Leo Frankowski

we learn to do everything properly.

Chapter Five
    JUNE 5,2001
     
    O NE OF the surprising
things about commanding large forces is that eager, dedicated subordinates
are often more trouble than slovenly ones. You must be ever on your guard. The
slightest hint can be taken literally and blown all out of proportion.
    The problem is as old
as the chain of command. A general drops a hint; a colonel makes a
suggestion; a major writes a memo; a captain gives an order; a lieutenant barks a
command; and… a corporal pulls a trigger. It happened at Corregidor — the Japanese command never
intended for the death march to occur. It happened at Mai Lai — when a town was
wiped out. And it happened all too often in the course of the Symbiotic
Revolution.
    —Heinrich Copemick
    From his log tape
     
    “So what’s the
verdict, Doc?” General Hastings asked.
    “You’ve got to
stop smoking, George,” Dr. Cranford said.
    “Is that
all?”
    “Of course not.
You really must start keeping regular hours. And cut your work week down to
sixty hours. And get out a little more. Learn to relax.”
    “Look, Cranford,
work is about all I have left.”
    “George, the
tragedy that took your family happened a year ago. You can’t—”
    “Cut it.”
    “But a man can’t
mourn forever—”
    “I take it that
I’m healthy,” Hastings said.
    “Yes, but you
don’t deserve to be. There’s nothing wrong with you now that a little rest and
exercise won’t cure.”
    “You’ve been
telling me that every checkup for the last ten years.”
    “Well, why do you bother coming to me
if you don’t take my advice? I tell you,
working yourself into the ground all
the time is going to catch up with you. It’ll shorten your life,
George,” Dr. Cranford said.
    “It hasn’t yet.
Now are you going to sign my flying status papers or not?”
    “I don’t have
much choice. Air Force regulations are so damned specific about it. I don’t know why
you bother—your flight pay is
less as a general than it was as a lieutenant-colonel. But your reflexes are
perfect. Your eyesight is twenty-twenty.
Your blood pressure and elec trocardiogram
and electroencephalogram and every other damned thing are annoyingly
perfect. But George, your life style is going to catch up with you.”
    “Just sign the
paper. Doc, you’re even more crotchety than usual. Something bugging you?” Hastings asked.
    “Nothing except that I’m about to
give up my practice and take up faith
healing. That seems to be where my gifts
lie.”
    “Somebody didn’t
have the courtesy to die when you told him to?”
    “A whole bunch of somebodies. Half of
the damned Senate has walked into this office
with every organ in their flabby
bodies rotting away!
    “You know that
this is the best-equipped facility in the country. And you know that I wouldn’t tell a man he was going to die unless I ran him through every test
known to man, plus a few I thought up
myself. And then not until he
had six days to live and no hope. It’s just not some thing that a doctor
likes to do. Besides the fact that many of
them are my friends, it’s embarrassing to have to admit that my profession is of no damn use to
them!”
    “People have
been getting well?” Hastings said.
    “Scads of the
bastards! It’s driving me to drink and damned nearly to profanity!”
    “So this has
been happening to everybody?”
    “No. You’ve got
to be in Congress to get a special dispensation from whatever God or devil is
doing this to me. And seniority seems to help.”
    “You’re serious
about this?”
    “Hell yes, I’m
serious! One week I tell a senator to put his affairs in order, and the next week
he comes in with his heart
beating and his liver working and he’s alive
in front of God and everybody!”
    “Do you have any
theories about it?”
    “I thought at
first that it was something that we were doing here by accident. Turned the place
upside down for months. Checked out every batch of every drug that I’d given any one of
them. Nothing. Then I found out that two other doctors at different clinics
were doing the same damned thing. The only thing that it correlates with is you’ve got to be
a congressman.”
    “Well, have you
checked out that angle?”
    “Of course! The
three of us have checked out every item in the Capitol cafeteria. The kind of
floor wax they use. The postage
stamps. The pencils. Anything that they
would all have in common. Hell, I even sent a roll of their toliet paper to the