“These are nice people,” Conway said rather inadequately at one point. “I can’t understand them jumping Lonvellin the way they did, somehow they don’t seem to be the type.”
“But they did it,” Stillman replied grimly. “Anything which hasn’t two eyes, two ears, two arms and two legs, or which has these things but happens to have them in the wrong places, gets jumped. It’s something drummed into them at a very early age, with their ABCs, practically. I wish we knew why.”
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 Con way’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 Con way’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.
CHAPTER 10
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.