The doctor exchanged glances with the nun and then seemed to come to a decision. “Very well,” he said. “When you were brought in, your foot was badly damaged, and you’d lost a good deal of blood. You were also suffering from exposure and shock, which meant we couldn’t operate as soon as we would have liked, and by the time we did, there was a good deal of infection—”
Oh, God, Mike thought. They had to amputate the whole leg.
“And after the first surgery you contracted pneumonia, so we had to wait longer than we wished to operate again. There was also considerable damage to the muscles and tendons—”
“I want to see it,” Mike said, and the nun glanced quickly at the doctor. “Now.”
The doctor frowned and then said, “Sister Carmody, if you’d help him to sit up,” and bent over to turn a crank at the foot of the bed.
The nun put her hand behind his back for support as the bed came up. His head swerved and spun. He swallowed hard, determined not to vomit. “Are you feeling dizzy?” she asked.
Mike didn’t trust himself to shake his head. “No,” he said, watching as the doctor pulled back the blanket and sheet, revealing his pajama-clad leg and his ankle and beyond it, a knobby lump of gauze in the general shape of a foot.
They didn’t cut it off, Mike thought, weak with relief. He lay back limply against the nun’s arm. The foot bones are still there, and the rest can be repaired as soon as I get back to Oxford.
“It will take some time to heal, but there’s no reason you won’t be able to walk again, though it will require additional surgeries. But just now you need to work on resting and regaining your strength. You’re not to worry.”
Easy for you to say, he thought. You’re not a hundred and twenty years from home with an injured foot and primitive medical care and in an environment you haven’t researched and that they will throw you out of as soon as they find out you’re a civilian.
And why didn’t they know that? They knew about his unfouling the ship’s propeller, which meant the Commander had brought him in. Then why hadn’t he told them his name?
He might not have remembered it, Mike thought. He’d immediately christened him Kansas and called him that from then on, but that didn’t explain why he hadn’t told them he was a reporter.
Mike drifted off to sleep still trying to figure it out, and dreamed of the drop. It wouldn’t open. “It can’t,” Private Hardy said. “It doesn’t exist.”
“Why not?” Mike said and saw it wasn’t Hardy, it was the dead soldier who’d been tangled in the propeller. “What’s happened to the drop?”
“You weren’t supposed to do it,” the dead soldier said, shaking his head sadly. “You changed everything.”
Mike woke drenched in a clammy sweat. Oh, God, what if his actions had altered events?
Saving a single soldier can’t change the course of the war, he told himself. There were 350,000 soldiers on those beaches. But what if Hardy was supposed to have saved an officer’s life there on the beach, an officer who’d be crucial to the success of D-Day? Or what if he was supposed to have been rescued by some other boat, or by one of the destroyers? What if he was the man who’d spotted the U-boat that would otherwise have torpedoed it, and without him it would be lost with all hands? And what if that destroyer had been the one that had sunk the Bismarck? What if they didn’t sink it, and we ended up losing the war to the Germans?
That’s why the retrieval team hasn’t come, Mike thought, shivering uncontrollably. Because—
“Oh, God,” he said to the dead soldier, “who won the war?”
“No one as yet,” the nun on night duty said cheerfully, “but I’ve no doubt we will in the end. Having a bad dream?” She took a thermometer out of her starched apron pocket, put it under his tongue, and laid her hand on his forehead. “Your fever’s back up.”
He felt a rush of relief. It’s the fever, he thought. You’re not thinking clearly. You can’t have altered events. The laws of time travel won’t let you. But they weren’t supposed to have let him get anywhere near a divergence point either. And Hardy had said—
“Here, these will make you feel better,” the nun said, handing him two tablets and a glass of water. Thank