They rounded a final corner and Vish pushed open a plain wooden door. “Here is the place, Crusher-Doctor. I will bring you polishing cloths to dry your assistant’s carapace and something to cover it with. But I beg of you to hurry with these inconsequential activities.”
“I understand.” Crusher’s voice cracked with impatience. “I will use the time to inform my assistant of what I expect of him, if only you will quit harassing me!”
“It will be as you wish.” Vish skittered away to fetch the promised towels while Crusher held the door aside for Riker.
He limped inside, feeling too drained to care what was happening. The room was small, with a low workbench and several shelves along one wall. Glass jars and small covered pots of various colors occupied most of the shelf space. Crusher pointed to the low arched door in the back wall. “The washing trough is in there. I’m sorry about the lack of privacy, but it doesn’t seem to be a concept the Jarada understand.”
The washing trough was exactly what its name suggested—a sunken, elongated tub with water flowing in at one end and out the other. Riker wiggled his fingers in the water, surprised to find it was tepid and not the icy chill he had expected. He wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time immersed, but he could at least get most of the grime off his body without suffering from hypothermia. The trough was a little small for a human, but again, he thought he could make do. He stripped and eased his body into the tub, wincing as the water touched the raw scrapes on his legs.
He looked around for soap, but all he could find was a bucket of sand. No doubt the gritty stuff would work fine on the Jarada, but just now his skin didn’t need any more abrasion. With a sigh Riker began working his fingers through his toes to remove the mud that had oozed into his boots. In the other room he heard Crusher talking to someone, but he didn’t pay any attention until he heard her boots moving toward him.
A wadded ball of fabric sailed over his head and dropped into the water in front of him. “Here. A polishing cloth,” she said. “There’s some more behind you to dry off with, and a couple of sheets that will have to do for clothing.” Her footsteps retreated into the other room and he heard her fussing with something on the workbench.
Riker unrolled the cloth, soaked it in the water, and began washing the rest of his body. “What’s going on here anyway?” he asked, needing the answers as much as he needed anything else.
“I’am not entirely sure,” her voice came back to him. “Vish told me that I was brought here to solve a form of planetwide insanity that’s destroying their people. However, they expect me to do it with their equipment and their databases—and without contacting the Enterprise for help. What happened to you?”
He gave her a shortened version of his adventures, concentrating on the behavior of the Jarada he had met in hopes that she could find some clue in his descriptions. By the time he finished his story he was clean and dry, with one of the sheets tied around his waist like an Indian dhoti.
“Before you do anything more, let me take a look at your back,” Crusher said as he started to drape the other sheet over his shoulders.
“Why? It’s just a couple of cuts, isn’t it?” Nevertheless, Riker tossed the sheet over his arm and joined her by the workbench.
Crusher activated her tricorder and scanned the cuts on his back. Each of the places where Zarn’s claws had broken the skin was surrounded by a purplish-red welt, as though the wounds had been poisoned. By contrast, the deep gash on her arm was still painful and had spotted the bandage with blood, but when she eased the gauze aside, she saw no unusual discoloration. Either the ointment Vish had given her was the antidote for a toxin on the Jarada’s claws, or Riker had gotten something into the cuts that had poisoned them.
Since none of the scrapes on his legs showed any abnormal inflammation, Crusher decided on the first hypothesis. She worked the ointment, a pungent mixture of herbs in a tarry base, into each cut and then, for good measure, slathered it on every other wound she could find.
“How much of that stuff do I need?” Riker protested as she smeared it over a scrape on his swollen knee. “It smells horrible.”
Crusher stood, wiping the excess off her fingers with a spare rag. Pointing the tricorder at the ointment, she ran a duplicate analysis on it before she capped the jar and returned it to the shelf. “It may smell horrible, but you’ve got several badly inflamed cuts on your back. Similar injuries on my arm show no signs of infection, so I’m not taking any chances. Until we get back to the ship, that ointment’s the best game in town.”
“Whatever you say, Doctor.” Riker wrapped the second sheet around his upper body and tied it over one shoulder, toga-style. “What’s our next move?”
“There’s one set of experiments they showed me earlier that I would like to check again. Something about trace elements determining the colors of a plant’s flowers. But after that—” Crusher shook her head in frustration, flipping her hair across her face like a red curtain. Raking it out of the way, she shrugged. “I’ve got tricorder readings on fairly normal to completely unbalanced Jarada, and I’ve recorded what their bioscanners reported for each individual. But if Vish thinks I can use their computers to make sense of the data, it needs to reconsider.”
“Personally, I didn’t think Vish was acting all that stable.” Riker grimaced, remembering the ochre Jarada’s impatient dance as it led them from the lab.
Crusher rubbed a muscle in her neck, frowning in thought. “You’re right. In fact, Vish has been acting less and less normal since we got here. I think this insanity is beginning to affect its stability too.”
“In that case, I suggest we check out those plants you want to study, then barricade ourselves in that lab with all the equipment. We may not be able to understand it well enough to get any science out of it, but I’m willing to bet we can find something that will attract the Enterprise’s attention.”
“As long as you’re the one who’s rewiring things. I’ll have you know that I can use any device that comes with a halfway decent operator’s manual, but I can’t replace the codecard on a door lock.” Crusher holstered her tricorder and poked her head into the hall, checking for Jarada. When she saw the corridor was deserted, she stepped through the door and motioned for Riker to follow.
He picked up the bundle that held his wet uniform and limped after her. The textured tile floor was cold against the soles of his feet. For no good reason Riker shivered, wishing his socks and boots had not been too wet to wear. Even more than the rest of his strange costume, his bare feet made him feel vulnerable. As they walked, he continued their conversation. “When it comes to electronics, I have to admit that I flunked the course—twice. I kept cross-circuiting my experiments so that they never worked the way they were supposed to.”
“And you’re telling me this to build my confidence?” The twinkle in Crusher’s eye belied the skepticism in her voice.
“Actually, yes.” He paused while she shot him an outraged glare. “If you really want to know, I’m hoping my old skills are still working. If we just tell ourselves we’re trying to reconfigure the medical scanners for human operation, I should have a functioning emergency beacon in no time.”
Crusher snorted with laughter. Usually she spotted Riker’s tall tales before he could spring the last line. For some reason, it made her feel better to know that his sense of the inappropriate was still functioning at peak efficiency.
After returning to the medical lab the doctor paused, searching her memory. She had been taken from the lab where she had been attacked directly to the room they had just left. At the time she had been too distracted to consciously memorize the route, so she had to think a moment, recalling the turns and cross-corridors by kinesthesis rather than by visual clues. The complex seemed deserted, and they met no one on their way to the botany lab.
When they got to the right hallway, Crusher tried three doors before she found the one she wanted. The room was unchanged, with broken glassware and crushed plants still m
arking the place where the young researcher had attacked her. Glancing at Riker’s bare feet, Crusher told him to wait near the door. She pulled out the tricorder and began walking along each aisle, recording the characteristics of each group of plants.
“What are you looking for?” Riker asked. From where he stood he could see the rows of glass tanks, each containing low bushes covered with different-colored blossoms, but could not tell why these particular plants were significant.
“These are all the same plant. Genetically identical. In most plants the color difference would be caused by variations in the genetic coding for the flower pigments.”
“You’re saying these plants don’t have different genes for the different colors?” Riker shook his head, wondering if the insanity was affecting Crusher as well. Somehow the connection between these plants and their current predicament seemed extremely tenuous.
“Apparently not.” Crusher shifted her tricorder to scan the next row, walking back toward Riker as she did. “Vish told me there was a link between the trace elements in the soil and the color of the flowers. What caught my attention was the fact that they had not been able to reproduce the color Vish said was the most common on their homeworld.”
“Oh.” Suddenly Riker felt the light go on in his head. “You think there’s a connection between a trace element deficiency and their insanity.”
“I’m sure of it. The crazy Jarada that I examined have readings that are well outside the parameters for the rest of their race. Unfortunately, if we’re dealing with a biochemical imbalance, I have to guess where the deficiency is because I don’t have any completely normal Jarada to compare my readings with. I wish we knew more about them.”
Riker snorted. “From what I’ve seen, I’m afraid I know a little more than I would like. So far they haven’t exactly been the most relaxing people I’ve ever been around.”
“Yes, there is that.” Crusher snapped the tricorder closed and returned it to its holster. Pausing by the counter with the smashed containers, she separated several broken stems from the tangle of crushed plants. “If you tuck these in with your uniform, they should keep well enough for me to do some cell workups when we get back to the ship.”
“If you say so.” Riker slipped the shoots into his bundle. “Is that all you needed here?”
Crusher nodded. “Let’s get back to the other lab and try to get a signal to the ship before someone decides to check on us.”
They retraced their steps, still meeting no one. Riker felt a prickle of uneasiness dance along his spine. He didn’t know how many Jarada worked in this complex, but if humans had designed it, there would have been hundreds of people here. The solitude made him wonder where all the Jarada were. Had the facility ever been fully staffed or had something happened to the researchers after they were assigned here? Either set of possibilities was further proof of how things were deteriorating for the Jarada on this planet.
When they reached the lab, Riker began studying the equipment. To his surprise, the examination field for the bioscanner had an adjustable focus and could be adapted for what he had in mind. It took him two hours to reorient the components and to rip out the safety regulators, but in the end he had a device that could throw a signal far enough for the Enterprise’s sensors to detect it. Crossing his fingers and hoping the ship would find them before the Jarada realized what he had done, Riker activated his beacon.
Chapter Twenty
KEIKO BIT HER LIP to keep from crying out at the nightmare sound of the Jarada voices humming and buzzing and clicking outside the tent. After the last few hours she was no longer sure how she should respond to them. All the students they had come here with were clearly crazy, their behavior unbalanced in the extreme. What she had seen of the teachers’ disciplinary methods—killing deranged students instead of restraining them—inspired little confidence that the teachers were any more rational than their pupils. But was the insanity only temporary? Or, perhaps, cyclical? Or could a new group of Jarada have arrived to rescue them? As little as she wanted to admit it, the only way she and Tanaka were going to get back to the city was if the Jarada provided transportation. The question was—should they take a chance on trusting the Jarada or would they be better off waiting until the Enterprise spread its search pattern far enough to detect the two lone humans in this wilderness? She would have liked to discuss the options with Tanaka, but he was still unconscious. Besides, with the Jarada outside their tent, any noise they made would attract the insectoids’ attention.
Tension wound itself tighter around her belly, twisting her insides into a tight knot of fear, and cold sweat trickled down her back. It would be different if she had some means of defending herself. A phaser would be welcome since she was so badly outnumbered. Then she could protect Tanaka, stunning any attackers before they got close enough to injure either of the humans again. Still, given how deadly the Jarada claws were, she would have settled for a well-made staff or even a sturdy tree branch long enough to land a solid blow without putting her within reach of her opponents. It was the waiting, the huddling in the tent and knowing she had no way of defending herself, that got on her nerves.
She suppressed a shudder, thinking what would happen if the Jarada outside were as crazed as the ones that had chased her and Tanaka into the forest. No, it wouldn’t do to attract their attention unless she was positive they were friendly. And as long as they were speaking their own language, she had no way to tell what they were up to. She reached for the Jaradan translator, but stopped with her hand on the switch. The sound would attract attention from the insectoids outside, and she wasn’t sure she should trust the Jaradan device. Tears of frustration burned her eyes as she thought of the damaged communicators. With a functional communicator she would have access to the ship’s Universal Translator and she would know whether these Jarada were friends or foes. More to the point, she wouldn’t even be in this mess. At the first sign of trouble, Miles could have beamed them back to the Enterprise, Tanaka would not have had his leg injured, and she wouldn’t be lying in the darkness with several potentially insane Jarada outside her tent. To keep her panic at bay, she let her mind dwell on Miles and on how she would apologize to him when she got back to the ship. He had been right about this assignment, although she still could not fathom the logic behind his conclusion.
After what seemed like forever, the voices faded away as the Jarada wandered off down the beach. Keiko didn’t know if they were following the trail she and Tanaka had left—was it only a few hours earlier? —when they had walked along the lake after setting up their camp, or if the Jarada had just drifted that way by chance. Either way, she and Tanaka were safe for the moment.
Her body went limp, sagging against Tanaka’s as the tension drained out of her. She shivered, unpleasantly cold where the air touched her sweat-slicked skin, and tried to pull the sleeping bag over herself. The far edge was folded under Tanaka’s fever-hot body, and she couldn’t free it without moving him. Nor could she raise the temperature to a more comfortable level for her exhausted body. The tent’s controller, concealed in its pocket outside the door, might as well have been on the Enterprise for all her chances of reaching it.
After a brief struggle she gave up and wiggled as close to Tanaka as she could, thinking, If Miles hears of this, he’ll never stop screaming about it. Still, it wasn’t as if she had a lot of choices. If she kept a decorous separation between herself and Tanaka, she would become thoroughly chilled and the chattering of her teeth would probably bring down an attack by marauding Jarada. And it wasn’t as if they were doing anything. With Tanaka in the condition he was in, Keiko wasn’t even sure he knew where he was or whom he was with.
As if her thoughts had penetrated his delirium, Tanaka stirred and murmured something. Keiko put her fingers to his lips, hoping the gesture would quiet him. Instead, it seemed to have the opposite effect. He thrashed harder, jabbing an elbow into her ribs. She groaned and rolled away, fighting the sudden return of her nausea.
It would not do to get sick inside the tent, and she dared not crawl outside for fear of attracting attention from any hostile Jarada still in the area. For that matter, wherever she got sick, it would be like a beacon to a race that used scent as extensively as the Jarada. Jamming her hand across her mouth and swallowing rapidly, Keiko fought to keep her body from betraying them to the danger outside.
Finally the queasiness receded and Keiko crept back to check on Tanaka. His breathing was shallow and rapid, and he felt as if he were burning up from the fever. Gritting her teeth, Keiko examined the leg, although the sight of it and the putrid smell of the infection made her stomach lurch. It was worse, much worse, with the swelling and redness stretching upward well past his knee and the yellowish-white rim extending over a centimeter back from the edge of the wound.
Although she knew it was futile, she injected him with the last of the antibiotics and squeezed the remainder of the ointment into the gash before replacing the bandage. Surprisingly, after his earlier restlessness, he was still while she treated him, although she didn’t think he was conscious. The job finished, Keiko sat back on her heels, shaking with reaction. She did not need any medical training to know that, unless they were rescued soon, Tanaka was going to die from the toxins in his leg.
He started to thrash again, muttering in his delirium.What if he makes enough noise to attract the Jarada? Keiko thought, not liking the direction that thought led. They would both be trapped, since Tanaka was unable to go anywhere and she could not escape into the trees without his help. She crawled under the sleeping bag and held him, stroking his back and murmuring nonsense words to him. For a wonder, it worked and he quieted, lapsing again into sleep.
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