coat and had an antiquated stethoscope around his neck. “Has he told you who he is yet?” he was asking the nun.
“No,” she said. “I came as soon as I saw he was awake—”
“What day is it?” Mike demanded.
“Awake and talking,” the doctor said. “How are you feeling?”
“What day is it?”
“August tenth,” the nurse said.
“Good heavens, as late as that?” Fordham said.
“How are you feeling?” the doctor asked again, and the nurse cut in, “What’s your name?”
“There wasn’t any identification on you when you were admitted,” the doctor explained.
So the retrieval team wouldn’t have been able to find him even if it had occurred to them to look here.
“It’s Mike,” he said. “Mike Davis.”
The doctor wrote it on the chart. “Do you remember what unit you were with?”
“Unit?” Mike said blankly.
“Or your commanding officer?”
They think I’m a soldier, Mike thought. They think I was rescued from Dunkirk. And why not? He’d been on a boat full of soldiers, and the fact that he hadn’t been in uniform wouldn’t mean anything. Half of the soldiers hadn’t been either. He tried to remember what had happened to his papers. They’d been in his jacket, and he’d taken it off when he went in the water.
But why hadn’t they realized he was an American? He remembered talking in his delirium. Maybe his L-and-A implant had stopped working. Implants sometimes went haywire when an historian got sick.
The doctor was waiting, his pen poised above the chart.
“I—” Mike began, and then hesitated. If his implant wasn’t working, he shouldn’t tell them he was an American. And if this was a military hospital, he shouldn’t tell them he was a civilian. They’d throw him out. But military hospitals didn’t have nuns.
“Never mind,” the doctor said before he could come up with a good answer. “You’ve had a difficult time. Do you remember how you came to be wounded?”
“No,” Mike said. It must have happened when the explosion blew the dead soldier’s body free of the propeller—
“He was hit by shrapnel,” the nun said helpfully, and to the doctor, “He was in the water attempting to unfoul his ship’s propeller when the ship came under attack, and he heroically dove in and freed it.”
The doctor said, “Sister, may I speak to you for a moment?” He and the nun walked away, their heads together.
“… Memory loss…” Mike heard him say and “extremely common in cases like this,” and “… concussion from the blast… don’t press him on it… usually returns after a few days…”
Jesus, Mike thought, they think I’ve got amnesia. But maybe that was a good thing. It would give him a chance to figure out if his L-and-A had stopped working and whether this place only took military patients, and now that he’d told them his name, he might only need to stall for another day or two, and the team would come and get him out of here and safely back to Oxford. If it wasn’t already too late, and they’d amputated his foot. If they hadn’t, it could be repaired with nerve and muscle grafts and tissue regeneration no matter how damaged it was, but if they’d already cut it off—
The nun and the doctor had finished conferring. “Let’s have a listen to your chest, shall we?” the doctor said, handing the chart to the nun; he stuck the ends of the stethoscope in his ears and pushed the blanket down and Mike’s hospital gown up, baring his chest.
“Did you have to take my foot off?” Mike asked, careful to keep his accent neutral, neither English nor American-sounding.
“Take a deep breath,” the doctor said. He listened and then moved the stethoscope to a different spot. “And another.” He looked up at the nun, nodding. “A bit better. Not as much involvement in the left lung as there was.”
“Do I have pneumonia?” Mike blurted out, and his implant was obviously working now. His pronunciation of “pneumonia” was unmistakably American.
The doctor didn’t seem to notice. He was looking at the chart. “Has his temperature come down at all?”
“It was thirty-nine this morning.”
“Good,” he said, handed the chart to the nun, and started to walk away.
“Do I have pneumonia?” Mike persisted. “Did you amputate my foot?”
“You let us worry about the medical side of things,” the doctor said heartily. “And you concentrate on—”
“Did you?”
“You shouldn’t think about any of that now,” the nun said soothingly. “Try to rest.”
“No,” Mike said, shaking his head. Mistake. The movement made him violently sick. “I want to know the worst.