"Listen, dumb-bell!" snapped the patient, speaking aloud now, in spite of the pain, the better to drive home his meaning. "Don't try to soothe me! What do you think I am, delirious? Get this and get it straight. I said that I landed that speedster free. If you don't know what that means, tell somebody that does. Get the space port—get Haynes—get——"
"We got them, Lensman, long ago." Although her voice was still creamily, sweetly soft, an angry color burned into the nurse's face. "I said everything is on zero. Your speedster was inerted; how else could you be here, inert? I helped do it myself, so I know that she is inert."
"QX." The patient relapsed instantly into unconsciousness and the nurse turned to an interne standing by. (Wherever that nurse was, at least one doctor could almost always be found.)
"Dumb-bell!" she flared. "What a sweet mess he's going to be to take care of! He's not even conscious yet, and he's calling names and picking fights already!"
In a few days Kinnison was fully and alertly conscious. In a week most of the pain had left him, and he was beginning to chafe under restraint. In ten days he was "fit to be tied," and his acquaintance with his head nurse, so inauspiciously begun, developed even more inauspiciously as time went on. For, as Haynes and Lacy had each more than anticipated, the Lensman was by no means an ideal patient. In fact, he was most decidedly the opposite.
Nothing that could be done would satisfy him. All doctors were fatheads, even Lacy, the man who had put him together. All nurses were dumb-bells, even—or specially?—Mac, who with almost superhuman skill, tact and patience had been holding him together. Why, even fatheads and dumb-bells, even high-grade morons, ought to know that a man needed food!
Accustomed to eating everything that he could reach, three or four or five times a day, he did not realize—nor did his stomach—that his now quiescent body could no longer use the five thousand or more calories that it had been wont to burn up, each twenty-four hours, in intense effort. He was always hungry, and he was forever demanding food.
And food, to him, did not mean orange juice or grape juice or tomato juice or milk. Nor did it mean weak tea and hard, dry toast and an occasional soft-boiled egg. If he ate eggs at all he wanted them fried—three or four of them, accompanied by two or three thick slices of ham.
He wanted—and demanded in no uncertain terms, argumentatively and persistently—a big, thick, rare beefsteak. He wanted baked beans, with plenty of fat pork. He wanted bread in thick slices, piled high with butter, and not this quadruply-and-unmentionably-qualified toast. He wanted roast beef, rare, in great chunks. He wanted potatoes and thick brown gravy. He wanted corned beef and cabbage. He wanted pie—any kind of pie—in large, thick quarters. He wanted peas and corn and asparagus and cucumbers, and also various other worldly staples of diet which he often and insistently mentioned by name.
But above all, he wanted beefsteak. He thought about it days and dreamed about it nights. One night in particular he dreamed about it—an especially luscious porterhouse, fried in butter and smothered in mushrooms—only to wake up, mouth watering, literally starved, to face again the weak tea, dry toast, and, horror of horrors, this time a flabby, pallid, flaccid poached egg! It was the last straw.