radofsky was a nice-looking brunette not far from his own age, while Miriam, who was about two, gave him a high-wattage little-girl smile. ”h.e.l.lo,” Reuven said to her mother. ”I'm afraid I'm going to make her unhappy for a little while. Her arm may swell up and be tender for a couple of days, and she may run a bit of a fever. If it's anything more than that, bring her back and we'll see what we can do.” It wouldn't be much, but he didn't say that.

He rubbed Miriam's arm with an alcohol-soaked cotton swab. She giggled at the sensation of cold, then shrieked when he injected her. He sighed. He'd known she would. He taped a square of gauze over the injection site.

Mrs. Radofsky cuddled and comforted her daughter till she forgot about the horrific indignity she'd just suffered. ”Thank you, Doctor,” she said. ”I appreciate that, even if Miriam doesn't. I want to do everything I can to keep her well. She's all I've got to remember her father by.”

”Oh?” Reuven said.

”He got... caught in the rioting last year,” Mrs. Radofsky-the widow Radofsky-said. As Reuven expressed sympathies, she asked Yetta, ”And what do I owe you?” Reuven hoped the receptionist would give her a break on the bill, but she didn't.

The Polish Tosevite named Casimir pointed proudly to the shuttlecraft port. He bowed to Nesseref: not the Race's posture of respect but, she'd learned, an equivalent the Big Uglies often used. ”You sees, superior female?” he said, speaking the language of the Race badly but understandably. ”Field is ready for usings.”

”I see.” Nesseref tried to sound happier than she felt. Then she made the affirmative gesture. ”Yes, it is ready for use. That is a truth, and I am very glad to see it.”

During the fighting, the Deutsche had done their best to render the shuttlecraft port unusable. By what the males from the conquest fleet said, their best was far better than it had been during the earlier round of combat. They'd plastered it with bomblets from the air, just as the Race might have done. Some of the bomblets were concrete-busters; others were antipersonnel weapons, and had had to be disposed of with great care-they could blow the foot off a male or female of the Race, or, for that matter, off a Big Ugly. Despite the Race's best efforts, a couple of them had done exactly that. They lurked in the weeds off the edges of the port's concrete landing area. Nesseref wasn't altogether sure every single one of them had been disposed of even yet.

And, with resources so scarce after the fighting ended, Casimir's construction crew had had to repair the landing field with hand tools rather than power machines. Nesseref had never imagined Big Uglies slapping hot asphalt into holes and smacking it down flat with shovels. That gave the shuttlecraft port a curiously mottled appearance, and contributed to her feelings of unease about it.

She had other reasons for feeling uneasy, too. Pointing, she said, ”Your patches are not as strong as the concrete they replace-is that not also a truth?”

”It are, superior female,” Casimir admitted ungrammatically. ”But the patchings will do well enough. One of this days, make all pretties again. Pretty not importants. Neat not importants. Working are importants.”

”There is some truth in what you say,” Nesseref admitted.

”Are much truthings in what I say,” Casimir answered.

Nesseref didn't want to admit that. The locals' whole way of doing things struck her as slipshod. They had a habit of fixing things just well enough to get by for a while: that well and no better. As a result, they were always mending, tinkering, repairing, where the Race would have done things right the first time and saved itself a lot of trouble.

Sometimes, work that was fast and sloppy, work that would last for a while but not too long, was good enough. Nesseref suspected that was the case here. Better repairs would come, but they could wait. For now, the shuttlecraft port was usable.

A male of the Race waved to Nesseref from the control building, off to one side of the patched concrete. She skittered off toward him without so much as turning an eye turret back toward Casimir. She wouldn't have been so rude to a member of the Race, but that thought didn't cross her mind till she'd gone a long way from the Big Ugly. She shrugged as she trotted along. It wasn't as if he were a particular friend, as Mordechai Anielewicz was.

”Well, Shuttlecraft Pilot, are we operational?” the male asked. ”Does everything meet with your approval?”

”Senior Port Technician, I believe we are,” Nesseref answered. ”The field is not all it could be, but it can be used for operations.”

”Good,” the technician said. ”This was also my opinion, but I am glad to have it confirmed by one who will actually fly a shuttlecraft.”

”It will be good to have shuttlecraft coming in and going out again, too,” Nesseref said. ”This subregion has been cut off from direct contact with our s.p.a.ce fleet for too long now. Air transport is all very well, but we did not come to Tosev 3 in aircraft.”

”Indeed,” the shuttlecraft technician said. ”Unlimited access to s.p.a.ce and its resources and the mobility it gives us are our princ.i.p.al remaining advantages over the Big Uglies.”

”I suppose you are right, but, if you are, that is a genuinely depressing thought,” Nesseref said. The technician only shrugged. Maybe that meant he didn't find it depressing. More likely, it meant he did, but didn't know what the Race could do about it. Nesseref shrugged. She didn't know what the Race could do about it, either.

The first shuttlecraft that had come into western Poland since the fighting stopped landed the next day. It disgorged a new regional subadministrator to replace Bunim, who was now only radioactive dust. The female, whose name was Orssev, looked around in disapproval verging on horror. ”What a miserable place to find oneself,” she said. ”Is it always so cold here?”

Listening to her carp, Nesseref began to understand why males from the conquest fleet complained about males and females from the colonization fleet. Nesseref was a female from the colonization fleet herself, of course, but even she could see that Orssev was not inclined to give Poland a fair chance.

And she knew things Orssev didn't. ”Superior female,” she said, ”this is the end of the period of relatively good good weather in this area. We shall have most of a year of truly bad, truly freezing weather on the way-a year of Home's, I mean.” weather in this area. We shall have most of a year of truly bad, truly freezing weather on the way-a year of Home's, I mean.”