Playfair's Axiom by James Axler

Armorer’s eyes were closed. His cheeks were yellowed and sunken. He looked awful, for a fact. Though not a sensitive man, Ryan was too attuned to the realities of morale to point out the fact, even in any sort of fun. Fact was, his own heart ached to see his friend and battle brother reduced to this condition.
    “Mildred’s right,” he said. “Don’t fret yourself on nonsense. Rest. Get better.”
    “What he’s trying to say, in his manly, near-inarticulate way,” Krysty said, moving to the other side of the sick-bed, “is that we need you, J.B. Rest well. Come back to us soon.”
    Although no breath of air blew through the open windows of the neat, almost dazzlingly clean infirmary, in aformer storefront across the big plaza from the palace, her sentient hair stirred around her shoulders as if in a slight breeze. It showed the agitation of her own spirit.
    “Heh,” the Armorer croaked in what seemed to be an attempt at laughter. “Mebbe I’m chilled already and all them stories about heaven weren’t the lies I thought they was. I’m surrounded by angels…”
    He sighed and relaxed. Ryan’s hard heart skipped a beat before sense took over and he realized his friend had simply passed into sleep, not caught the last train west.
    Strode made a sound in her throat. “Strange as it seems I think that last remark was probably a favorable sign,” she said. “Making a joke shows he’s keeping his spirit up. That’s important to healing.”
    “I know,” Mildred said. “Back in my day—when I was studying the healing arts, I mean—some people claimed it was all a myth that your feelings could affect your physical health. But most of the people I knew who actually did healing knew better. And so do I.”
    “Whitecoats,” the stocky woman with the gray braid said, shaking her head. She wore an old-fashioned stethoscope around her bull neck. “They know so much about facts and figures and so little about what matters, where people are concerned.”
    “How you know whitecoats?” Jak asked suspiciously. He was always suspicious. Mention of scientists tended to make him more so.
    “We have some of our own,” she said. “I have to admit, they’re helping us to make new medicines from herbs and plants. And of course Breweryville is full of whitecoats. The brewmeister fancies he’s a scientist himself.”
    “Brewmeister?” Doc asked.
    Strode shrugged. “Their baron.”
    “You don’t sound too fond of him.”
    “Well, he’s not lovable. I’m not as down on the ville itself as…some of our people here. I wouldn’t want to live there myself, that’s certain sure, even though they’re richer than we are.”
    A look passed among the companions. Compared to what they were accustomed to—their whole lives, in Ryan’s and Jak’s and Krysty’s cases, not just their last few years of wandering the wastelands—Soulardville was all but unimaginably prosperous and peaceful. And clean. Ryan was actually becoming aware of his own stink through the carbolic-acid smell of Strode’s domain, and the way his unwashed clothes chafed, the way every fold and crevice of his lean hard-muscled body itched. He realized he’d begun scratching his ribs unconsciously.
    Mildred had stepped to Strode’s side and was discussing J.B.’s treatment. All traces of rivalry or suspicion between the two women had disappeared like a pinch of dust thrown to the wind. Each recognized in the other a true professional in her field. Now they talked shop.
    “—antibiotic powder in the wound,” Strode was saying.
    Mildred’s eyebrows rose. “Your whitecoats make you antibiotics?”
    “Not yet,” Strode said. “Brewmeister claims his have cultured and refined penicillin. Mebbe so. They got all kind of fancy gear down there, from the days they really were a brewery, back before the big cull. Claim they reworked some of it to make antibiotic. Me, I don’t trust ’em that far yet. This stuff’s scavenge. Old as it is, it still