Robert Chase: The Wellness Plague

A figure sat slumped over in the pilot’s chair. Small food cartons, the type that made up part of any VTOL’s emergency kit, formed a pile in the comer. Already knowing what he would find, Rey felt for a pulse. He sighed as he let the wrist fall.

“Belkom Michaels-Nye. There are splints on both legs. Dead a little more than a day, as far as I can tell. We just missed him.”

“Anyone else there?” Lopez asked.

“No.” Rectangles on the wall showed where the emergency kits had been. At least one other member of the party had survived, had done his or her best for Belkom, and then… what? Climbed down the trunk to attempt to walk back to Far Edge? Stupid, stupid, stupid! “Stay with your craft” in case of accident was drilled into you from the time you could walk. It had been hard enough to spot the VTOL. Individuals would be invisible under the jungle canopy.

“Excuse me.” Ting-Lim’s voice. “I can hold here for only about ten more minutes.”

“Right,” Rey acknowledged. He reached around to detach a body bag from his backpack. “We’ll be right up.”

He sat across from the open cargo door on the flight back to Far Edge. The jungle skimmed by beneath them. O’Donnel and his other three friends might be anywhere below. It was even conceivable that they were still alive.

There was nothing more anyone could do except arrange for the memorial service.

Two nights later there was another storm. Paabo Bhagwati awoke, listened to the pounding of the rain and the roar of distant thunder. There had been something else—there! From the front of the house, a sound midway between a scratching and a tapping. It was not loud, compared to the other storm sounds, but it should not have been there at all. He got up, wondering if something had been tom loose by the wind and was now battering his door. Or if somehow one of the sheep had somehow escaped the adjoining bam and was now scraping at the door for shelter.

The wind nearly tore the door from his hand as he opened it. A man stood before him, face dark with at least a week’s growth of beard. His clothes were tom. Three other figures huddled behind him under the overhang.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” O’Donnel Buergher-Murchison said hoarsely, “but my friends and I have had a bit of trouble. May I use your comm set to call my mother, please?”

O’Donnel Murchison. Judith Speigelman-Fromm. Anderson Perry-Barlow. Maria Castillo-Schmidt. They had done something no one else had done since the first landing. They had crashed in the jungle and walked out on their own.

The screen above the bed gave most of the basic facts: blood pressure, pulse rate, body temperature, white blood cell count, respiration, oxygenation levels, metabolic rates, fluid input and output. Most of the facts and none of the answers.

“When can I go home?” O’Donnel asked.

Rey followed the IV lines down to his patient. “When you are well enough.”

“I just did a hundred-kilometer hike in the jungle. Doesn’t that mean I’m in pretty good shape?”

“Considering what you went through, you are in astoundingly good shape,” Rey answered. “You should be ready tomorrow, or the next day for sure. After all, you were in the jungle more than two weeks. Even the Bainbridge expedition was beyond the cordons little more than one week, and they started fully outfitted, and were resupplied on their way. The fact is, a lot of people can’t understand why you and your friends are alive at all.”

“I’m almost sorry to disappoint them,” O’Donnel murmured.

“No need to be,” Rey replied, “but there are some questions which need answering. You were on minimal rations, on a trek which must have required a great deal of endurance. You seem to have lost some body fat, and you may have the beginnings of a few deficiency diseases. Yet Belkom, who had most of the emergency rations, died of starvation.”

O’Donnel’s face clouded. “None of us wanted to leave him,” he said, “but there was no way he could!ve walked. The emergency packs were supposed to contain enough rations for all of us for five days. We took three days’ rations for ourselves and left the rest for Belk.”

Rey thought back to the pile of cartons in the VTOL. “Why did you split it up that way?”

“We figured we weren’t that far from Far Edge, so three days should do it.” He shrugged. “Big mistake, huh? Even though we tried to keep to the ridge, the tree cover was so thick we a lose sight of me sun. Every two or three hours, one of us had to climb a tree to see if we were still walking in the right direction. Lots of times, we weren’t.

“And the rations weren’t nearly enough! Each of them was supposed to last you a day, but we’d eat one during a stop and be hungry two hours later.”

Which suggested one line of investigation: if the contractor who packaged the emergency rations had shorted the contents, it might explain why Belkom had died. Although, as Marty had remarked, it was odd that anyone should die of hunger in a week even if he had had no food at all. In Belkom’s case, the additional factors of trauma and blood loss must have gready weakened him.

“Why did you leave the VTOL?” Rey asked.

O’Donnel shook his head, aware of the implied criticism. “We didn’t think you’d ever find us. All the radios had been destroyed by the crash. We waited two days before starting the trek. We could hear VTOLs both days, but nobody ever spotted us. I figured we were just too deep below the canopy, and that we would have to save ourselves.”

That was close enough to the truth. Regan Lee’s friends had mounted an experimental infrared sensor array and metal detectors on the Sunbird ’s wings. That, and the fact that the Sunbird was able to stay on station longer than the VTOLs and so make a more thorough search, were the only reasons the downed craft had ever been located.

“Fair enough,” Key said. “I guess the main question now is how the four of you managed to survive as well as you did. Your exploits have made you the heroes of the news net.”

O’Donnel looked skeptical.

“No, really,” Rey insisted. “What’s important, though, is to learn whatever we can from your experience. If your rations were inadequate, then we want to establish that and have someone swing for it. On the other hand, if you discovered some way of improving the odds of surviving in the jungle, it is important that everyone else on the planet learn of it.”

O’Donnel nodded. “There isn’t much to tell. We just discovered that we could live off the land. At least, a little bit.”

It was Rey’s turn to look skeptical.

“It started with water,” O’Donnel continued stubbornly. “The ration packs made us thirsty. There weren’t any streams on the ridge, but I was afraid we would become completely lost if we went lower. Then we looked around, and discovered that in between the trees there was ground cover which looked like leaves as big as your arm. Lot of these leaves contained little puddles.

“So we tried to drink them while spilling as little as possible. One way was to put your mouth on an end and slurp. That’s how we found that the leaves tasted good. So we started eating them.”

“The leaves as bulk would have been somewhat filling,” Rey said judiciously, “and your body may well have been able to extract water from the leaf tissues as well as what was lying on the surfaces. Did you eat anything else?”

O’Donnel nodded. “There were these things Judy called pine cones ’cause they resembled something she’d seen in the Terrace’s big arboretum. They were scattered all over the ground. Had kind of a nutty smell. I don’t know why she started eating them, but she did and told us they tasted good. We’d stuff our pockets, then eat as we walked.”