"Connie Willis - Schwarzschild Radius" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

I hand the barretter to Muller and go over to stand by the lantern that hangs from a nail in the beam.

"I think he should be invalided home, Herr Doktor," Muller says. He knows it is impossible, of course.
He was at the wireless the day the message came through that no one was to be invalided out for
frostbite or "other non-contagious diseases."
"Can you find me a better light?" the doctor says to him.

Muller's curiosity is so strong that he cannot bear to leave any place where something interesting is
happening. If he went up to the front, I do not think he would be able to pull himself away, and now I
expect him to make some excuse to stay, but I have forgotten that he is even more curious about the
wiring fatigue. "I will go see what has happened to Eisner's unit," he says, and opens the door. Snow flies
in, as if it had been beating against the door to get in, and the doctor and I have to push against the door
to get it shut again.

"My eyes have been hurting," I say, while we are still pushing the metal into place, so that he cannot ask
me to assist him. "They feel like sand has gotten into them."

"I have a patient with a disease I do not recognize," he says. I am relieved, though disease can kill us as
easily as a trench mortar. Soldiers die of pneumonia and dysentery and blood poisoning every day in the
dressing station, but we do not fear it the way we fear the front.

"The patient has fever, excoriated lesions, and suppurating bullae," Dr. Funkenheld says.

"Could it be boils?" I say, though of course he would recognize something so simple as boils, but he is not
listening to me, and I realize that it is not a diagnosis from me that he has come for.

"The man is a scientist, a Jew named Schwarzschild, attached to the artillery," he says, and because the
artillery are even farther back from the front lines than we are, I volunteer to go and look at the patient,
but he does not want that either.

"I must talk to the medical headquarters in Bialy-stok," he says.

"Our wireless is broken," I say, because I do not want to have to tell him why it is impossible for me to
send a message for him. We are allowed to send only military messages, and they must be sent in code,
tapped out on the telegraph key. It would take hours to send his message, even if it were possible. I hold
up the dangling wire. "At any rate, you must clear it with the commandant," but he is already writing out
the name and address on a piece of paper, as if this were a telegraph office.

"You can send the message when you get the wireless fixed. I have written out the symptoms."

I put the back on the wireless. Muller comes in, kicking the door open, and snow flies everywhere,
picking up Dr. Funkenheld's message and sending it circling around the dugout. I catch it before it spirals
into the flame of the Primus stove.

"The wiring fatigue was pinned down all night," Muller says, setting down a hand lamp. He must have
gotten it from the dressing station. "Five of them froze to death, the other eight have frostbite. The
commandant thinks there may be a bombardment tonight." He does not mention Eisner, and he does not
say what has happened to the rest of the thirty men in Eisner's unit, though I know. The front has gotten
them. I wait, holding the message in my stiff fingers, hoping Dr. Funkenheld will say, "I must go attend to
their frostbite."