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?”
“There’s a report just in which might help you,” Stillman replied. “It’s a copy of the records of a North Continent hospital which go back past Teltrenn’s last visit to them. The records show that he brought on that occasion some useful data on obstetrics and a specific against what we have called B-Eighteen. The incidence of B-Eighteen dropped rapidly within a few weeks there, although the overall figures remained much the same because F-Twenty-one began to appear about that time.. .”