by James White
Present at the briefing, which was held on the casualty deck because it was the largest compartment in the ship, were the medical team, Captain Fletcher, Hewlitt, and, onscreen, the grey, furcovered features of Colonel Shech-Rar, commander of the local Monitor Corps base. The officer projected the image of a very busy and impatient Orligian.
“Your names and Rhabwar’s reputation precede you, Doctor,” it broke in before Prilicla had completed its friendly, informal introductions. “Let us not waste time. Sector General has requested my full cooperation during your stay here. What is the nature of your mission, how long will it take, and what facilities will you require?”
Hewlitt, who had been introduced as a nonmedical advisor, wondered whether its service career had been spent among too many Kelgians or two few Cinrusskins or if its bad manners were an inherited characteristic.
“Regretably, Colonel,” Prilicla replied, with no detectable change in its friendly manner, “I am not at liberty to divulge the precise details of our mission, other than to say that it involves the investigation of incidents which took place over twenty years ago and which may have an important bearing on a present medical research project. It is not a matter of Federation security, a Galactic Secret, or anything of a sensitive or important nature for which, I am sure, you would have full clearance. At present the information is restricted because of simple patient confidentiality. As soon as the investigation has been completed and evaluated, I have no doubt that you will be informed of the results.”
“Is there a possibility that your investigation will pose a health risk,” said Shech-Rar, “either to my base personnel or the native population? This was Etla the Sick, remember. We succeeded in clearing it of all its ghastly diseases many years ago, and our ongoing cultural contact mission would not be helped if the people were given an unnecessary reminder of their past. Do not try to obscure your purpose with a screen of medical polysyllables, Doctor. Can you give me this assurance?”
“Yes,” said Prilicla.
Shech-Rar showed its teeth, whether in a smile or a scowl Hewlitt could not be sure, then said, “A clear, single-syllable answer. Good. But when a vessel like Rhabwar arrives on a confidential mission that is neither important nor sensitive, that is curious and so am I. No matter, Doctor. What do you need from me?”
It took only a few minutes for Prilicla to detail its requirements, but it was obvious from Shech-Rar’s voice when it spoke that suspicion had replaced its former impatience.
“I was not assigned here until five years after these incidents took place,” said the colonel, “so I have no direct responsibility in the matter. The flyer accident to the subject’s parents, which to my mind is the only incident worthy of attention, was fully investigated. The findings were that the cause was a combination of adverse weather conditions, a power system malfunction that affected the control linkages, and pilot error, the error being in not waiting until the storm had passed. You are welcome to a copy of the report. But why is it that young people with long lives ahead of them take needless risks while the old ones, with much less time remaining, are so careful?”
The colonel made an untranslatable sound, as if irritated with itself for digressing into philosophy, and went on, “In spite of what you have told me, the arrival of Rhabwar and your team here is the true measure of the mission’s importance. However, if your investigation is likely to uncover any long-past act of negligence or other misbehavior on the part of any of my officers, I will not allow you to question them until I have satisfied myself that they have Corps legal representation before answering any charges. Is that understood, Doctor?”
The empath’s fragile body and limbs trembled for a moment, as if it was sensing Shech-Rar’s emotional radiation at extreme range; then it said, “I assure you, Colonel, it is not that kind of investigation. We require permission to explore the locality where the incidents took place and, if they are still on Etla, interview the beings concerned. We are interested in their recollections, nothing more, and will make allowances for any lapses of memory. The approximate timing of the event is known to us, but we will need your help in identifying the people concerned. At present we do not even know their names.”
“That information will be on my predecessor’s file,” said the colonel. “Wait.”
Rather than the transmission ending, when Shech-Rar’s image disappeared it was replaced by the Monitor Corps symbol on a field of deep blue, indicating that the wait was not expected to be a long one. On Rhabwar everyone remained silent, not wishing to start a discussion that was sure to be interrupted. Hewlitt watched the screen until the hairy features of the colonel reappeared.
“The names you require,” said Shech-Rar without preamble, “are Stillman, Hamilton, and Telford. Major Stillman, who was then a surgeon-lieutenant, is now retired but still attached to the base as an Etlan cultural advisor, as is Dr. Hamilton, the civilian specialist in other-species dentistry. Should you need to interview it, Surgeon-Captain Telford, the senior base medical officer at the time, was posted to Dutha three years ago. The present encumbent, Surgeon-Lieutenant Krack-Yar, will make the hospital records available and discuss them with you on request.
“The matter is not important enough to warrant going to Dutha,” said Prilicla. “In the absence of the original medical officer, a copy of its records and the flyer accident investigation report will be fine, as soon as you find it convenient, Colonel.”
Shech-Rar looked at someone offscreen, nodded, then said, “Is fifteen minutes soon enough?”
“You don’t believe in wasting time, Colonel,” said Prilicla. “Thank you, yes.”
“Rather than send you the names, locations, and a map,” said Shech-Rar, “it will waste even less of your time if Major Stillman acts as your guide and escort. He can take you over the ground and introduce you to the people concerned as well as, hopefully, telling me what you are really doing here…”
Definitely, thought Hewlitt, the colonel had spent a long time among Kelgians.
“The residence you mentioned,” it went on, “is no longer occupied by Earth-humans. Do you still need to visit it?”
For an instant the Cinrusskin’s hover became less stable. Then it recovered and said, “Yes, Colonel. If only to apologize for landing Rhabwar uninvited in their backyard.”
Being an emotion sensitive, Priicla always tried to avoid doing or saying anything that would cause an unpleasant emotional reaction in others, because the other person’s anger or distress would be shared by the empath. Even though the colonel was well beyond the range of its empathic faculty, the habit of always saying the right thing was strong. But there were times, Hewlitt had found, when the little entity could be very economical with the truth. He had the feeling that this was one of them.
“Major Stillman will meet you at your airlock in three hours,” said the colonel. “Is there anything else you need from me, Doctor?”
Before Prilicla could finish saying no and thanking it again, the transmission ended.
“I could have taken you to the site, and the house, without Stillman’s help,” said Hewlitt. “Why do you want to go to the house anyway? The real reason, I mean, not the polite, socially acceptable one that you gave the colonel.”
“If we refused the assistance of the local Monitor Corps, friend Hewlitt,” said Prilicla, “the colonel would be sure that we were trying to hide something. We are not hiding anything, because we still don’t kr~ow if there is anything to hide except, perhaps, our own future embarrassment.
“I have no good reason to visit the house,” it went on, “other than to cover old ground in the hope that a useful idea will occur to us, or to you, while we are doing so. I feel you radiating disbelief combined with disappointment. Perhaps you were expecting a more substantial reason. But the truth is that we have no clear idea of what, if anything, we will find there.
“We will proceed with the briefing now…
They might not know what they were looking for, Hewlitt tho
ught, but Captain Fletcher and the entire medical team were going out well equipped to find it. His translator was working, but the language was too specialized and technical for him to understand and make a contribution, so he listened without speaking until there was an interruption from the wall speaker.
“Communications. The material promised by Colonel ShechRar has come in. Instructions?”
“Put it on our repeater screen, friend Haslam, and run the accident report first,” said Prilicla. It drifted closer until the downdraft from its wings stirred his hair, and went on, “You are welcome to remain, friend Hewlitt, but if at any time you find this material or our conversation distressing, please feel free to return to your bed and raise the hush field.”
“It happened a long time ago,” he said. “I was too young to be told all the details, but now I want to know. Thank you, but I feel sure that I’ll be all right.”
“I will know how you feel, friend Hewlitt,” said Prilicla. “Proceed, friend Haslam.”
The report began with the service ID pictures of his parents, which surprised him because they looked no older than he was now, and in his mind they had always been so much bigger and older than himself. They had been looking very serious for the camera, he thought as the other personal and physiological details unrolled, but that must have been one of the few times when they had not smiled at him. The memories came flooding back, sharp and clear and corroborating in every detail the reconstruction of the accident investigators.
At the time his father had been too busy to even to look at him, but his mother had smiled and told him not to be afraid as she climbed over the backrest of the copilot’s position to squeeze down beside him. She had held him very tightly in her lap with one arm while her free hand redeployed the safety harness around both of them. Outside the canopy, the sky and the tree-covered mountains were spinning around them, with the trees coming so close that he could see individual branches. Then she had pushed his head forward, folding him in two on her lap with the back of his head pressed between her breasts. There had been a sudden shock that flung them sideways and apart, a loud, tearing crash, and the feeling of rain on his face and cold air rushing past as he fell.
He remembered an explosion of pain as he hit the ground, but nothing else until one of the rescue party that had responded to the flyer’s automatic distress beacon asked him where he was hurt.
According to the report, the flyer’s canopy had been speared by one of the treetops and was found still lodged in the upper branches, while the rest of the ship crashed to the ground and rolled down the mountain for a distance of forty-five meters before breaking up and catching fire. Because the local vegetation was sodden after a day of heavy rain, the flames did not travel up the slope to the point where the sole survivor, the seven-year-old Hewlitt boy, was lying. The report went on to discuss at length the technical evidence gathered by the investigators, which Prilicla passed over for later study by Captain Fletcher, and ended with brief details of the autopsy, disposal, and treatment of the victims.
His parents had sustained massive trauma, and the indications were that they had probably died, and were certainly unconscious, before the fire engulfed them. Hewlitt had been found in a state of shock and confusion but otherwise unharmed, and it was assumed that the small patches of blood on his clothing belonged to his mother. Although unhurt, he had been kept under observation in hospital for the nine days it took the next-of-kin, his grandmother, to arrive and collect him and arrange for the disposal of his parents’ remains.
His grandmother had not allowed Hewlitt to see the bodies because, he now realized, the cremation had simply completed the process already started by the fire.
For a moment the old but never quite forgotten pain of loss and grief returned like a great, dark vacuum filling his chest, and he tried hard to control his feelings because Prilicla was watching him and becoming unsteady in its flight. He pushed the remembered pain out of his mind and tried to concentrate on the next report that was coming up on the screen.
“Thank you, friend Hewlitt,” said the empath, and went on, “As we can see, this report relates to the medical condition, treatment, and behavior of the survivor during its nine-day stay in hospital. Even then the younger Hewlitt was presenting its doctor with problems.
“They began,” Prilicla went on, “when the base medical officer, Surgeon-Captain Telford, prescribed oral sedation. Although uninjured, the patient was close to physical exhaustion and emotionally distressed by the loss of its parents and was unable to sleep. The result was a violent but nonspecific reaction that included abdominal discomfort, respiratory difficulty, and a rash covering the skin of the lower chest and back. While the surgeon-captain was still trying to discover what was happening, the symptoms subsided. A different type of sedation was prescribed and, as a precaution, only a minute initial dose was administered, by subcutaneous injection. This time the result was a cardiac arrest which lasted for two-pointsix minutes, accompanied by a brief recurrence of respiratory impairment, both of which passed without any detectable aftereffects.
“As you can see,” Prilicla continued, indicating the treatment summary at the bottom of the screen, “Dr. Telford diagnosed a hyperallergenic reaction, cause unknown, and forbade further medication. Instead, the emotional problems were treated with verbal tranquilization and reassurance provided by a same-species nurse who was nearing retirement age, and by allowing the child, who was apparently neither ill nor injured, to tire himself out and forget some of his grief by allowing him to visit and talk to other patients, who included serving space officers with many interesting stories to tell…
“That nurse was very nice to me,” Hewlitt broke in, his voice quiet with remembered sadness that he had not felt for many years, “and I realize now that some of those stories might not have been true. But the treatment worked and… I’m sorry for interrupting, Doctor, I didn’t mean to remember out loud.”
“Don’t apologize, friend Hewlitt, your memories of the time are valuable to us,” said Prilicla. A moment later it went on, “There is an entry here to the effecrthat the then Surgeon-Lieutenant Telford was completely mystified by your atypical reaction to two simple and well-tried types of sedative medication. But it had no opportunity to discover, identify, and list what he assumed to be the allergenic substances that were causing the reaction before your relative arrived to take you to Earth. Dr. Telford had no reason, other than its unsatisfied curiosity, for keeping an otherwise healthy child in hospital.
“And now,” it ended, “has anyone anything they would like to say about this report?”
There were a few things Hewlitt would have liked to say, but he knew the question was not directed at him. It was Pathologist Murchison who spoke first.
She said, “Even though the condition was atypical in that the symptoms appeared and receded with unusual rapidity, Telford’s diagnosis of what appeared to be a wide-ranging and nonspecific allergy was sensible in the circumstances, as was his decision not to attempt further medical treatment until he knew exactly what was going on. Essentially, that is what the patient’s medics did on Earth and later in Sector General. In a word, nothing…
“Pathologist,” Naydrad broke in, its fur spiking with impatience. “You are restating the problem, not offering a solution.”
“Perhaps,” said Murchison, who knew her Kelgians well enough not to be irritated by the interruption. “But the point I’m trying to make is that the allergy symptoms appeared at a very early age and were repeated, with minor variations, here, on Earth, and in Sector General. This makes me wonder if the patient was born with the condition and we should be looking for a genetic rift of some kind. There are no recorded instances of anyone being allergic to the food produced by the synthesizers, which is the kind most off-planet visitors favor, and certainly not baby-formula varieties. And there would be no allergic response if… Hewlitt, were you breast-fed as an infant?”
“If I was,” he replied after a quick search
of his earliest memories, “I was too young to remember.”
Murchison smiled. “Too bad, but it may not be important. If you were breast-fed and weaned onto synthesized food, that might explain why the first recorded allergic reaction was to medication. There is another possibility. The symptoms first appeared in the base hospital a few hours after the flyer crash. You were not hurt, but it is reasonable to assume that the fall through the branches onto the soft, wet ground rendered you temporarily unconscious. Certainly, your shocked and confused condition when found is symptomatic of a recent concussion. But it is possible that you sustained minor lacerations or abrasions, too minor in the circumstances for the rescuers to bother recording them, and that something was introduced into your system which caused the later allergic reaction. It might have been something living in the tree or on the ground, a spore or an insect or even a small animal that bit you, or a toxic substance with unknown properties that gained entry though a scratch from the foliage itself. I suggest a search of the crash site. If the suspect organism or material is native to Etla, it will still be there.
“And stop tying your fur in knots, Naydrad,” she went on. “I know that pathogens native to one world cannot affect any being who evolved on another. I also know that physiologically the natives of Etla and Earth are almost identical, so much so that there are theories about a prehistoric colonization program by common, star-traveling ancestors. But attempts at procreation between the few base personnel who, for emotional reasons, felt impelled to widen cultural contact by marrying Etlan men or women were unsuccessful. But if there is an overlap, no matter how small, in the gene structure of the two species, then that, too, should be investigated. And if Patient Hewlitt would submit to tests, very closely monitored and using trace quantities of Etlan native medication to minimize the risks, we might find the exception that proves the rule.”
“No tests, friend Murchison,” said Prilicla, before Hewlitt could say the same thing in stronger language. “No medication of any kind, Etlan or otherwise, until we have a clearer idea of what we are looking for. Perhaps you have forgotten that friend Hewlitt has already been affected by Etlan native vegetation, when it ingested toxic fruit prior to falling from a tree?”
