[Jan Darzek 03] - This Darkening Universe

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  "I'd love to have a job," Malina said. "Practicing medicine."

  "I'm afraid I can't help you with that. Want to come sightseeing with me? E-Wusk has found a ship big enough to transport the kloatraz. It's due in this morning, and I'm going up to have a look at it."

  "A ship that big would be worth a look," Malina agreed.

  A special shuttle ship had been placed at their disposal, and Miss Schlupe and Malina joined Darzek and E-Wusk for the inspection visit to the ship Darzek already had dubbed the Behemoth. The suggestion that the gesardl maintained space-to-ground transmitters for its own use proved to be a malicious rumor.

  "The fact is," Darzek said, "the gesardl is making a very tidy profit on the shuttle service and sees no reason to change."

  Even at a distance and against the backdrop of space, the Behemoth looked enormous. The moment it achieved orbital perfection, their tiny ship swung to a docking position as it would have at a transfer station - for such a monster could not use the regular transfer stations and thus constituted a special station of its own. They filed into the control room and proceeded by interior transmitter to a cargo control room somewhere in the depths of the ship. It was a small cargo holds. The cargo master, a tiny life form with four inordinately long arms and as many short legs, stood at a control panel. He seemed to enjoy being a center of attention.

  "They're dressing the ship," Darzek said. "They have to hold it at a precise inclination when they eject the cargo."

  There was nothing to be seen through the transparent walls except the ends of cargo compartments, so Malina watched the cargo master. She never before had been close to the controls of anything larger than an automobile, and she was prepared to be dazzled by the complexity of such a formidable-sounding undertaking as ejecting cargo at a precise inclination; but the controls looked childishly simple.

  The cargo master turned a dial until its calibrations lined up with the proper hieroglyphs. Next he positioned a pair of indicators. One pointed to each cargo hold; therefore, Malina concluded, the contents of both holds were going to be ejected.

  Finally, at a shout of command through an amplifying system, he lifted a clamp that held a meter - long lever in place and swung the lever through a half circle. There was a sudden whoosh.

  Malina turned and caught a fleeting glimpse of the cargo compartments disappearing into space. Both holds' openings closed automatically, and the cargo master cheerfully returned the lever to its original position and restored the clamp.

  "Very neat," Darzek said. "Now the compartments are conveniently stored in orbit until called for. The gesardl has a special fleet of these giants."

  "But why do they need such huge ships?" Malina asked.

  "To take advantage of special economies in transporting huge cargoes. For example, they could transport a world's grain surplus with one trip and park it in orbit here, and any world with a grain shortage could come directly here to buy whatever it needed. Needless to say, the gesardl's business is very big business indeed."

  They stepped to one of the transparent walls and looked into a hold. It was now a vast, empty cavity. Malina flattened her nose against the wall to look upward into uncertain dimness. The place seemed enormous, but so was the kloatraz. "Is it big enough?" she asked.

  "Just," Darzek said.

  On the far side of the hold Malina could see window walls similar to the one she was looking through, some of them filled with unlikely faces. Again she turned her attention to the hold. "How will you get it here?"

  "You have unerringly singled out the problem," Darzek murmured. "Don't be facetious," Miss Schlupe snapped. "I'd feel a lot better about this business if we had some of our own transmitting experts here. What if those nincompoops launch the poor thing into space?"

  "They'll manage," Darzek said. "All they have to do is build a transmitter that's big enough."

  They returned to the mart, and Miss Schlupe went to her business, Darzek to his transmitting engineers, and Malina to her children. She heard their lessons and then took them on another outing to the park, and while they played and looked about for unsuspecting natives to deliver presents to, she held a debate with herself: to wait for Rok Wllon, or to insist on leaving now?

  She asked the children if they would like to go home, and they' chorused disgusted negatives. There was still the charm of novelty about the mart, but very soon, she thought, they would become as bored as she was now. To wait, or to insist on leaving? She did not think Darzek would refuse if she insisted.

  She delivered the children to Miss Schlupe for an hour or two of work at the refreshment stand, and on her way back to the Prime Common she stopped off to see how Darzek was making out with his engineers. She finally found him at the deepest level of the Kloa Common, supervising an excavation: soil was being removed from around the kloatraz.

  He paused to explain the problem to her. The kloatraz's weight was unknown even to the kloatraz, and grappling hooks or clamps or any such devices were out of the question. Thus it was impossible to move the kloatraz through a transmitter frame, so the engineers had devised an arrangement whereby a transmitter frame would be passed around the kloatraz. The openings around the kloatraz in the various floors of the Kloa Common had to be enlarged - a major construction project. Scaffolding was to be set up and supporting members put into place for the tracks that would accurately guide the transmitting frame on its fall from the roof to a level below the deepest basement.

  The excavation was to make it possible for the frame to drop past the kloatraz's base. It was a delicate process, exposing masses of the creature's roots. These ranged in size from slender ropes to cylindrical growths a meter in diameter - and thus far the main roots were concealed far beneath the kloatraz.

  "Are you going to cut them?" Malina asked. ...

  Darzek shook his head. "It says it will disengage itself at the proper time. I don't know how it proposes to manage that, but we have no choice except to take its word for it."

  Malina was scrutinizing the kloatraz's massive base. Here, at the very bottom of its bulk, the rippling lights seemed dim. She had never been so close to it before; the balustraded openings on the upper levels kept spectators at least three meters from the creamy surface. She was curious about the cellular structure of whatever it was that served as its epidermis, and she also wondered if it was correct to call it a plant merely because it had roots. Animal, vegetable, or mineral?

  Just above her eye level, the surface shaded into a shadowy spot a couple of meters in diameter. She moved a few steps and picked out another. And another. They varied in color from dim gray to noticeable brown, and the shapes were highly irregular. From close up, the creature's base had a distinctly mottled appearance.

  Cautiously she reached out to touch a spot.

  A shout rang out - Darzek's - and at the same instant she experienced searing pain. She jerked her hand away; the tips of the three middle fingers were burned severely. Several of the kloa converged on her, talking excitedly, and Jan Darzek was confronting her sternly. She ignored the lot of them and examined her fingers with professional detachment. Second - degree burns.

  She spoke before Darzek could. "There's heat involved - you can feel its warmth when you come close to it - but there isn't enough heat to do this. It must secrete a film of some corrosive substance."

  "An acid?" Darzek suggested.

  "Acid or alkali. Something with an extreme pH."

  "It's probably a defense mechanism," he said. "A creature like this would be terribly vulnerable to enemies or even curious passers-by. But if that's what you wanted to find out, why didn't you use just one finger?" .

  "I didn't know it was dangerous," she said. "I wanted to examine it."

  "Examine - "

  "I think your precious alien life form has a skin disease."

  She identified Arluklo among the fluttering kloa - Miss Schlupe, tired of mistaken identities, had tied a ribbon around his neck and he conti
nued to wear it. She said, "Please tell the kloatraz that there are areas on its lower surface that look unhealthy. Ask it if it is aware of any pain or irritation there."

  Arluklo piped a negative with his usual politeness, and Malina retired to the Prime Common with no small chagrin to bandage her fingers.

  The following day she stopped in again at the Kloa Common to see how the work was progressing. As she approached, the transmitting frame hurled downward, unpowered, on a dry run. The frame struck the ground and flew apart. The engineers, who represented a spectacular diversity of life forms, gathered up the pieces in a mute agony that she found comical. "Back to the drawing board," she murmured.

  She seated herself on one of the scaffolding braces and studied the kloatraz. Darzek came over and sat down beside her. "Same diagnosis?" he asked.

  "Those spots certainly look unhealthy."

  Darzek thrust out an arm and rolled his sleeve up a few inches.

  He pointed at several large freckles. "Those spots certainly look unhealthy, but if I couldn't see them I'd never know they were there."

  "Unless a nosy dermatologist called them to your attention," she suggested.

  "Right. If that happened, I might start worrying about them." She turned quickly. "You mean - the kloatraz - "

  "It now decides that it's afflicted with an itch. Thus far it's being noble about the amount of pain involved. When pressed, it confesses to experiencing a painful irritation. Any suggestions?"

  "If the pain is psychosomatic, none at all. Kloatraz psychology certainly would be a fascinating study if we had a lifetime, but that would delay your expedition. If the pain is wholly somatic, then the problem is slightly more complicated. Is the pH different in the areas of pigmentation? I'm not sure that I know how to find out, but if the kloatraz doesn't mind, I'm willing to try a few things."

  "Ask Arluklo," Darzek said. "If the irritation or pain is psychosomatic, the fact that the creature is receiving attention may help the situation. "

  Malina consulted Arluklo, and then she went for her medical kit.

  With Arluklo standing by, poised to pipe a warning if anything she did made the situation worse, she selected the largest spot she could conveniently reach and took skin scrapings. Then she took scrapings from an area that looked normal. The surface was hard, but the scrapings came easily. Neither the kloatraz nor Arluklo made complaint. Malina thanked them both and returned to the Prime Common. For once she felt grateful to Rok Wllon - his lavishness with medical supplies had enabled her to include a microscope. Excitedly she prepared slides and took her first look at the cells of genus kloatraz.

  They certainly were unearthly, but she disregarded that for the moment and made her comparisons. She found no abnormalities in the cells from her control area, but many of the cells from the spot looked necrotic. She quickly identified an acid condition, and she thought the scrapings from the necrotic area had a lower pH than those from the control, though she had no means of precise measurement.

  Neither did she have any notion of what to do about it, but she had told Darzek she was willing to try a few things. She made up a phosphate buffer solution and returned to the Kloa Common. She summoned Arluklo, and then she soaked a bandage in the solution and cautiously applied it to one of the spots, holding it in place with forceps. The moisture evaporated almost at once, and before she could react, the bandage had become uncomfortably warm. When she jerked it away, the under surface was charred.

  She retreated in confusion and seated herself on the scaffolding. "What did it feel?" she asked Arluklo.

  "The same. Only in greater quantity."

  Her medical thermometer, with its upper limit of 420, was useless.

  She dispatched Arluklo on an errand; he probably had to tour the mart to accomplish it, but eventually he returned with a boxlike object with protruding radii and a strangely graduated dial. Since none of her medical sources indicated a normal surface temperature for a kloatraz, she would have accomplished nothing in trying to convert the graduations to centigrade. She first grasped a pair of radii, which enabled her to establish the reading for human surface temperature as a reference point and also to convince herself that the thing worked.

  Then she pressed several of the radii against the kloatraz. Arluklo assured her that it felt nothing at all, so she proceeded with her experiment. With the help of the engineers, who raised and lowered her on the new transmitter frame they had built, she established that the kloatraz's surface temperature at its base decreased steadily all the way to the top, where the temperature was little more than half what it was at the bottom. She could detect no measurable difference, at least on this thermometer, between the spots and the surrounding area.

  She was pondering this when Jan Darzek returned. "Found out anything?" he asked.

  "Several things, but I don't know what they mean. Did anyone notice these spots before?"

  "Probably not," he said. "Until we started our excavations, no one but kloa ever came down here. If they'd noticed them, the kloatraz would have known about them."

  "The spots definitely are getting darker, and there are more of them than there were yesterday. Now that I know what to look for, I can pick out a multitude of them in incipient stages. I think your kloatraz is on its way to becoming extremely ill."

  "You think so," Darzek said. "Are you willing to swear that the spots aren't a cosmetic affliction like freckles or even a sign of robust good health?"

  "Of course not. All I can swear is this: if you intend to haul the creature off across two galaxies and you want it alive when you arrive, you'd better give some thought to its health before you start."

  Darzek said despairingly, "Worlds are dying, and you want to deprive us of the only potential weapon we have while you play nurse. I'm willing to take the risk if the kloatraz is."

  Malina smiled. "If neither you nor the kloatraz cares, I don't see why I should. I certainly haven't established any kind of a doctor-patient relationship with it."

  She packed her medical kit. As she was leaving, Darzek's gloomy countenance made her burst into laughter. "If it's any consolation," she said, "eighty per cent of the sick get well whether they have medical attention or not - though I couldn't say whether that figure applies to kloatrazes. If it's been here as long as you say, the spots may be a symptom of senility."

  She returned to the Prime Common and looked again at the kloatraz's cells. And when, later that day, she took the children to the park, she met a native by special arrangement with the gesardl, and he carefully cut specimens for her of several kinds of Monturan vegetation. Back at the microscope, she quickly established that the kloatraz, plant though it might be, had no apparent relationship with

  Monturan plant life. ?" " -

  There was one further experiment she could perform. She had brought no culturing equipment with her - the standard BAP's would not have survived such a long trip, and in any case she had expected that the ultramodern city she was to practice in would have competent medical laboratories to perform chores that were beyond either the competence or interest of most dermatologists. Now she went down to Miss Schlupe's sandwich assembly line and abstracted a few pieces of pseudo salami. These she boiled into a thick broth, and she prepared three cultures: one with the normal skin scrapings, one with the necrotic cells, and a control. "And," she told herself, "I'll pray that nothing grows in any of them, because if it does I won't have the faintest idea what it is."

  Early the next morning Darzek came for her. The dark spots were enlarging, there were more of them, and the kloatraz, whether for cause or because it merely wanted attention, was complaining. Would she please come back and have another look? ...

  She made another buffer solution with a. higher pH, and this she sprayed on several of the kloatraz's larger spots. According to Arluklo, the kloatraz noticed nothing different about that area, but at least the medication did not evaporate as quickly as the previous solution. She could not venture a gue
ss as to how long it would take before she knew whether or not it was helping.

  She spent an hour minutely scrutinizing the kloatraz's base, and then, after repeating the spray, she joined Darzek, who had been watching her from his own favorite seat on the scaffolding. She said bluntly, "If you're taking it anywhere soon, I think I'd better come along."

  He shook his head. "You saw the recordings. You know how dangerous it is. If we make one bad guess, or have a few seconds of bad luck, you'll enhance your medical education by experiencing first hand an extremely unpleasant way to die."

  "The kloatraz is the real reason Supreme sent a mission here, isn't it?" she asked.

  "It must be."

  "Has it occurred to you that the kloatraz may also be the reason