James Blish - Case of Conscience

“I’m going to give you a shot,” Ruiz-Sanchez said gently. “And then I think you’d better go to bed.”

“The hell with that,” Cleaver said. “I’ve got nine times as much work to do as I can hope to clean up now, without any additional handicaps.”

“Illness is never convenient,” Ruiz-Sanchez agreed. “But why worry about losing a day or so, since you’re in over your head anyhow?”

“What have I got?” Cleaver asked suspiciously.

“You haven’t got anything,” Ruiz-Sanchez said, almost regretfully. “That is, you aren’t infected. But your ‘pineapple’ did you a bad turn. Most plants of that family on Lithia bear thorns or leaves coated with polysaccharides that are poisonous to us. The particular glucoside you ran up against today was evidently squill, or something closely related to it. It produces symptoms like those of trench mouth, but a lot harder to clear up.”

“How long will that take?” Cleaver said. He was still balking, but he was on the defensive now.

“Several days at least—until you’ve built up an immunity. The shot I’m going to give you is a gamma globulin specific against squill, and it ought to moderate the symptoms until you’ve developed a high antibody titer of your own. But in the process you’re going to run quite a fever, Paul; and I’ll have to keep you well stuffed with antipyretics, because even a little fever is dangerous in this climate.”

“I know it,” Cleaver said, mollified. “The more I learn about this place, the less disposed I am to vote ‘aye’ when the time comes. Well, bring on your shot—and your aspirin. I suppose I ought to be glad it isn’t a bacterial infection, or the Snakes would be jabbing me full of antibiotics.”

“Small chance of that,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “I don’t doubt that the Lithians have at least a hundred different drugs we’ll be able to use eventually, but—there, that’s all there is to it; you can relax now-but we’ll have to study their pharmacology from the ground up, first. All right, Paul, hit the hammock. In about ten minutes you’re going to be wishing you’d been born dead, that I promise you;”

Cleaver grinned. His sweaty face under its thatch of dirty blond hair was craggy and powerful even in illness. He stood up and deliberately rolled down his sleeve.

“Not much doubt about how you’ll vote, either,” he said. “You like this planet, don’t you, Ramon? It’s a biologist’s paradise, as far as I can see.”

“I do like it,” the priest said, smiling back. He followed Cleaver into the small room which served them both as sleeping quarters. Except for the window, it strongly resembled the inside of a jug. The walls were curving and continuous, and were made of some ceramic material which never beaded or felt wet, but never seemed to be quite dry, either. The hammocks were slung from hooks which projected smoothly from the walls, as though they had been baked from clay along with the rest of the house. “I wish my colleague Dr. Meid were able to see it. She would be even more delighted with it than I am.”

“I don’t hold with women in the sciences,” Cleaver said, with abstract, irrelevant irritation. “Get their emotions all mixed up with their hypotheses. Meid-what kind of name is that, anyhow?”

“Japanese,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “Her first name is Liu-the family follows the Western custom of putting the family name last.”

“Oh,” Cleaver said, losing interest. “We were talking about Lithia.”

“Well, don’t forget that Lithia is my first extrasolar planet,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “I think I’d find any new, habitable world fascinating. The infinite mutability of life forms, and the cunning inherent in each of them… It’s all amazing, and quite delightful.”

“Why shouldn’t that be sufficient?” Cleaver said. “Why do you have to have the God bit too? It doesn’t make sense.”

“On the contrary, it’s what gives everything else meaning.”

Ruiz-Sanchez said. “Belief and science aren’t mutually exclusive—quite the contrary. But if you place scientific standards first, and exclude belief, admit nothing that’s not proven, then what you have is a series of empty gestures. For me, biology is an act of religion, because I know that all creatures are God’s—each new planet, with all its manifestations, is an affirmation of God’s power.”

“A dedicated man,” Cleaver said. “All right. So am I. To the greater glory of man, that’s what I say.”

He sprawled heavily in his hammock. After a decent interval, Ruiz-Sanchez took the liberty of heaving up after him the foot he seemed to have forgotten. Cleaver didn’t notice. The reaction was setting in.

“Exactly so,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “But that’s only half the story. The other half reads, ‘…and to the greater glory of God.’”

“Read me no tracts, Father,” Cleaver said. Then: “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry… But for a physicist, this place is hell… You’d better get me that aspirin. I’m cold.”

“Surely, Paul.”

Ruiz-Sanchez went quickly back into the lab, made up a salicylate-barbiturate paste in one of the Lithians’ superb mortars, and pressed it into a set of pills. (Storing such pills was impossible in Lithia’s humid atmosphere; they were too hygroscopic.) He wished he could stamp each pill “Bayer” before it set—if Cleaver’s personal cure-all was aspirin, it would have been just as well to let him think he was taking aspirin—but of course he had no dies for the purpose. He took two of the pills back to Cleaver, with a mug and a carafe of Berkefeld-filtered water.

The big man was already asleep; Ruiz-Sanchez woke him, more or less.

Cleaver would sleep longer, and awaken farther along the road to recovery, for having been done that small unkindness now. As it was, he hardly noticed when the pills were put down him, and soon resumed his heavy, troubled breathing.

That done, Ruiz-Sanchez returned to the front room of the house, sat down, and began to inspect the jungle suit The tear which the plant spine had made was not difficult to find, and would be easy to repair. It would be much harder to repair Cleaver’s notion that the defenses of Earthmen on Lithia were invulnerable, and that plant-spines could be blundered against with impunity. Ruiz-Sanchez wondered whether either of the other two members of the Lithian Review Commission still shared that notion.

Cleaver had called the thing which had brought him low a “pineapple.” Any biologist could have told Cleaver that even on Earth the pineapple is a prolific and dangerous weed, edible only by a happy and irrelevant accident. In Hawaii, as Ruiz-Sanchez remembered, the tropical forest was quite impassable to anyone not wearing heavy boots and tough trousers. Even inside the Dole plantations, the close-packed irrepressible pineapples could tear unprotected legs to ribbons.

The Jesuit turned the suit over. The zipper that Cleaver had jammed, was made of a plastic into the molecule of which bad been incorporated radicals from various terrestrial radio-frequency induction, he felt more in the dark than ever.

They had a completely marvelous radio network, which among other things provided a “live” navigational grid for the whole planet, zeroed on (and here perhaps was the epitome of the Lithian genius for paradox) a tree. Yet they had never produced a standardized vacuum tube, and their atomic theory was not much more sophisticated than Democritus’ had been!

These paradoxes, of course, could be explained in part by the things that Lithia lacked. Like any large rotating mass, Lithia had a magnetic field of its own, but a planet which almost entirely lacks iron provides its people with no easy way. to discover magnetism. Radioactivity had been entirely unknown on the surface of Lithia, at least until the Earthmen had arrived, which explained the hazy atomic theory. Like the Greeks, the Lithians had discovered that friction between silk and glass produces one kind of energy or charge, and between silk and amber another; they had gone on from there to van de Graaf generators, electrochemistry, and the static jet—but without suitable metals they were unable to make heavy-duty batteries, or to do more than begin to study electricity in motion.