He sighed and jabbed home the needle of yellowish fluid. The kid jumped and howled; Dr. Soames's hand was not as dexterous with injections as it might once have been. They were working themselves into a coma, all three of the doctors, with routine shots against typhoid and penicillin to keep the sniffles of the kids from getting worse; but any ambulance driver could have done as much. What these people needed—homes; help; money—was not in their little black bags.
"Dr. Soames!" Chief of Police Brayer was coming into the school's gym. The tired old face looked worried—almost panicked; Soames had thought the time for panic was over. "They're bringing Henry in, Doctor. He looks bad."
The burgess came in, under clean blankets, on an aluminum-frame stretcher at last. Soames took a quick look. Fever; coma; and the unmistakable racking, hard-fought breaths. Pneumonia? "Wake up Doctor Brandeis," he ordered; but he found a hypodermic and loaded it without waiting.
The other doctor's eyes were bleary when he staggered in, but there wasn't much doubt. "Pneumonites, all right," he said, auscultating the burgess's chest. "We ought to have oxygen, Frank." Chief Brayer listened to the doctors. He cut in, "Don't we have any oxygen?" Soames shook his head; and Brayer remembered. The oxygen was there, all right, in the firehouse, where it was handy for the pumpers to take along in case of drowning or asphyxiation or any of the other things Hebertown called out its fire department for; but it wasn't handy at all in case of floods, since the firehouse was in the Borough Hall. You couldn't even see the roof yet, though the water had gone down.
He blundered out of the room and buttonholed one of the other volunteers. "Who've we got who can swim underwater?" he demanded. "We have to get the oxygen out of the firehouse—Henry needs it."
They found a couple of high-school kids, on the swimming team, and they went down to survey the drowned-out hall. The water had slowed enough to put a boat out; they rowed down Front Street, over the back yards of the cottages, into the River Road. "Must be around here," Brayer said doubtfully, staring at the muddy water. "Some of the houses got moved, I guess...."
It wasn't there. One of the boys eventually went down, but only for a moment. He came up sputtering and grunting, his eyes squeezed tight; when they got him into the boat and he could talk coherently again he said, "Sorry, Mr. Brayer. Maybe there's still some of the firehouse down there. But that isn't water, it's plain mud. Even if I had a face mask, I couldn't see—and I don't have a face mask." They took him back to the school to have his eyes looked after. Chief Brayer leaned dizzily against the door frame, watching Dr. Brandeis bathing the kid's eyes. What, he wondered, was Hebertown going to be like without Henry?
Mickey Groff woke up. They must have given me a shot of something, he thought clearly, and sat up.
A girl in a white uniform with gold bars at the collar leaned over him and said, "You ought to go back to sleep. You've only had about two hours."