The Fall of the City of Steel

Mr. and Mrs. Gottlieb pumped the handcart furiously, struggling to bear the wounded Gasperi to medical attention.

"Henry?" asked Mrs. Gottlieb. "What if no one's waiting at the end?"

"I don't know, honey," Mr. Gottlieb answered.

"And what's going to happen to Jerry?"

"I think they'll bring him back here."

"But how?"

"I think they want us to be waiting for them when he gets here," Henry conjectured.

There was a pause filled only by panting and an unintelligible groan from Gasperi.

"The poor devil..." Mrs. Gottlieb sympathized. "What have they done? What kind of crowd has our Jerry been hanging out with?"

"They seemed pretty adamant about calling themselves 'the resistance,'" Henry commented, shaking his head pessimistically. "Jerry is way too young for this."

"You don't suppose they've made a rapscallion out of him do you? A scoundrel? A delinquent?"

"He looked fine."

"I hope you're right," Mrs. Gottlieb desisted.

After just a few more minutes, they reached the end of the track.

"Look!" Mrs. Gottlieb indicated, as she and her husband picked up the wounded guard. "There's the hospital!"

"No," Henry corrected, "that's just the workshop. The crazy girl said we should go straight south from here, and we'd find a hospital."

Hastily, the two determined which direction was south, then took off in that direction, struggling heavily through the forest brush.

At the village grounds, Dr. Piasecki gathered together the bodies of soldiers fallen in battle and arrayed them before the helicopter in a dignified manner. The villagers watched him suspiciously, but he knew as well as they did that he did not have it in his power to do anything dangerous.

During this work, he heard blathering and gasping in his own language. Excited, he looked up, only to be horrified, seeing two adults dressed in prison clothes carrying a wounded man in a uniform.

The villagers gathered quickly around the three strangers, weapons ready but not drawn. Piasecki reached them first.

"What's the situation?" he asked.

Both Gottliebs were dumbfounded.

"Bring that man into this helicopter," Piasecki clearly instructed. "I'll see what I can do about him."

"Are..." Henry began glancing at the villagers, "Are they going to hurt us?"

"No."

"Who are you?"

"Dr. Franklin Piasecki."

"Where are we?"

"An indigenous village."

The two Gottliebs stared at one another, then back at the doctor, who proceeded to set the anemic patient on his bed in the helicopter.

"What happened to him?" Piasecki asked.  "He looks bad."

"We didn't see," Henry admitted. "Will he make it?"

"Stay quiet, and we'll find out," Dr. Piasecki bargained, as he exposed and began to treat Gasperi's wound. Seeing the two newcomers looking terribly uncomfortable, he added, "I'll explain everything as soon as he's no longer unstable, one way or the other."