Connie Willis - Blackout

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. It’s important.”

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 God, he thought. At least they’d had aspirin. He swallowed them eagerly and lay back. “Try to sleep,” she whispered and continued through the ward, her flashlight bobbing like Jonathan’s had in the water, signaling Hardy.

Historians can’t change history, Mike told himself, clenching his chattering teeth, waiting for the aspirin to take effect. If my unfouling the propeller would have altered the course of the war, the net would have sent me through a month later. Or to Scotland. Or it wouldn’t have let me through at all. And the reason the retrieval team’s not here is because it never occurred to them to look in a convent.

But when Sister Carmody came to take his temperature in the morning, he asked her if he could see a newspaper so he could make sure the war was going the way it was supposed to. “You must be feeling better,” she said, smiling her pretty smile. “Do you think you could sit up and take some broth?” and when he nodded, hurried off, to return shortly with a bowl of broth.

“Did you bring the newspaper?” he asked.

“You mustn’t worry yourself over the war,” she said brightly, helping him sit up and propping pillows behind his back. “You must concentrate all your energy on getting well.”

“What energy?” he said. Sitting up in bed, even with her help, took a tremendous effort, and when Sister Carmody handed him the bowl, his hands shook.

“Let me help with that.” She took it from him. “Has anything come back?” she asked, feeding him a spoonful of broth. “Have you remembered what happened? Or the unit you were with?”

Maybe he should tell her he’d remembered so they’d transfer him to a civilian hospital where the retrieval team could find him. But what if they’d already checked the civilian hospitals and determined he wasn’t there? And a different doctor might be determined to operate. “No, not yet,” he said.

“You talked a good deal when you first came,” she said. “You kept murmuring something about a ‘drop.’ We thought perhaps you might be a parachutist. Isn’t that what they call it when they jump out of the plane, making a drop?”

“I don’t know. Did I say anything else?”

“He said ‘Oxford,’” Fordham said from the bed next to him.

“Oxford. Could that be where you’re from?” the nun asked.

“I don’t know,” Mike said and frowned as if trying to remember. “It might be. I can’t-”

“Well, you mustn’t worry,” she said, and offered him another spoonful, but it was too much effort to even sip at it. He waved the spoon away and lay back against the pillows, exhausted, and he must have fallen asleep because when he opened his eyes, she was gone.

“Did you bring me a newspaper?” he asked when she came to take his temperature again.

“Your fever’s back,” she said, writing it in the chart. “I’ll fetch you something for it.”

“Don’t forget my newspaper,” he said, and when she returned without it and with the blessed aspirin, he said slyly, “I thought seeing a paper might help me to remember.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said and left.

“Which is what she always says when I ask her out,” Fordham said. “It means no.”

Asked her out? But he was a mere boy, and she was a nun-

“I don’t blame her,” Fordham said. “I couldn’t exactly take her dancing, could I? And by the time I’m out of this bed, she’ll already be engaged to one of the doctors,” but Mike had stopped listening.

She wasn’t a nun, in spite of the wimple and veil, in spite of the title “Sister.” She was a nurse. Which I’d have known if I’d had time to research this era properly. But if she wasn’t a nun, then this wasn’t a convent, and his theory of why the retrieval team hadn’t found him didn’t hold water. So where were they? They should have been here long before now.

Unless they didn’t exist. Unless the net had malfunctioned and let him go through to somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be and he had altered the course of events. Unfouling the propeller wasn’t the only thing he’d done. He’d steered the Commander around that submerged sailboat, he’d helped sailors up over the side, he’d hoisted a dog on board. And in a chaotic system, any action, no matter how inconsequential, could affect-

“Sister Carmody!” he shouted, struggling to sit up. “Sister Carmody!”

“What is it?” Fordham said, alarmed. “What’s wrong?”

“I’ve got to see a newspaper! Now!”

“I have yesterday’s Herald here,” Fordham said. “Will that do?”

“Yes.”

“The problem is how to get it to you. I can’t reach far enough to get it over to you, I’m afraid. Can you get out of bed, do you think?”

I have to, Mike thought, but when he tried to sit up, hot and cold and nausea washed over him, and he had to lie back, swallowing hard.

“I could read it to you, if you like,” Fordham offered.

“Thank you.”

Fordham patted around on the bed for the newspaper and propped it up against his elevated arm. “Let’s see, a rector in Tunbridge Wells rang his church’s bells in violation of the official edict that they’re only to be rung to signal invasion-”

That’s why I didn’t hear the bells that night on the beach, Mike thought.

“-and was fined one pound ten,” Fordham said. “There’s been an overwhelming response to Lord Beaverbrook’s Spitfire drive. They’ve collected five tons of aluminum saucepans alone. Sir Godfrey Kingsman is rehearsing a new production of King Lear at-”

“Isn’t there anything about the war?”

“The war… let’s see…” Fordham muttered. “A barrage balloon broke loose from its moorings and drifted into the spire of St. Albans Church and damaged some of the slates.”

“I meant, news about how the war’s going.”

“Badly,” he said. “As usual. The Italians hit one of our bases in Egypt-”

Egypt? Had Britain been in Egypt in August? He didn’t know enough about the war in North Africa to know what was supposed to have been happening there then. “What about the…?” He hesitated. Had they been calling it the Battle of Britain at this point? “-the air war?”

Fordham nodded. “The Germans attacked one of our convoys yesterday, and the RAF shot down sixteen of their planes. We lost seven.” He turned the page, rattling the sheets. “Good Lord, the Prime Minister-”

“What about the Prime Minister?” Mike said sharply. Oh, God, what if something had happened to Churchill? England could never have won the war without him. If he’d been killed-

“He looks dreadful in this photograph. It’s of him rejecting Germany’s latest peace proposal, but he looks like a suet pudding.”

Mike let out the breath he’d been holding. England was still refusing to surrender, the RAF was still holding off the Luftwaffe, and Churchill was all right.

Fordham had finished the news stories and was reading the personal ads: “Anyone having information regarding the whereabouts of Pvt. Derek Huntsford, last seen at Dunkirk, please contact Mr. and Mrs. J. Huntsford, Chifford, Devon.” Fordham shook his head. “He must not have made it back. He wasn’t as lucky as you, poor chap.”

Lucky, Mike thought. But at least he hadn’t altered events. And the war was still on track.

Fordham was reading another ad. “To let, country home in Kent. Restful location…”

Restful, Mike thought, and fell asleep.

He jerked awake to the up-and-down wail of sirens. And shouting. One of the patients, in pajamas and bare feet, was waving a flashlight wildly around the dark ward. “Wake up!” he shouted, shining the light full in Mike’s face. “They’re here!”