White, James – Sector General 10 – Final Diagnosis

Braithwaite laughed again and shook his head.

“It isn’t funny, dammit,” said Hewlitt. “At least, not to me.”

“It will be,” said the lieutenant, “after you meet your first Cmrusskin. Prilicla doesn’t talk that way to people. And we are trying to do something other than keeping you under close medical surveillance. It isn’t much, I admit, but a suggestion has been made that there could be some truth in your story about eating the poisonous fruit if-and this is a pretty tenuous theory-the juice that is lethal in small quantities has curative properties when taken in bulk. I can’t give you the medical reasons why that should happen, but there is one known precedent. In that particular case there were long-term aftereffects which might explain, although again I don’t know how, the intermittent nature of your symptoms. That is why we are sending to Etla the Sick for samples of the fruit so that Pathology can make an independent investigation of its degree of toxicity.

“The two-way hyperjump between here and Etla,” he went on, “and a couple of days to find, gather, and pack the fruit, plus the time needed for the analysis, means a wait of two weeks minimum. During that time nothing much will be happening to you, unless Prilicla returns early or Medalont comes up with another form of treatment. That’s why I wanted to know how you plan to pass the time.”

“I don’t know,” said Hewlitt. “Reading and viewing, I suppose, when you give me the library codes. Was it your idea about the Pessinith fruit?”

Braithwaite shook his head again. “I wouldn’t want to be associated with a weird idea like that. It was Padre Lioren’s. It is a Tarlan BRLH attached to Psychology Department, who will probably visit you within the next few days. Visually it is a pretty fiercelooking character, but it might be able to help you, and after the way you behaved during the trainees’ examination its appearance shouldn’t cause you any problems.”

“I suppose not,” said Hewlitt, refusing to feel pleased at the compliment. “But… does what you have been saying mean that you are beginning to believe me?”

“Sorry, no,” Braithwaite replied. “As I told you earlier, we believe that you believe yourself, which is different from us believing that what you tell us is completely true. The Pessinith fruit incident is evidence, the only piece of hard evidence you have given us, that can be checked. We must try to prove or disprove it and move on from there.”

“And how exactly do you plan to do that?” said Hewlitt. “By feeding me with Pessinith fruit and seeing if I die?”

“As a nonmedic I cannot answer that,” Braithwaite replied with another smile. “There would be safeguards, of course, but you are probably right.”

CHAPTER 10

Hewlitt knew that it was not a symptom which would register on his medical monitor, but he was beginning to wonder whether there was such a condition as terminal boredom allied to atrophication of the tongue.

Apart from asking how he was feeling and saying “That’s good,” Medalont said nothing to him. His Hudlar nurse, although friendly enough and helpful when it did speak, was absent for most of the day on lectures and busy at other times. Braithwaite called for a few minutes every day on his way to the dining hall and insisted that, because they were on his own rather than the department’s time, they were social rather than professional visits. He gave Hewlitt a few useful library access codes and talked a lot without saying anything. Charge Nurse Leethveeschi had time for him only if his monitor signaled a medical emergency; the lieutenant’s Tar Ian colleague, Padre Lioren, had yet to appear.

The ambulatory patients who passed his bed on the way to the bathroom-a couple of Melfans, a newly arrived Dwerlan, a Kelgian, and one slow-moving Tralthan-sometimes talked among themselves but never to him, and the few conversations he could overhear from farther up the ward were never widened to include Patient Hewlitt. He could not talk to the patients in the beds beside and opposite him because they had been transferred somewhere else.

He was growing heartily sick and tired of listening to the condescending voice of the library computer for hours on end. It was beginning to make him feel as he had done as a boy when confronted with an unending succession of thinly disguised school lessons. Then as now he had felt bored and restless, but then there had been an open window beckoning and beyond it a landscape filled with interesting things to play with. Here there were no windows that opened and nothing but space outside them if they had. In a desperate attempt to relieve his restlessness he decided to walk up and down the ward.