Chapter 24: With This…… [1]
Chapter 24: With This…… [1]
I got into the carriage.
The first time I rode one, my heart had pounded like someone boarding a plane for the first time, but now I felt nothing in particular.
It was more like, Well, I’m riding it again, that sort of feeling.
Maybe it would be different if I knew the price, but for now, that was how it was.
“All right, then, we’re off.”
Anyway, once we were all aboard, the coachman, with a familiar look on his face, started driving the carriage.
Rattle, rattle.
The wheels rolled along without anything like cushions.
Rubber ought to do something about this too.
But that seemed like a whole different field.
Well, someone who wanted to make money would figure that out themselves.
For now, if I could live safely and cleanly as a doctor, that was enough for me.
Money and fame....
In twenty-first-century South Korea, skill alone was no longer enough to make things work.
But here, would it not be different?
Not because the social structure was favorable, but simply because my skill was on a level far beyond the other doctors.
No, “far beyond” was not even the right phrase.
It was obvious they would not even be able to gauge where my level stood in the first place.
Just look at this scenery....
Unfortunately, I had never been to England in the twenty-first century.
Even back when backpacking had been popular during my student days, I never went.
So all I had ever heard were secondhand stories.
And yet the scenery now reflected in my retinas would have made every backpacker I knew into a liar.
It was hard to believe this place would improve so much two hundred years later.
“Ugh.”
“Cough.”
“Cough, cough.”
It was not only the scenery that was a mess. The air was too.
I did not think it had been quite this bad before, but coughing burst out without pause.
So I looked around again, and smoke was rising everywhere.
It was so fierce it looked as though there had been a fire, but regrettably that was not the case. It was simply the Factory District.
Beside it were rows of buildings inhabited by city laborers, structures that were hard to call shacks yet hard to call anything else.
Our carriage came to a stop right among those things that could barely be called buildings.
“Get inside quickly. And don’t go poking around anywhere else for no reason.”
After saying that to us, the coachman looked around.
As he did, he made it obvious that he had a firearm tucked inside his coat.
He had not meant to frighten us, but I was a little frightened anyway.
“Yes, yes.”
Anyway, we went inside the factory and found ourselves facing an older man with a lively smile.
And what that man was holding....
What was that?
Some kind of sea squirt?
“Ah, come over here.”
“Yes, yes.”
He called me while doing something, so I hurried over first.
Was he not the one putting up the money?
There was a very high possibility that he would become the hospital director later.
That meant it was necessary to make a good impression in advance.
“Look at this.”
The older man thrust some black thing at me as I ran over in a hurry.
I had no idea what it was, but it looked far too different from what I had expected.
It looks unpleasant....
First of all, it was pitch black.
It was not smooth either.
How should I even describe it?
“You’re really examining it closely. Do you like it that much?”
To be honest, I was acting.
If you spent enough time in a hospital, you mastered the skill of pretending to know what you were doing even when you knew nothing.
Just because you were a doctor did not mean a plan instantly formed in your head the moment a patient was admitted.
If it were a surgery you did every day, then sure, it should.
But with difficult patients, there was no way to know right away.
Still, if you showed too much of that in front of the patient, how could they possibly feel at ease enough to receive treatment?
At best, it was a relief if they did not start shouting during the examinations, asking what on earth they were for.
“Uh... yes, yes. But this is....”
“A condom.”
“Ah....”
Whether I liked it or not, my acting skills had improved by leaps and bounds, but even for me this was not easy to handle.
This was a condom?
Only after hearing the word condom did the parts I had not really registered before begin to stand out.
First of all, why was it so huge?
What was it for, an elephant?
A forearm would fit into this.
That was all I intended to think, but before I knew it, I was putting my hand into it.
A fist went in easily enough.
“Well now. Our Pyeong is... awfully enthusiastic.”
Watching me do that, the older man gave a hearty laugh and continued.
“For now, since it’s the first one, I made it large... but of course I plan to make it smaller than this.”
“Will that alone be enough to improve it?”
My hand was still inside it.
Maybe it was because I had heard the word condom, but it did not feel anything like one, and besides, there were various things I wanted to test.
Did what I was doing look like testing to other people too?
Apparently not.
“Can’t you at least take your hand out before talking? No, don’t touch me with that. My arm... don’t touch me with that thing on.”
The older man recoiled in disgust.
I found that a bit disappointing.
So I touched Joseph instead.
“Ah... don’t do that....”
When Joseph pulled away, I touched Alfred.
“Ah, don’t.”
This bastard only said that and stayed still, which made me slightly annoyed.
There was no reason for me to feel that way, but still I did.
Of course, most of us were thinking about something entirely different.
I can’t feel anything. Like this....
At a glance, it had already looked thick.
When I put my hand inside, it did feel like rubber, and when I felt the outside, it was not as rough as I might have expected.
But the sensation transmitted to the hand inside was unbelievably dull.
Some people might have wondered what the problem with that was.
To put it bluntly, they might have thought it did not matter if this was not actually going to be used as a condom.
That was the sort of thing only people who knew nothing would say.
How delicate a task was surgery?
You were putting a knife to a living person in order to save them. How could you treat that lightly?
The sensations transmitted to the fingertips were so important that calling them absolute would not even be an exaggeration.
Especially when dissecting something away—peeling it apart, in other words—if you had no sense of what you were touching, it would be all too easy to cause an accident.
Whatever the issue of thickness, for now it was still impossible.
“I can’t feel anything inside.”
“Well now, that’s sharp. Do you stay up all night studying condoms?”
“No, it’s not that.”
When I shook my head with a serious expression, the older man started saying strange things.
I did deny it, but it seemed useless.
He was not listening.
No, he was just saying whatever he wanted to say.
“A condom... certainly ought to be thinner than this.”
Now that I looked, this was not the only prototype.
There were several.
One of them was in the older man’s hand.
The rest were scattered across the floor, and even at a glance, they were all different sizes.
It made me wonder if he had made them by blowing them up.
“There’s no sensation at all. Still... like you said, it has become softer.”
The older man now began swinging around the rubber lump that may or may not have been a condom.
Even though it could not possibly have been used, the way it whirled around still made me feel distinctly uncomfortable.
It was not just me. Joseph and Alfred must have felt the same, because they stepped back together.
“It has not only become softer. It is still waterproof. And very tough. I can guarantee this... even if you make it thinner, it still will not tear easily.”
At that moment, the short older man who had been bent over in the middle of things straightened up and revealed himself.
His face was pale, but his cheeks were round and rosy, giving him a slightly cute impression.
Ah... so this gentleman is the Chemist.
His name?
I had heard it, but I did not remember it.
That probably meant he was not all that famous.
Even if I was not especially learned, I still knew the names of the big figures.
Because of me, you’re going to become extremely famous, aren’t you?
After all, he would become the first person in history to make not rubber condoms, but rubber gloves.
In other words, he would become someone who saved countless lives.
I would be the one actually saving them, though.
Heh heh.
“That is a relief. I was worried this might end as nothing more than my own delusion....”
“No, no. Rubber... it has some very interesting properties. If we make condoms out of this, they will definitely be a huge hit. The boss will become even richer, and we will become rich too.”
“We... will?”
I wanted to indulge the fantasy further, but if I went any farther, they would surely start looking at me strangely, so I answered vaguely enough.
Then the talk of becoming rich came up, and I widened my eyes and looked at the older man—or rather, the boss.
The boss gave a hearty laugh.
“Did you think I would swallow it all for myself? I was the one who found the capital and the people, so naturally I would only give you a portion... but don’t worry, I have no intention of wiping my mouth clean and pretending otherwise.”
It was the smile of a decent man.
Maybe that was why he did not thrust a contract in front of us.
This is what people normally call a scam, sir.
It would have been fine even if he did scam me.
I only needed the gloves.
“Yes, yes. Thank you very much. But I’m fine without money... I would be grateful if you could make gloves with this instead.”
And this man was the boss, was he not?
He might become the hospital director later.
No matter what he gave me, it probably would not be that much anyway, so was there any need to act difficult?
So I said it was fine and subtly asked for gloves instead.
“Gloves...?”
“Yes. Gloves. You remember that senior who badly injured his hand not long ago, right?”
He might have felt a bit unpleasant hearing this for the first time.
But perhaps because I had made it clear I had no greed for a share, the boss—that older man—simply listened in silence.
“Ah, I remember. He was hurt quite badly.”
“Yes. But if someone were injured like that while dissecting a corpse... you’ve heard about it, haven’t you? How medical students sometimes die.”
“That much I know. Isn’t it because of miasma? The air in hospitals is so bad, after all.”
The older man laughed and nodded at my words.
The air here was much worse, so what exactly was he talking about...?
“But that....”
Anyway, I thought about how to explain this to our ignorant people, then decided to teach at their level.
I had done the same thing with professors, so what high-level conversation could I possibly expect to have with this man?
“If the miasma on a corpse enters a wound on the hand, it can be much more dangerous. There was an old belief like that in Joseon too, but after coming here and studying, I became certain of it.”
“Ah... so the miasma might not just be air, is that it?”
“Yes. I think it may be some sort of particle... something like that. Robert Liston agrees with this as well.”
Strictly speaking, he had never agreed to the part about particles, but what did it matter?
It was not as though this older man would ever meet Robert Liston anyway.
So I said whatever I pleased, and the older man nodded.
“Aha, I see. Then?”
“If we make gloves out of this material, they will provide protection. But for now they are still too thick. If you wear something like this while dissecting, it will be difficult to dissect accurately.”
“I see. Right. Hm... what do you think?”
The older man turned to the Chemist with the white face and red cheeks.
The Chemist shrugged.
“They wouldn’t need to be as thin as condoms... and the surface wouldn’t need to be smooth either... in that case, I think I could do it in a week.”
“So he says. What do you think?”
“That sounds good. Then please do!”
“Ha ha. Just think of this as a free extra, a bonus. If the business succeeds, I’ll make sure you can continue school without having to worry about money.”
Ha ha, just please let me keep living in your house to the end.
I barely managed to swallow those words and came outside.
One week.
In just one week, I would finally be able to show Joseph and Alfred, who kept trailing after me, a whole new world of dissection.