Final Diagnosis

CHAPTER 20

Hewlitt took an instinctive step backward, his body breaking into a sweat that was not due to the warmth of the sun, but nobody else moved. Either they were all lacking in imagination, which was unlikely, or there was no danger in the situation. He took another step backward anyway.

“Not to our knowledge, Captain,” Stillman replied. “There is no historical record of them ever being used in Etlan planetary wars, and they would be pretty ineffective in a space battle. Besides, this world was sick enough already. They could have been developed secretly by the emperor’s scientists, and toward the end of the rebellion he might have been desperate enough to use everything he had, but I would say not. The casualty lists of the period mention traumatic injuries resulting from explosions, shrapnel, and gunshot wounds, not disease.”

He paused long enough for Fletcher to pass Murchison three more fragments before going on. “In any case, chemical or biological weapons are designed to burst on impact or in the air above the target. This one was soft-landed by parachute, the expulsion mechanism malfunctioned, and it didn’t break open until it was struck by something.”

“Or someone,” said Prilicla.

One by one they turned to stare at Hewlitt, as surprised by the empath’s words as he was himself. It was Stillman who spoke first.

He said, “If you mean that it was the Hewlitt child who fell onto this thing, smashed it, and released whatever was inside, I can’t help you. He was lying beside it, but it was dark and I was too busy examining him to notice whether there was any broken glass lying around. Besides, Etlan pathogens cannot affect anyone from off-planet. We all know that. And, well, he looks as if he hasn’t had a day’s illness in his life.”

There was a faint trembling in Prilicla’s limbs as it nerved itself for the effort of telling another person that he was wrong.

“Friend Hewlitt has a long history of nonspecific illnesses,” it said, “all of which responded negatively to treatment. For that reason, diagnosis has been uncertain and the strange succession of symptoms displayed was initially and perhaps mistakenly thought to have a purely psychological basis. Our provisional diagnosis is that he suffers from a wide-ranging, hyperallergic reaction to all forms of medication used so far. We are fairly sure that the condition is not life-threatening, except when an attempt is made to administer medication orally, by subcutaneous injection, or by external application and massage into the dermis. It is a clinically confusing picture.”

Stillman shook his head, then pointed at the torpedo. “And is this thing helping to reduce your confusion?”

A faint tremor shook the empath’s body as if someone, perhaps Prilicla itself, was generating unpleasant emotional radiation. Instead of answering the question, it said, “Friend Stillman, I have been feeling your hunger and that of the others since I refused the Tralthans’ offer of hospitality at the house. My reason for doing so is that Rhabwar’s food synthesizer was recently reprogrammed by Chief Dietitian Gurronsevas himself, and we could do a better job of satisfying it on the ship. Would you like to dine with us on board, now?”

“Yes, please,” said Stillman.

“I am also detecting feelings of negation and intense curiosity from one of the team. Friend Fletcher, is there a problem?”

“The problem is this soft-landed vehicle,” the captain replied. “I would like to have a closer look at the actuator mechanism controlling the piston. It seems to be unnecessarily sophisticated for the simple job it had to do, but I prefer to keep the structure intact and undisturbed. For that I need Danalta to extrude the specialized limbs and digits that will enable us to examine and disassemble the actuator from inside. I have no wish to be insubordinate, Doctor, but from me you must be feeling intense curiosity rather than hunger.”

Prilicla gave a low, trilling sound that did not translate before it said, “Very well, the two of you are excused. Friend Murchison, do you wish to join the mutineers?”

The pathologist shook her head. “I can do no more here,” she said. “The coating on the fragments is a synthesized nutrient material suited to the needs of a wide range of warm-blooded oxygenbreathers. There are a number of unidentified organisms present; they may belong to the original contents of the flask or they may be native to Etla, or both. A full analysis isn’t possible with this portable equipment, so it will have to wait until we return to the ship, and after lunch.”

With its iridescent wings catching the sunlight and seeming to reflect every color in the spectrum, Prilicla rose high above the edge of the ravine to disappear in the direction of the ship, leaving Fletcher and Danalta to complete their investigation and the others to return as they had come.

The empath seemed to be in an awful hurry, Hewlitt thought. It was the first time he had seen the Cinrusskin act in a manner verging on the impolite.

“There are times,” Stillman said to Murchison, who was climbing beside him, “when I wish I could fly. Or better still, that I hadn’t allowed myself to become so three-dimensional in my old age.”

Murchison smiled politely but remained silent until they reached the top; then she said, “Surgeon-Captain Stillman, will you answer a question?”

“You sound very formal and serious, ma’am,” the other replied, “which means the question will be the same. I will if I can. “Thank you,” said the pathologist. She took three long, swishing steps through the long grass and went on, Something very strange must have happened here during the rebellion. I know the accounts and dispatches are not secret, but when I tried to brief myself on the subject I discovered that the Monitor Corps would make them available only to accredited historians and scholars, who, it turned out, were in no hurry to publish.

“The reason given,” she went on, “was that the former worlds of the Etlan Empire were being assimilated into the Galactic Federation and it would hamper the process if all the reasons for the rebellion on this world in particular were made available to the merely curious, or worse, to those wishing to abstract the more dramatic incidents to produce shallow and insensitive treatments for the mass-entertainment channels. The natives here, I was told, are still troubled by the war crimes committed against them by their emperor and must not be reminded of them.

“But what exactly were those crimes?” she continued. “Was chemical warfare or biological experimentation on sapient beings among them? It might aid our investigation if we knew. Or are you, too, forbidden to talk?”

Stillman shook his head. “No, ma’am. I can talk to people who will not misuse the information. It will be given on a patient confidentiality basis, because the emperor, and the exclusive families who were the hereditary imperial advisors, were very sick people.

“Have you another question, ma’am?” he added, smiling. “A nice, simple one that will not need a couple of hours and a very nasty slice of history to answer properly?”

Murchison did not reply until they were about to ascend Rhabwar s boarding ramp.

“Yes,” she said. “Do you know if Fudge ever went exploring in Hewlitt’s ravine?”

Captain Fletcher and Dr. Danalta, whose curiosity regarding the object in the ravine was still outweighing their hunger, were listening on their communicators to Stillman giving his long answer to her first question because they, like Hewlitt, had not been present during the single, epic, and only multiple-ship engagement of the war, the climactic battle for Sector General.

“For political reasons,” Stillman was saying as he loosened his kilt’s waistband to relieve the pressure on his recently expanded stomach, “the Monitor Corps does not refer to the Etlan conflict as a war. The idea of a fifty-world empire tucked away in a hitherto unexplored galactic sector opening undeclared hostilies on a totally unprepared Federation was, well, destabilizing to say the least, and had to be played down.

“There has been only one interstellar war,” he continued, “the one between Earth and Orligia, whose cessation brought about the formation of the Galactic Federation. Since then it has been generally accepted that interstellar warfare for economic or territorial gain is logistically and economically impossible. It costs too much and there are too many uninhabited planets just waiting for colonization. If the belligerent culture or its rulers were sufficiently demented to be motivated by hatred alone rather than the expectation of gain, their victim worlds could simply be detonated or otherwise rendered uninhabitable. But a culture does not develop the technology to get into space, much less to mount successful interstellar colonization projects, without learning the basic lessons of civilization, that is the ability to understand, cooperate, and live together in peace. So it was axiomatic that any new species we discovered that had an interstellar-travel capability had to be highly civilized as well as technically advanced.

“Where the Etlan Empire was concerned,” he went on, “the Monitor Corps had to consider the possibility that it was the exception to that rule. But until we were sure, everything possible was done to conceal the locations of the Federation worlds from them while we found out all we could about their culture and at the same time played down the true gravity of the threat. That is why we, as the Federation’s executive and law-enforcement arm, prefer to think of it as a large-scale police action…

“Doctor,” said Naydrad, its fur tufting into spikes of irritation, “with hundreds of armed ships dogfighting all around us and non-nuclear torpedoes blowing chunks out of the hospital’s outer hull, it felt like a war, not a riot! Were you there?”

“Yes,” said Stillman. In the quiet, serious tone of one who is recalling unpleasant memories, he went on, “I was the junior medic on Vespasian when she collided with that Etlan transport, and helped move the casualties into the hospital. When Conway, who was the senior surviving medic by that time, saw that I had escaped with only a few bruises, he told me that they were desperately short of staff and put me to work in an other-species ward somewhere. The hospital’s translation computer had been knocked out and trying to communicate was… Anyway, it might have felt like a war but officially it is recorded as a police operation involving organized and heavily armed lawbreakers.

In the silence that followed, Hewlitt looked from Stillman to Murchison to Prilicla, who were all reacting in characteristic fashion to their memories of a terrible experience they had shared. He felt excluded, but for the first time in his life he was grateful for being an outsider.

Stillman gave an abrupt shake of his head and continued, “The trouble began when one of your ex-patients, a very high-powered entity called Lonvellin, discovered what it called Etla the Sick Planet…

“I am familiar with the Lonvellin case,” Prilicla broke in. “It was the then Senior Physician Conway’s patient and I assisted with the emotional radiation readings while it was unconscious… I’m sorry. Friend Stillman, please go on.

Following its discharge from Sector General, Lonvellin had boarded its private starship and resumed the interrupted search for a world, said to be in a hitherto unexplored section of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, about which it had heard some very disquieting rumors. In spite of its physiological classification of EPLH, its massive body and fearsome natural weaponry, Lonvellin was a highly intelligent, compulsively altruistic, extremely long-lived, and intensely independent being who made it very plain that it did not and probably never would need help from anyone in rectifying any nasty situation it might find because it had been curing ailing planetary cultures for the greater part of its very long life.

It had come as a great surprise to the Monitor Corps when Lonvellin contacted them with the news that it had found the world it had been seeking and asked them for specialized assistance.

Conditions on the world Lonvellin had found were both sociologically complex and medically barbaric. It needed advice in the medical area before it could take effective action against the many social ills afflicting this truly distressed planet. It also asked that beings of physiological classification DBDG, and specifically Earthhuman entities, should be sent to act as information gatherers. It explained that the natives were of that classification and were violently hostile to all off-wonders who did not closely resemble themselves, a fact that was seriously hampering Lonvellin’s activities.

From the mass of evidence gathered over many months’ observation and monitoring of communications channels from orbit, Lonvellin judged the planet, called Etla by the inhabitants, to have been a thriving colony world that had regressed because of the effect of a wide variety of diseases affecting more than sixty-five percent of the population. But the presence of a small and still functioning spaceport meant that Lonvellin’s first and usually most difficult problem, that of making the natives trust an alien and perhaps visually horrifying being who had dropped out of their sky, should have been simplified, because the inhabitants were already used to the idea of off-planet visitors.

Lonvellin’s intention had been to play the role of a not very bright off-wonder who had been forced to land in order to make repairs to its ship. For this it would require various odd and completely worthless pieces of metal or plastic, and it would pretend great difficulty in making the Etlans understand what it needed. But for this worthless material it would exchange artifacts of great value, and soon the more enterprising inhabitants would begin to take advantage of the situation.

At that stage Lonvellin did not mind being exploited, because the situation was going to change. Rather than give items of value, it would offer to perform even more valuable services, including that of a teacher. Then it would tell them that it considered its ship to be beyond the technical resources of Etla to repair, and as had happened on many previous occasions, gradually it would be accepted as a permanent resident. After that it would have been just a matter of time before it was able to begin changing the Etlan situation for the better, and time was something with which Lonvelun was well supplied.

“To an immensely long-lived and highly intelligent being like Lonvellin,” Stillman went on, “it was all an elaborate and intricate game that it had played successfully many times in its past. It was a good game in that the populations of the worlds concerned benefited as well as rewarding the player with the satisfaction of a job well done. But this time Lonvellin’s game went disastrously wrong. From the moment it landed on the outskirts of a small town and revealed itself, it was kept too busy with the ship’s defenses to begin to play…

Unable to proceed without discovering why a race with experience of space travel should be so violently xenophobic, and not being in a position to ask questions itself, Lonvellin had called for Earth-human assistance. Because of the incredibly high incidence of disease among the population, it had also asked that the senior physician who had been in charge of its case at Sector General advise and assist as well. Shortly afterward, cultural-contact specialists of the Monitor Corps accompanied by Conway had arrived, sized up the situation for themselves, and gone in.

The Etlans were contacted simultaneously at two levels. The first was by a few trained linguists and medics who were landed covertly and concealed their translators under native dress, no other disguise being necessary because the physiological resemblance was so close. Problems with accent and pronunciation were disguised by the pretense of having a speech impediment, it being difficult to identify an accent when the speaker had a stutter or a disease affecting the mouth and tongue, a medical condition that was very common on Etla.

On the second level, a large Monitor vessel landed openly at the spaceport; the Corpsmen admitted their off-world origin and conversed normally by translator. Their story was that they had heard of the plight of the native population and had come to give what medical assistance they could. The Etlans accepted this story, revealing the fact that every ten years an imperial vessel was sent to them loaded with the newest drugs and with healers on board familiar with their use, but in spite of this their medical condition continued to deteriorate. The strangers were welcome to do what they could, but the impression given was that if the medical efforts of an empire covering nearly fifty worlds was powerless to help them then the Monitor Corps was wasting its time.

The majority of Etlans were friendly, trusting people who talked freely about themselves and their empire. The Corps’ contactors were also friendly, but more reticent.

When the subject of the strange and frightful entity called Lonvellin came up, the Corps pretended complete ignorance and their opinions about it leaned heavily toward the middle of the road.

But the really important information had come from the covert investigators. They discovered that the natives were terrified of Lonvellin because they had been taught that all extraterrestrials were disease carriers. The first medical lesson that all star-traveling cultures learned, that pathogens evolved on one planet could not affect the beings of another, had been withheld from them.

Deliberately.

“At least their intense and continuing fear of contracting new infections was understandable,” Stillman continued, “because Etla was a very sick planet. It was a seventh-generation colony world, widely settled but not heavily populated, that had been dogged with ill health for more than a century. At the time an incredible sixty-five percent of its men, women, and children were affected by a wide variety of diseases, most of which were accompanied by a large degree of physical disablement. Very few of the conditions were life-threatening but a high proportion were disfiguring. Many of the contagious diseases would have responded to isolation and simple medical treatment, but their medical science was primitive and there were no research facilities because the empire did all their medical thinking for them.

“The situation was driving us out of our medical minds,” he went on, “because so far as we could see all of the conditions we had seen were curable. If we could have declared the planet a disaster area and moved in massive medical support, the problem would have been solved within a few years at most. But we had a delicate first-contact situation on our hands: the people were proud and independent and, at that time, still loyal and grateful to their emperor on Imperial Etla and to the people of all the other worlds called Etla that made up the empire for their continuing support. The arrival of massive medical aid from strangers would have been demeaning to them and might even have been mistaken by the onplanet imperial representative, who so far had avoided contact with the Monitor Corps, and the large military establishment he maintained, as a hostile invasion from space…”

In order to reassure the Etlan authorities regarding Federation intentions, and to discover why the medical aid sent to their ailing colony world was so small and infrequent, a Monitor vessel with a senior medical officer on board was sent to Imperial Etla. It was possible that distance had diminished the urgency of the plight of their sick brothers, but when the unarmed courier vessel signaled its approach and landed openly at the planetary capital’s spaceport, it was immediately surrounded by elements of the imperial guard.

The reason given for this apparently unfriendly act was that a xenophobic reaction could be expected from the less intelligent among the local population and the security of the visitors was of paramount importance. This was also why the ship’s crew, with the exception of their medical officer, should remain on board and make no attempt to communicate with anyone until the authorities had prepared the psychological ground.

Their medic was given the warmest of welcomes by the imperial advisors and interrogated in a manner both thorough and friendly about all aspects of the Federation while at the same time being accorded the honors normally reserved for a visiting head of state. Meanwhile the sensors on the courier vessel were uncovering some very disquieting information regarding what the broadcast media was referring to openly as the Plague Planet as well as obvious-obvious, that was, to the Corps’ political analyst on board-deficiencies in the administration and financial structure of the Etlan Empire.

Their first discovery was that the Plague Planet was out of sight but most definitely not out of mind. On every street intersection and at frequent intervals along the intercity roads there were display boards advertising the plight of their desperately ill brothers on Etla the Sick in graphic and often horrifying detail, all pleading for contributions for the relief of their suffering. Every one of the vision channels ran supporting stories at frequent intervals, and the appeal was invariably mentioned by candidates seeking political office. It was the most promoted and popular charity, not only on Imperial Etla but on every other planet of the empire, and the contributions were continuous and generous.

It was impossible to believe that the donations funded the dispatch of only one aid ship every ten years.

They already knew that the ship arrived, unloaded, and left without delay, because none of the crew would stay a moment longer than necessary on that planetary pesthole. The cargo was transferred to Imperial Representative Teltrenn’s estate, a large, parklike tract of land surrounding a palace and barracks whose perimeter was guarded by a heavily armed, elite force. The reason given for the military presence among the unarmed colonists, who were required to supply them with food and low-ranking support personnel, was that they were there to guard against a possible offworld invasion. At intervals of a few months, there seemed to be no great urgency about the process, Teltrenn traveled to distant parts of the colony world to distribute the new medication, information on its administration, and news of the continuing research being done on Imperial Etla.

It would have been faster and more efficient to supply the colonist medics with the new material and instructions simultaneously, but Teltrenn insisted on bringing it to them in person so that he could pass on the personal sympathy as well as the good wishes of their emperor.

This lack of urgency aroused the suspicions of Conway and the other Corps medics, who analyzed the various plague vectors going back over several decades. They found that many of the earlier diseases were disappearing, probably because the sufferers and their families were developing a natural resistance to them. But invariably a new disease appeared to replace the old, usually one involving visually horrifying skin eruptions, multiple limb deformities, or uncontrollable palsies that were, against all the laws of medical probability, rarely fatal.

All of the evidence pointed to the incredible and horrifying conclusion that the much loved and respected Imperial Representative Teltrenn was deliberately and systematically spreading diseases, not trying to cure them, and that the reason was financial.