Ring of Fire III (3 page)

All except for the blue one—which corresponded to a spot right at the throat (and was the “auric color” that Gribbleflotz had told the king was his own. George made that one glow strongly. The king stared at the wand in fascination.

“Ah, now you see, all of your chakras are unbalanced,” Tom told him. “The only strong one is the Muskogee chakra, the chakra of communication and intellect. You are a man of your mind, Your Majesty. Your mind is the most powerful part of you. But by strengthening that part of your energy exclusively, you weaken the rest of your etheric body, exactly as if you concentrated on strengthening only your hand, until you could crush a walnut with your fist, but your legs would not take you across a room unaided.”

Since he couldn’t remember the Indian names for the chakras, he had finally just used the names of the home towns of some of his old friends. The chakra at the top of the head he called “Sheboygan,” followed by Mishawaka, Muskogee, Oskaloosa, Chillicothe, Oolagah and Austin.

The king nodded. “That is how I feel ever since
Doktor
Gribbleflotz was reading my aura and telling me it was blue!” he exclaimed. “I thought I was to be—” He broke off, looking perplexed.

“Now I will be examining your chakras with my colleague and assistant, Gupta,” Tom carried on blithely. “Then we will know what is to be done to re-balance you.”

So the king sat in the red light while Tom dipped his fingers in a little water and made the biggest bowl “sing” by running his wet finger around the top of it, chanting nonsense syllables the entire time. The king’s eyes widened at that; evidently no one had invented the glass harmonica yet. Tibetan “singing bowls” were made of brass and made to sing in much the same fashion but using a wooden mallet—Tom had never quite mastered that, but he was pretty good at making wineglasses sing. George made mystical passes, made red silk handkerchiefs appear and vanish, did the same with glowing balls that he rolled around on his hands. Then they repeated the whole routine with orange light from an orange pane of glass, a higher pitched bowl, and so on right up to the white light. George meanwhile was getting a wealth of information.

By the time they were done, poor Wallenstein was exhausted and more than willing to go back to his bed while Tom and George “consulted” and “made their calculations and charts” to present to him the following day.

In reality they went back to the Roths’, and Tom holed up with the radio and the closely-written pages of notes, consulting not with the stars, but with Dr. Nichols back in Magdeburg. Some things were obvious—Wallenstein had gout, for instance, a common complaint among nobles whose diets were worse than any American teenager who lived on fast food. His heart was definitely dodgy. By process of elimination, they figured he had a chronic infection somewhere.

“The heart’s going to kill him eventually,” Nichols said, “I’d say three, four years.” Tom clearly heard the frustration in Nichols’ voice, and he sympathized. Things that could have been treated with a couple generic prescriptions up-time were deadly now, and sometimes he could tell it grated on the Doc that Tom often knew more about what worked in the here and now than he did, with all of his experience and medical knowledge. “But you’ve got foxglove to keep him going, and the point is mostly to get the baby past the danger zone of infancy, according to Mike and Ed.”

“We can improve his diet some, if I put enough mystical spin on it. Garlic and kelp might clear up that infection, especially if it’s his tonsils; heck, I know I can make a Lister’s Fluid he can gargle with. Or if it’s in an infected tooth, maybe Edith can get him to get the tooth pulled.” Tom rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. “I’ll see what I can figure out. He’s a tough old bastard, and he might surprise us. Look how long Henry the Eighth lasted, and he not only had a lot of the same problems, he had an abscessed leg too.”

“I hate this,” Nichols said, after a long pause. “I hate knowing that I know what to do, if only I had a modern operating theater, if only I had the right drugs, if only—”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Doc,” Tom interrupted. “Look at it this way. You and me, we’re still managing to save people no one down-time could before.” He said that, and he knew as he said it that it wouldn’t help much. Nichols was a real doctor; he had never been in medicine for the money, but because medicine was his calling. “And have patience. We’re getting antibiotics. We’ve got chloramphenicol and even some small amounts of penicillin. We’ll get there.”

“Providing quacks like Gribbleflotz don’t kill them first,” Doc said sourly. “All right, I’ve used up my allotted time. Good luck.”

Tom didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye; the voice of someone else, calling another station, immediately filled the speakers. He turned off the set, gathered up his notes, and headed for bed. Enough for now; tomorrow they’d start treatments and see if their guesses were going to work.

* * *

The treatments had begun to work. Tom really had not expected such a quick result, but already Wallenstein’s color was better, his breathing had eased thanks to the rosemary-infused steam he was inhaling, and Tom thought his BP might be going down. That might have been partly the placebo effect, partly the effect of just getting some of the king’s other conditions under control.

Whatever, there was progress, and it was beginning to look as if he and George would be able to go back to Grantville and leave things in Edith’s hands.

Which was, of course, the moment when everything went pear-shaped.

* * *

“I’m going to kill him,” George said for the fifty-sixth time. “I am going to mug Gribbleflotz in a dark alley, tear out his liver, and feed it to him.”

Dr. Gribbleflotz had been closeted with the king all morning, and the longer he was in there, the more convinced Tom became that things were not looking good for Chakras versus Kirlian.

Still. They had an ace in the hole, and that was Edith. Wallenstein trusted her as he trusted no one else.

But George was pacing up and down the antechamber they had been sent to wait in, muttering. Tom had never seen him this agitated before. Something more was going on here than Tom was aware of, obviously, but if George wasn’t going to say anything—

That was when Edith entered the room, and she didn’t even have to say anything; the expression on her homely face told both of them everything they needed to know.

George was already angry—but it was Tom who suddenly felt himself overcome with fury.

“Come on,” he growled, “Follow my lead.” And before Edith could say or do anything at all, he charged towards the king’s private chambers. Fortunately, Edith managed to sprint ahead of them, or they might have gotten skewered on the halberds of Wallenstein’s guards.

As it was, when they burst through the doors together, both Gribbleflotz and the king nearly jumped out of their skins.

“Thanks be to the Lord Jesus!” Tom bellowed. “I am here in time! Gupta! The violet ray! This is an emergency!”

And he leapt, not for the king, but for Gribbleflotz.

“Doctor, God save us,” he shouted, pulling the first thing he could lay his hands on out of his sleeve—it was an atomizer full of Lister solution—and spraying Gribbleflotz liberally. “Your chakras are fluctuating so dangerously that we felt the effects in the antechambers!”

George meanwhile had fished out the little flashlight they’d put a tiny scrap of blue theatrical gel on and was playing it into Gribbleflotz’s startled eyes.

“I beg your pardon, Majesty,” Tom continued, waving a quartz crystal point all over Gribbleflotz’s upper torso. “We dared not wait any longer. Your devoted doctor has put his own life in jeopardy by treating so many sufferers. His Mishawaka is utterly drained, his Sheboygan enlarged, and the rest of his chakras so muddled it is a wonder he has not collapsed before now!”

“They are?” Gribbleflotz managed, face stricken with doubt. “It is?”

Now George took over. “When you drink wine at dinner, do you sometimes feel dizzy when you rise, sahib?” he asked, earnestly, carefully mangling his German. “Do you find yourself waking in the night with a terrible need to relieve yourself? Do you find yourself stumbling over nothing? Do you sometimes forget a word or a name that you know as well as your own?”

Gribbleflotz paled. The doubt on his face was erased by slowly growing fear.

George had managed to palm one of his little lights, and he suddenly thrust it at Gribbleflotz’s belly, where it began to flash most alarmingly. “Sahib! Dr. Thomas!” George screamed in panic. “The Mishawaka! There is no time! I must operate!”

Before anyone in the room could react, Tom shoved Gribbleflotz down into a chair, and ruthlessly yanked up or tore open his clothing, exposing a very pale belly. In an instant, George had plunged his fingers into that belly, as both the king and Gribbleflotz’s eyes bulged and the king’s guards backed away, making furtive signs against evil.

One of them fainted dead away as George pulled his hand back out, bloody and sticky, and opened them to reveal a mass of what looked like bloody hair and things best left unidentified. “You see!” George shouted. “You see! It was almost too late!”

Gribbleflotz fainted dead away.

* * *

Back in Grantville at last, Tom and George gave the president of the State of Thuringia-Franconia their reports in person. Ed Piazza had come up from the new provincial capital at Bamberg to hear their report, on his way to Magdeburg. He’d pass the information along to Mike Stearns and Rebecca Abrabanel later, when the current political ruckus settled down. The dynastic situation in Bohemia was important but not exactly an urgent matter.

“Although I thought you said no psychic surgery,” Tom said. “I thought—”

“Look,” George growled. “I’m not proud of myself, all right? I hate those bastards. But we needed something dramatic, something that couldn’t be explained away as up-timer science, and we needed it right then. I had the feeling we might, so I helped myself to some stuff from the kitchen and a hairball one of the cats coughed up that morning. When I saw he wasn’t falling for your crystal waving, I played my ace. Do
not
ask me to do it again.”

“I won’t,” Tom replied. He didn’t add that he was making no promises about Ed Piazza or Mike Stearns.

“So, the treatments are going well, then?” Ed prodded.

Tom nodded. “Wallenstein’s actually making some improvement—he’s not going on any long hikes, but he’s able to do pretty much everything that a king needs to do on most days. Edith’s pleased. She asked me about the dyes I used in his medicines. I just told her they’re safe enough. I didn’t have the guts to tell her that Doc Nichols said congestive heart failure is going to kill him long before the dye will.”

Ed nodded with sympathy, then one corner of his mouth quirked up in a half smile. “And just what is this “special treatment” she keeps objecting to in her letters?

“Oh...” Tom blushed. “That...”

“Go on—” Piazza ordered.

“Well...you know that the ‘root chakra’ is supposed to be located in the...ah...”

“Goolies,” George supplied helpfully.

Ed nodded. “Right, I follow you. And since you’re balancing all the chakras you can’t leave that one out.”

“Right.” Tom blushed further. “And the, ah...goolies...can’t drink. So we can’t exactly give them medicine. Except topically. But all the medicines are colored.”

“And—”

“So the salve is colored. Blue, because the root energy is supposed to get boosted.” By now Tom felt like his face was on fire. “Because a lot of impotence is psychological and I figured—well—”

“Right. And?”

“Well, besides coloring the salve, I really needed something that was going to, you know, remind the king that the stuff is working. So the...ah...the dye is kind of permanent.”

Tom watched as Ed mentally went over everything he had just said, then stared at them both incredulously.

“You don’t mean—”

“He does mean,” George said, with a grin on his face. “Old Tom gave the king a case of blue balls.”

Birds of a Feather

Charles E. Gannon

Owen Roe O’Neill started at the burst of gunfire, not because—as a veteran of the Lowlands Campaigns—he was unaccustomed to the sounds of combat, but because such sounds were now out of place near Brussels in 1635. Old habit had him reaching toward his saber, but the pickets at the gate leading into the combined field camps of the
tercios
Tyrconnell and Preston seemed utterly unconcerned by the reports. As O’Neill let his hand slip away from the hilt, his executive officer, Felix O’Brian, jutted a chin forward: never at ease atop a horse, O’Brian didn’t dare take either of his hands from the reins to point. “So what would all that be, then?”

Ahead and to the right, a score of the men of
tercio
Tyrconnell were skulking about in the trenchworks surrounding the commander’s blockhouse. So far as Owen could make out, they seemed to be engaged in some perverse, savage game of hide-and-seek with an almost equal number of troopers from
tercio
Preston. As he approached, the soldiers of the Tyrconnell regiment repeatedly bobbed and weaved around a sequence of corners, usually in pairs. One stayed low, training a handgun or musketoon on the next bend in the trenchworks while the other dodged forward. If one of Preston’s men popped his head around that far corner, the man with the gun fired, immediately reaching back for another weapon. If the approach was unopposed, the advancing trooper finished his short charge by sliding up to the corner and—without even checking first—lobbing a grenade around it.

Of course, these “dummy” grenades simply made a kind of ragged belching sound as they emitted puffs of thin grey smoke: rather anticlimactic. But the training and the tactics were startlingly new. And quite insane.

“This is what comes of O’Donnell’s visit to the up-timers,” Owen grumbled to O’Brian. “Thank God he’s given over his command.”

“It’s only
rumored
that he’s resigned his command,” amended O’Brian carefully.