and which with all the forms clipped in various places inside was nearly three inches thick, from the medical technician, nodded and smiled, and said, “Thank you.”
Major Martin headed for the opening in the nurses’ station.
“That won’t be necessary, Major,” he said. “I won’t need you. Thank you.”
“Sir, he has visitors,” Major Martin said, more than a little annoyed and disappointed not to be able to exercise her prerogative of accompanying the chief of internal medical services while he saw a patient on her ward.
“Well,” General McClintock said, “he’s about to have at least one more.”
“He’s in 421, General,” Major Martin said.
“Yes, I know,” General McClintock said. “Thank you.”
He walked down the corridor, his rubber-heeled and -soled shoes making faint squeaking noises on the waxed linoleum.
When he pushed open the door to 421, there were three men inside, including the patient, who was sitting, dressed in civilian clothing, smoking a very large light green cigar, on the bed. The patient started to get off the bed when he saw General McClintock, but McClintock, smiling, quickly put up his hand to stop him.
“Stay where you are, Captain,” McClintock said.
General McClintock saw that the room was decorated for the holiday season as seen through the eyes of an officer like this one. The patient had obviously visited the Post Exchange Branch, where he had purchased not only a plastic model of the HU-1B “Huey” but four adorable little dolls. One of them was Santa Claus; two were dressed as nurses and one as a doctor.
The Huey was hanging from the central light fixture. The adorable nurse and doctor dolls were hanging, their necks realistically broken, from pipe-cleaner nooses attached to the Huey’s skids. Santa Claus straddled the tail boom of the helicopter, cradling a machine gun in his arms.
The chart described the patient as a Negro male, twenty-six years old, five feet eleven and one half inches tall, weight 144 pounds. There was a note stating that this was twenty-one pounds less than he had weighed at his last annual physical examination.
Dr. McClintock noted quickly, professionally, that the patient’s eyeballs were clear. When they had brought him in, he looked as if he had been liable to bleed to death through the eyeballs. And he had been ten pounds lighter then than he was now.
Dr. McClintock guessed the patient’s visitors to be his father and brother, not because they looked alike, but because he had been ordered to restrict his visitors to his immediate family. The younger of them, the brother, a tall, light-skinned, hawk-faced man, was well, even elegantly, dressed in a superbly tailored glen plaid suit and a white-collared faintly striped blue shirt. The father was short, squat, flat-faced, very dark, and what Dr. McClintock thought of as “comfortably crumpled.” He wore a tweed jacket, rumpled flannels, rubber soled “health” shoes and a button-down collar tattersall shirt without a necktie.
“How do you feel, Captain?” Dr. McClintock asked.
“Frankly, sir,” Captain Lunsford said politely, “not quite as happy as I was an hour ago, when I thought I was being turned loose.”
Dr. McClintock raised his eyes from Lunsford’s chart and smiled. “All things come to he who waits, Captain,” he said. “We’re still going to turn you loose. But not just now. Soon.”
“Today?” Lunsford asked.
“Today,” McClintock said. “Shortly.”
“May I see the chart, Doctor?” Lunsford’s father asked. When McClintock looked at him in surprise, he added, “I’m a physician. ”
“Excuse my manners, General,” George Washington Lunsford said. “Doctor, may I present my father, Dr. Lunsford? And my brother, Dr. Lunsford?”
“How do you do, Doctor?” McClintock said, handing the elder Dr. Lunsford the chart.
“Dad is a surgeon, Doctor. My brother is a shrink,” Lunsford said. Then, when McClintock smiled, he added, “Before Charley became a shrink, Dad used to say that shrinks were failed surgeons. ”
“George, for Christ’s sake!” the younger Dr. Lunsford snapped.
“I’ve heard that,” Dr. McClintock said, smiling, “but rarely when one of them was in the same room.”
“My God!” the elder Dr. Lunsford said. “I have never seen a case of that before.” He extended the chart to Dr. McClintock, pointing at a line with his finger.
“It’s pretty rare,” Dr. McClintock said. “Your son has been regarded as a gift from heaven by our parasitologists. I understand he has his own refrigerator in their lab.”
“I’ll bet he does,” the elder Dr. Lunsford said, and showed the chart to his other son, who shook his head in disbelief.
“And they are going to give him his own glass cabinet in the Armed Forces