Amerika by Brauna E. Pouns, Donald Wrye Read Free Book Online Page A

up somebody there.”
    “You’re really primitive, Puncher. Maybe you’d feel more at home on the other side.”
    Peter cornered Dr. Alan Drummond on the courthouse square, before the city council meeting. The chief of staff at Milford County Hospital was fiftyish, a husky black man with graying hair and a kind of delicate and battered humanity about him. Although an exile, he was a necessary commodity—a doctor—to the Milford community.
    “Got a moment, doctor?”
    “Always, Peter, for you.”
    “Ward told me about the man who died at your hospital last night. It sounded like those new Triage guidelines killed him.”
    “Drinking lighter fluid killed him. But the guidelines didn’t help any. The rule was clear. I wasn’t supposed to do a thing for him. A matter of priorities.”
    “What about your Hippocratic Oath?”
    “You’ want me to disobey the guidelines? That’s essentially the same as disobeying the National Advisory Committee.”
    “If a life is hanging in the balance, I want you to ignore them if you have to.”
    “Will you put that in writing, Peter?”
    “No.”
    A wry smile crossed Alan Drummond’s face. “That’s smart of you. Back in Philadelphia, I put something in writing once. Cost me a two-hundred-thousand-a-year practice. I wasn’t political—just doing the decent thing. Some other people didn’t quite see it that way, and now I’m in Nebraska. Nothing against your home state, Peter, but if we’re talking about circles of hell, I’ve fallen far enough, thank you very much. Far enough so that I’m keenly aware of how much farther they might have pulled me down—if the idea of minority doctors didn’t fit in quite so neatly with their propaganda. So now I think about politics and guidelines, jump when the advisory committees say jump, and worry about informers on my staff. And yet, dammit, I hate for people to die in my county if there’s a chance of saving them.”
    “My advice is pick your shots, Peter. You can’t save everybody.”
    The two men went into the council chambers. The city council met weekly in a large conference room that featured portraits of Lincoln and Lenin on the far wall. Their session did nothing to lighten Peter’s spirits. Someone reported that the local VFW chapter was refusing to march in the Lincoln Day parade if the SSU troops participated. There was a lot of talk about biack-market skimming of already scarce consumer goods and about whether the county could meet its production quota. Some people wanted to blame everything on the Exiles, wanted to turn the SSU loose on them. Before long, Alan Drummond was embroiled in an impassioned defense of those who had fallen much farther than himself.
    “You don’t understand the first thing about it,” he raged. “They didn’t ask to be sent here. Some of them have been here for years—three years now. They aren’t farmers but they’re trying to make a living on those pathetic little plots of land they gave them. But when they come into town, they’re treated like outcasts, like dirt. Dammit, they’re Americans!”
    “Don’t get riled up, Alan,” said one of the council members, a red-faced hardware merchant. “I just wish ail the exiles were people who wanted to work and make a place for themselves.”
    “That sounds too damn much like what bigots used to say about blacks,” Alan Drummond said bitterly. “You don’t understand what these people are up against.”
    “The White House sent them here,” another council member declared. “Let the White House feed them.” “Wait a minute,” Peter said at last. “That’s easy to say. But it’s us who have to deal with them. I don’t know if you heard, but the exiles rioted in Missouri last week. I don’t want that here.”
    “Let ’em riot. The Special Service Units can handle ’em.”
    “Not in my county,” Peter said firmly.
    And so it went. Peter thought that whoever said “divide and conquer” damn sure knew what he was