The Rainbow and the Rose Read Online Free PDF Page B

mechanically, and she went out. ‘You could break a leg trying to do that,’ he said. ‘Anything could happen.’
    He was the only doctor that we’d got. ‘I wouldn’t ask you to break a leg,’ I said patiently. ‘We don’t want any more casualties there. If I can’t make it so that you can just step out, we’ll come home again.’
    ‘Suppose I were to do that,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t hope to do much for either of them.’ He stared up at me with some hostility. ‘You know all about aeroplanes. Well, you don’t know much about medicine. Am I supposed to do awonder-operation on a fractured skull with nothing but a blunt penknife and a kettle of muddy water? Or take out an appendix? There’s not a hope of a successful operation. I can tell you that. I can tell you another thing. If I try it, both patients will die.’
    The sergeant said quietly, ‘A cup of tea, Doctor.’ He passed a cup to him and gave me one, and passed the bowl of sugar.
    ‘If I can land you, I can land anything else in reason,’ I said. ‘It may be necessary to drop it. But I can land your instruments, and anything else you’ll need, provided that the weather holds if a second trip is necessary. A steriliser, perhaps.’
    ‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ he said irritably. ‘There’s no electric current …’ And then he said, ‘There’s only one thing to be done. They’ll have to send a party in to them by land. They can fly in to Lake Pedder, can’t they? Well, it can’t be more than thirty miles from there.’
    I shook my head. ‘I doubt if they’d make Lake Pedder,’ I said. ‘Not with all this low cloud. It’s in the middle of the mountains.’ I turned to the sergeant. ‘I think they ought to start a land party, though. How long would it take them to get through?’
    He rubbed his chin, ‘They can get a truck as far as Kallista,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Then there’s a track to the Gordon River – that would be how they’d go. That’s about twenty miles. After that, it might be about another forty miles over the mountains and through the bush to reach the Lewis River.’ He paused in thought. ‘I’d say it might take a land party four days,’ he said.
    I asked the doctor, ‘Would they be alive in four days’ time?’
    ‘The girl will,’ he said. ‘From what you say, her appendix is subsiding. That often happens. She’d probably be able to walk out by then.’
    ‘What about Captain Pascoe?’
    He was silent. We all stood looking at each other.
    At last I said, ‘Well, that’s the position. Hobart are coming on the air again at half past eight. They’re going to send out an Auster with a doctor to try and get through; if they do they’ll try to land him in the way I said. But I don’t think they’ll make it over the mountains, in this cloud. And they’ve not got the range to go by the south coast.’
    ‘Who’s the doctor?’ he asked.
    The sergeant said, ‘It would be Dr Parkinson. He does air trips for them now and then. Did one last year, to Maria Island.’
    ‘Well, why can’t they fly up here and take on more petrol, and then fly down the coast from here?’
    ‘They’ve got to get here, for one thing,’ I said. ‘They’d have to go pretty well to Launceston to avoid the mountains, and then due west another sixty miles against the wind. It’d be a three-hour flight before they could be here to start the job, in an Auster. From what the Met say this clear patch is only going to last about three hours.’
    He stood in silence before us. ‘I don’t want you to think that I’m afraid of jumping out there,’ he said at last. ‘That doesn’t sound too bad. It’s what comes after that that I don’t like. I can’t see any hope of a successful operation, in that place. And if I operate and then he dies, just think what the papers will say!’
    It seemed to me that it was time to be brutal, and I was getting a bit tired of this. ‘The papers will be on to this already, by this