James White - Star Surgeon

Conway was silent. He was thinking that the reason he had been sent here was to organize medical aid for this planet, and that wandering in fancy dress over one small piece of the jigsaw was not going to solve the big puzzle. It was time he got down to some serious work.

As if reading Conway’s mind again Stillman said, “I think we should go back now. Would you prefer to work in the office block or the ship, Doctor?”

Stillman, Conway thought, was going to be a very good aide. Aloud he said, “The office block, please. I get lost too easily in the ship.”

And so Conway was installed in a small office with a large desk, a button for calling Stillman and some other less-vital communications equipment. After his first lunch in the officers dining quarters he ate all his meals in the office with Stillman. Sometimes he slept in the office and sometimes he didn’t sleep at all. The days passed and his eyes began to feel like hot, gritty marbles in his head from reading reports and more reports. Stillman always kept them coming. Conway reorganized the medical investigation, bringing in some of the Corps doctors for discussion or flying out to those who could not for various reasons get in.

A large number of the reports were outside his province, being copies of information sent in by Williamson’s men on purely sociological problems. He read them on the off-chance of their having a bearing on his own problem, which many of them did, But they usually added to his puzzlement.

Blood samples, biopsies, specimens of all kinds began to flow in. They were immediately loaded onto a courier — the Corps had put three of them at his disposal now-and rushed to the Diagnostician-in-Charge of Pathology at Sector General. The results were sub-radioed back to Vespasian, taped, and the reels dumped on Conway’s desk within a few days. The ship’s main computer, or rather the section of it which wasn’t engaged on Translator relay, was also placed at his disposal, and gradually the vaguest suggestion of a pattern seemed to be emerging out of the flood of related and unrelated facts. But it was a pattern which made no sense to anyone, least of all Conway. He was nearing the end of his fifth week on Etla and there was still very little progress to report to Lonvellin.

But Lonvellin wasn’t pushing for results. It was a very patient being who had all the time in the world. Sometimes Conway found himself wondering if Murchison would be as patient as Lonvellin.

I n answer to his buzz Major Stillman, red-eyed and with his usually crisp uniform just slightly rumpled, stumbled in and sat down. They exchanged yawns, then Conway spoke.

“In a few days I’ll have the supply and distribution figures needed to begin curing this place,” he said. “Every serious disease has been listed together with information on the age, sex and geographical location of the patient, and the quantities of medication calculated. But before I give the go ahead for flooding the place with medical supplies I’d feel a lot easier in my mind if we knew exactly how this situation came about in the first place.

“Frankly, I’m worried,” he went on. “I think we may be guilty of replacing the broken crockery while the bull is still loose in the china shop.

Stillman nodded, whether in agreement or with weariness Conway couldn’t say.

On a planet which was an absolute pest-hole why were infant mortality figures, or deaths arising from complications or infections during childbirth so low? Why was there a marked tendency for infants to be healthy and the adults chronically ill? Admittedly a large proportion of the infant population were born blind or were physically impaired by inherited diseases, but relatively few of them died young. They carried their deformities and disfigurements through to late middle age where, statistically, most of them succumbed.

And there was also statistical evidence that the Etlans were guilty of gross exhibitionism in the matter of their diseases. They ran heavily to unpleasant skin conditions, maladies which caused gradual wasting or deformity of the limbs, and some pretty horrible combinations of both. And their costume did nothing to conceal their afflictions. To the contrary, Conway had the feeling sometimes that they were like so many small boys showing off their sore knees to their friends …

Conway realized that he had been thinking aloud when Stillman interrupted him suddenly.

“You’re wrong, Doctor!” he said, sharply for him. “These people aren’t masochists. Whatever went wrong here originally, they’ve been trying to fight it. They’ve been fighting, with very little assistance, for over a century and losing all the time. It surprises me they have a civilization left at all. And they wear an abbreviated costume because they believe fresh air and sunlight is good for what ails them, and in most cases they are quite right.

“This belief is drilled into them from an early age,” Stillman went on, his tone gradually losing its sharpness, “like their hatred of e-ts and the belief that isolating infectious diseases is unnecessary. Is dangerous, in fact, because they believe that the germs of one disease fight the germs of another so that both are weakened …”

Stillman shuddered at the thought and fell silent.

“I didn’t mean to belittle our patients, Major,” Conway said. “I have no sensible answers to this thing so my mind is throwing up stupid ones. But you mentioned the lack of assistance which the Etlans receive from their Empire. I would like more details on that, especially on how it is distributed. Better still, I’d like to ask the Imperial Representative on Etla about it. Have you been able to find him yet?”

Stillman shook his head and said dryly, “This aid doesn’t come like a batch of food parcels. There are drugs, of course, but most of it would be in the form of the latest medical literature relevant to the conditions here. How it reaches the people is something we are just now finding out.

Every ten years an Empire ship would land and be met by the Imperial Representative, Stillman went on to explain, and after unloading and handing over what were presumably dispatches it left again within a matter of hours. Apparently no citizen of the Empire would stay on Ella for a second longer than was necessary, which was understandable. Then the Imperial Representative, a personage called Teltrenn, set about distributing the medical aid.

But instead of using the mass distribution media to bring local medical authorities up to date on these new methods, and allow local GPs time to familiarize themselves with the theory and procedures before the medication arrived, Teltrenn sat tight on all the information until such times as he could pay them a personal visit. Then he handed everything over as being a personal gift from their glorious Emperor, accruing no small measure of glory himself by being the middleman, and the data which could have been in the hands of every doctor on the planet within three months reached them piecemeal in anything up to six years …

“Six years!” said Conway, startled.

“Teltrenn isn’t, so far as we’ve been able to find out, a very energetic person,” Stillman said. “What makes matters worse is that little or no original medical research is being done on Etla, due to the absence of the researcher’s most vital tool, the microscope. Ella can’t make precision optical equipment and apparently no Empire ship has thought to bring them.

“It all boils down to the fact,” Stillman ended grimly, “that the Empire does all of Etla’s medical thinking for her, and the evidence suggests that medically the Empire is not very smart.”

Conway said firmly, “I’d like to see the correlation between the arrival of this aid and the incidence of disease immediately thereafter. Can you help me in that?”