Chapter IX: Sparks Fly
Approaching the generator shed at a run, with Houlihan keeping pace, Mulcahy was having second thoughts about his last-minute inspiration. Now that they were actually going to attempt it, he found himself wishing that he'd never even come up with the idea, much less proposed it. It was only mildly reassuring that Houlihan saw enough merit in it to assume the risk alongside him.
Radar was waiting for them in the shed with a flashlight in one hand and a two-by-four in the other. "What's that for?" asked Houlihan, eyeing the plank.
"Just in case, ma'am."
"In case of what?"
"Um...electrocution," he explained. "If you can't let go, I can't pull you away or else I'd get shocked, too. I'd have to knock you off with this."
Imagining that horrific possibility, Mulcahy felt his stomach turn over. "Then let us pray you won't have occasion to use it."
Radar nodded solemnly. "Amen."
"All right, let's get this over with," said Houlihan, her voice tense. "Where should we...?"
"How 'bout there?" Radar indicated a small coupling inside an open access panel. The spot looked as good as any to Mulcahy's inexpert eye.
"Right." The clerk stepped back as Houlihan took up a position next to the generator, her left shoulder perpendicularly aligned with it, the coupling within easy reach. "Ready, Father?"
Mulcahy crossed himself and murmured an abbreviated prayer before moving to stand face to face with her. Nearly two weeks had crawled by since he'd last been this close to his former self -- to Margaret Houlihan -- and despite his apprehension regarding what they were about to do, an indelicate shudder of anticipation rippled through him. More disturbing, he could see in her eyes a reflection of his own conflicted emotions. "Ah...ready."
Two unsteady hands hovered above the coupling, awaiting the countdown. "On three," declared Houlihan. "Remember, only for a second. One...two...three!"
They touched it simultaneously, then pulled back as planned. Mulcahy exhaled the breath he'd been holding -- as it turned out, just as with Private Kirby, he hadn't felt a thing. An anticlimactic outcome, perhaps, but a happy one.
Radar looked distinctly relieved that he hadn't been called upon to employ the two-by-four. "Great! Let's see if it worked," he said, shooing Mulcahy and Houlihan out of the way. Unfortunately, though he tried several times, the generator still refused to start.
Their last-ditch effort had failed.
"Hmm. Hang on," said Radar, his brow furrowed in concentration as he stared at the balky power plant, "maybe that wasn't the best place to touch it, after all."
"What?" Houlihan exploded. "You mean you weren't sure?"
The clerk quailed but held his ground. "Sorry, Major, but I've never tried to fix one of these by zapping it, ya know. Uncle Ed never did it that way when he worked on our generator back home."
"Terrific," she muttered, throwing her hands in the air. "Here we are, screwing around with a piece of equipment that could fry us like bacon, and nobody really has a clue."
"Anyway, now that I think about it, the current might do more good over here." He pointed to a cable apparently intended to transmit electricity from the generator to the outside world.
"But the wire is coated," Mulcahy observed. "Doesn't that make it nonconductive?"
In answer, Radar produced a pocketknife and gingerly stripped bare a seven-inch section of copper-colored wire. "Will that be enough, d'you think?"
"That'll do," said Houlihan. "Come on, Father, one more try."
They squared off as they had before, face to face beside the cable, and once again Houlihan synchronized the process by counting to three. But the instant his fingers closed around the exposed wire, Mulcahy knew this experience would be nothing like the last.
For one thing, though it hadn't been an official part of the plan, the limited space meant that his hand unavoidably came into contact with Houlihan's. So instead of nothing, he felt the familiar -- and much missed -- tingle sweep up his arm and start to spread throughout his body.
Beyond that, he noticed that the darkness inside the shed and out in the compound had lifted, and faint sounds of jubilation could be heard coming from the direction of the O.R. Power had been successfully restored.
But it was the sound Mulcahy didn't hear -- the hum of a functional generator -- that gave away the truth: he and Houlihan were powering the entire MASH unit by themselves.
How long they could pull off this parlor trick, he had no idea, but he knew how important it was to both patients and staff that they keep the electricity flowing as long as possible. He locked eyes with his counterpart and whispered, "We can't let go."
Houlihan must have come to the same conclusion on her own. "We won't let go," she agreed.
But Radar, his plank at the ready, was getting edgy. "Uh, sirs? Aren't you supposed to let go?"
"It's all right, Radar," Mulcahy assured him. "Instead of repairing the generator, we seem to have replaced it. There's no danger at the moment, but it might be best not to leave us unattended."
"Oh, geez! You mean...? But I have to report this to the colonel!"
"Hold your position, Corporal," ordered Houlihan. "He doesn't want to know, and you won't be held responsible."
While Radar fretted and paced, keeping an anxious watch on the pair of them, Mulcahy focused on maintaining his hold on the wire and shoring up his still-tattered self-control. Even in these grave circumstances, the impulses associated with touching Houlihan were extremely...distracting.
For what felt like hours (though they later learned it was about fifteen minutes), they stood as silent and immobile as granite statues, clinging to the wire, each lost somewhere in the depths of the other's eyes. Then Houlihan, her patience evidently exhausted, reached out with her free arm and caught Mulcahy around the waist. As she pulled him close, he gasped but offered no resistance; at that point, he had none left to work with.
Indeed, without stopping to second-guess himself, Mulcahy proceeded to throw caution and propriety to the wind by letting his own arm drift up across her shoulders, tightening the embrace. As if it somehow belonged there, his forehead came to rest lightly against hers.
The effects were immediate and overwhelming. Exactly as it had before, a wave of almost unbearable sensual pleasure flowed in an instant from his forehead down to his toes and back again, leaving no nerve ending untouched along the way. Houlihan was experiencing the same; the expression on her face left no room for doubt.
This time, however, fleeing for the hills wasn't an option. Mulcahy had no choice but to weather the storm and pray that he might be forgiven for surrendering to it.
On the fringes of his awareness, he could sense poor Radar's growing consternation. It was regrettable that the boy had to witness such indecorous behavior on the part of senior officers, but keeping a third person close at hand in case anything went wrong seemed a wise precaution. Even if it meant never being able to look that person in the face again.
Before long, Mulcahy became incapable of worrying about Radar or future consequences or almost anything else at all. His nascent thoughts were scattering like dandelion seeds before ever reaching a conscious state. The passage of time had long since ceased to be meaningful, and now nothing existed beyond the tiny pocket universe delimited by himself and Houlihan.
In a development that would have distressed him had he been fully cognizant, the mental boundaries between the two of them began to blur and shift as fluidly as the waves of physical sensation that coursed through their bodies. When Mulcahy closed his eyes, impressions and images and half-formed ideas that might have been either his or hers flickered through his mind like a badly edited newsreel. Though they slipped by too quickly to be examined in detail or committed to memory, many of the more vivid ones were quite obviously not his own, and for one immeasurable, ephemeral moment he knew Margaret Houlihan -- more intimately and completely than she knew herself.
It was then that the newsreel guttered out in a spectacular shower of sparks, leaving in its wake only darkness...and stillness...and silence...and nothing more.