eleventh century, each separately or all at once, using a buried throat mike, tongue
switches, and a body antenna, whether she was at the Tellus Prime end or the Tellus
Tertius end of the aid-station gates.
In addition to these hook-ups she was in touch with Zeb and Deety Carter, in Gay
Deceiver, at 30.000 feet over the English Channel – too high for bombers, too high
for Messerschmidts or Fokkers, too high for AA fire of that year. Guy had agreed to
be there only if she was allowed to pick her own altitude. (Gay is a pacifist with,
in her opinion, a deplorable amount of combat experience.) But at that altitude Gay
was sure that she could spot Heinkels taking off and forming up long before the
British coastal radar could see them.
As a result of rehearsals at Potemkin Village, drills involving every casualty we
could think of, the surgical teams had been rearranged, with most of them held back
on the Boondock side of the gates. `Triage’ of a sort would be practised; the
hopeless cases would be rushed through to Boondock, where no case is hopeless if the
brain is alive and not too damaged. There Doctors Ishtar and Galahad would head
their usual teams (who need not be volunteers for combat; they would never be in
Coventry). The hopeless cases, repaired, would be gated to Beulahland for days or
weeks of recovery, then gated back to Coventry before dawn.
Cas and Pol had been volunteered (by their wives my daughters Laz and Lor) as
stretcher bearers, to move the worst cases from Coventry to gurney floats on the
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Boondock side.
It had been decided that too many surgical teams and -too much equipment showing up
out of nowhere as soon as the sirens sounded would alert Father unnecessarily, make
him smell a rat. But, when the wounded started pouring in, he would be too busy to
notice or care.
Jubal and Gillian were a reserve team, and would go through when needed. Dagmar
would go through when Deety in Gay Deceiver reported that the bombers were on their
way, so that Dagmar would meet Father – Dr Johnson – as he first poked his head in.
When the sirens sounded, Lazarus and I would go through, already masked and gowned,
with me as his scrub nurse. I’m an adequate surgeon but I’m a whiz as an operating
nurse – much more practice at it. We figured that three of us could do what might
have to be done at `all clear’, the end of the raid: grab Father and’ kidnap him –
drag him through the gate, sit him down in Boondock, and explain things to him
there… including the idea that he could have the works – rejuvenation and expert
tutoring in really advanced therapy and still be returned to Coventry 8 April 1941.
If he insisted. If he had any wish to.
But by then I hoped and expected that, with Tamara’s help, Father could be made to
see the Quixotic futility of going back to the Battle of Britain when that battle
had been won more than mo millennia earlier.
With Tamara’s help – She was my secret weapon. By a concatenation of miracles I had
married my lover from the stars… and thereby married my son, to my amazement and
great happiness. Could more miracles let me marry the only man I have always loved,
totally and without reservation? Father would certainly marry Tamara, given the
chance – any man would! – and Tamara would then see to it that Father married me. I
hoped.
If not, it would be enough and more than enough simply to have Father alive again.
I had gone back through the gate to Boondock when I heard Gwen Hazel’s voice:
‘Godiva’s Horse to all stations. Deety reports bandits in the air and forming up.
Expect sirens in approx eighty minutes. Acknowledge.’
Gwen Hazel was standing beside me by the gates in the hospital, but this was a
communication check as much as an intelligence. My own comm gear was simple: a
throat mike not buried but merely under a bandage I did not need; a `hearing aid’