CHAPTER 9
THE INCREDIBLE PEOPLE
Slowly and patiently they drew the story from the emissary from theseventh planet of 31 Brucker.
The small, monkey-like creature was painfully shy; he required constantreassurance that the doctors did not mind being called, that they wantedto help, and that a contract was not necessary in an emergency. Even atthat the spokesman was reluctant to give details about the plague andabout his stricken people. Every bit of information had to be extractedwith patient questioning.
By tacit consent the doctors did not even mention the strange fact thatthis very planet had been explored by a Confederation ship eight hundredyears before and no sign of intelligent life had been found. The littlecreature before them seemed ready to turn and bolt at the first hint ofattack or accusation. But bit by bit, a picture of the current situationon the planet developed.
Whoever they were and wherever they had been when the Confederation shiphad landed, there was unquestionably an intelligent race now inhabitingthis lonely planet in the outer reaches of the solar system of 31Brucker. There was no doubt of their advancement; a few well-selectedquestions revealed that they had control of atomic power, a workingunderstanding of the nature and properties of contra-terrene matter, anda workable star drive operating on the same basic principle as Earth'sKoenig drive but which the Bruckians had never really used because oftheir shyness and fear of contact with other races. They also had anexcellent understanding, thanks to their eavesdropping on Confederationinterstellar radio chatter, of the existence and functions of theGalactic Confederation of worlds, and of Hospital Earth's work asphysician to the galaxy.
But about Bruckian anatomy, physiology or biochemistry, the littleemissary would tell them nothing. He seemed genuinely frightened whenthey pressed him about the physical make-up of his people, as thoughtheir questions were somehow scraping a raw nerve. He insisted that hispeople knew nothing about the nature of the plague that had strickenthem, and the doctors could not budge him an inch from his stand.
But a plague had certainly struck.
It had begun six months before, striking great masses of the people. Ithad walked the streets of the cities and the hills and valleys of thecountryside. First three out of ten had been stricken, then four, thenfive. The course of the disease, once started, was invariably the same:first illness, weakness, loss of energy and interest, then gradually afading away of intelligent responses, leaving thousands of creatureswalking blank-faced and idiot-like about the streets and countryside.Ultimately even the ability to take food was lost, and after an intervalof a week or so, death invariably ensued.
Finally the doctors retired to the control room for a puzzledconference. "It's got to be an organism of some sort that's doing it,"Dal said. "There couldn't be an illness like this that wasn't caused bysome kind of a parasitic germ or virus."
"But how do we know?" Jack said. "We know nothing about these peopleexcept what we can see. We're going to have to do a complete biochemicaland medical survey before we can hope to do anything."
"But we aren't equipped for a real survey," Tiger protested.
"We've got to do it anyway," Jack said. "If we can just learn enough tobe sure it's an infectious illness, we might stand a chance of finding adrug that will cure it. Or at least a way to immunize the ones thataren't infected yet. If this is a virus infection, we might only need tofind an antibody for inoculation to stop it in its tracks. But first weneed a good look at the planet and some more of the people--bothinfected and healthy ones. We'd better make arrangements as fast as wecan."
An hour later they had reached an agreement with the Bruckian emissary.The _Lancet_ would be permitted to land on the planet's surface as soonas the doctors were satisfied that it was safe. For the time being theinitial landings would be made in the patrol ship's lifeboats, with the_Lancet_ in orbit a thousand miles above the surface. Unquestionably thefirst job was diagnosis, discovering the exact nature of the illness andstudying the afflicted people. This responsibility rested squarely onJack's shoulders; he was the diagnostician, and Dal and Tiger willinglyyielded to him in organizing the program.
It was decided that Jack and Tiger would visit the planet's surface atonce, while Dal stayed on the ship and set up the reagents andexamining techniques that would be needed to measure the basic physicaland biochemical characteristics of the Bruckians.
Yet in all the excitement of planning, Dal could not throw off thelingering shadow of doubt in his mind, some instinctive voice of cautionthat seemed to say _watch out, be careful, go slowly! This may not bewhat it seems to be; you may be walking into a trap...._
But it was only a faint voice, and easy to thrust aside as the planningwent ahead full speed.
* * * * *
It did not take very long for the crew of the _Lancet_ to realize thatthere was something very odd indeed about the small, self-effacinginhabitants of 31 Brucker VII.
In fact, "odd" was not really quite the proper word for these creaturesat all. No one knew better than the doctors of Hospital Earth thatoddness was the rule among the various members of the galacticcivilization. All sorts and varieties of life-forms had been discovered,described and studied, each with its singular differences, each withcertain similarities, and each quite "odd" in reference to any of theothers.
In Dal this awareness of the oddness and difference of other races wasparticularly acute. He knew that to Tiger and Jack he himself seemedodd, both anatomically and in other ways. His fine gray fur and hisfour-fingered hands set him apart from them--he would never be mistakenfor an Earthman, even in the densest fog. But these were comprehensibledifferences. His close attachment to Fuzzy was something else, and stillseemed beyond their ability to understand.
He had spent one whole evening patiently trying to make Jack understandjust how his attachment to the little pink creature was more than justthe fondness of a man for his dog.
"Well, what would you call it, then?"
"Symbiosis is probably the best word for it," Dal had replied. "Twolife-forms live together, and each one helps the other--that's allsymbiosis is. Together each one is better off than either one would bealone. We all of us live in symbiosis with the bacteria in our digestivetracts, don't we? We provide them with a place to live and grow, andthey help us digest our food. It's a kind of a partnership--and Fuzzyand I are partners in the same sort of way."
Jack had argued, and then lost his temper, and finally grudgingly agreedthat he supposed he would have to tolerate it even if it didn't makesense to him.
But the creatures on 31 Brucker VII were "odd" far beyond the reasonablelimits of oddness--so far beyond it that the doctors could not believethe things that their eyes and their instruments were telling them.
When Tiger and Jack came back to the _Lancet_ after their first trip tothe planet's surface, they were visibly shaken. Geographically, they hadfound it just as it had been described in the exploratory reports--abarren, desert land with only a few large islands of vegetation in theequatorial regions.
"But the people!" Jack said. "They don't fit into _any_ kind of pattern.They've got houses--at least I guess you'd call them houses--but everyone of them is like every other one, and they're all crammed together intight little bunches, with nothing for miles in between. They've got anadvanced technology, a good communications system, manufacturingtechniques and everything, but they just don't use them."
"It's more than that," Tiger said. "They don't seem to _want_ to usethem."
"Well, it doesn't add up, to me," Jack said. "There are thousands oftowns and cities down there, all of them miles apart, and yet they hadto go dig an old rusty jet scooter out of storage and get the motorrebuilt just specially to take us from one place to another. I knowthings can get disorganized with a plague in the land, but this plaguejust hasn't been going on that long."
"What about the sickness?" Dal asked. "Is it as bad as it sounded?"
"Worse, if anything," Tiger said gloomily.
"They're dying by thethousands, and I hope we got those suits of ours decontaminated, becauseI don't want any part of this disease."
Graphically, he described the conditions they had found among thestricken people. There was no question that a plague was stalking theland. In the rutted mud roads of the villages and towns the dead werepiled in gutters, and in all of the cities a deathly stillness hung overthe streets. Those who had not yet succumbed to the illness were nursingand feeding the sick ones, but these unaffected ones were growingscarcer and scarcer. The whole living population seemed resigned tohopelessness, hardly noticing the strangers from the patrol ship.
But worst of all were those in the final stages of the disease,wandering vaguely about the street, their faces blank and their jawsslack as though they were living in a silent world of their own, cut offfrom contact with the rest. "One of them almost ran into me," Jack said."I was right in front of him, and he didn't see me or hear me."
"But don't they have _any_ knowledge of antisepsis or isolation?" Dalasked.
Tiger shook his head. "Not that we could see. They don't know what'scausing this sickness. They think that it's some kind of curse, andthey never dreamed that it might be kept from spreading."
Already Tiger and Jack had taken the first routine steps to deal withthe sickness. They gave orders to move the unaffected people in everytown and village into isolated barracks and stockades. For half a dayTiger tried to explain ways to prevent the spread of a bacteria orvirus-borne disease. The people had stared at him as if he were talkinggibberish; finally he gave up trying to explain, and just laid downrules which the people were instructed to follow. Together they hadcollected standard testing specimens of body fluids and tissue from bothhealthy and afflicted Bruckians, and come back to the _Lancet_ for abreather.
Now all three doctors began work on the specimens. Cultures wereinoculated with specimens from respiratory tract, blood and tissue takenfrom both sick and well. Half a dozen fatal cases were brought to theship under specially controlled conditions for autopsy examination, toreveal both the normal anatomical characteristics of this strange raceof people and the damage the disease was doing. Down on the surfaceTiger had already inoculated a dozen of the healthy ones with variousradioactive isotopes to help outline the normal metabolism andbiochemistry of the people. After a short sleep period on the _Lancet_,he went back down alone to follow up on these, leaving Dal and Jack tocarry on the survey work in the ship's lab.
It was a gargantuan task that faced them. They knew that in any race ofcreatures they could not hope to recognize the abnormal unless they knewwhat the normal was. That was the sole reason for the extensivebiomedical surveys that were done on new contract planets. Under normalconditions, a survey crew with specialists in physiology, biochemistry,anatomy, radiology, pharmacology and pathology might spend months oreven years on a new planet gathering base-line information. But herethere was neither time nor facilities for such a study. Even in thetwenty-four hours since the patrol ship arrived, the number of dead hadincreased alarmingly.
Alone on the ship, Dal and Jack found themselves working as a wellorganized team. There was no time here for argument or duplicatedefforts; everything the two doctors did was closely co-ordinated. Jackseemed to have forgotten his previous antagonism completely. There was acrisis here, and more work than three men could possibly do in the timeavailable. "You handle anatomy and pathology," Jack told Dal at thebeginning. "You can get the picture five times as fast as I can, andyour pathology slides are better than most commercial ones. I can do thebest job on the cultures, once I get the growth media all set up."
Bit by bit they divided the labor, checking in with Tiger by radio onthe results of the isotopes studies he was running on the planet'ssurface. Bit by bit the data was collected, and Earthman and Garvianworked more closely than ever before as the task that faced themappeared more and more formidable.
But the results of their tests made no sense whatever. Tiger returned tothe ship after forty-eight hours with circles under his eyes, looking asthough he had been trampled in a crowd. "No sleep, that's all," he saidbreathlessly as he crawled out of his decontaminated pressure suit. "Notime for it. I swear I ran those tests a dozen times and I still didn'tget any answers that made sense."
"The results you were sending up sounded plenty strange," Jack said."What was the trouble?"
"I don't know," Tiger said, "but if we're looking for a biologicalpattern here, we haven't found it yet as far as I can see."
"No, we certainly haven't," Dal exploded. "I thought I was doingsomething wrong somehow, because these blood chemistries I've been doinghave been ridiculous. I can't even find a normal level for blood sugar,and as for the enzyme systems...." He tossed a sheaf of notes down onthe counter in disgust. "I don't see how these people could even bealive, with a botched-up metabolism like this! I've never heard ofanything like it."
"What kind of pathology did you find?" Tiger wanted to know.
"Nothing," Dal said. "Nothing at all. I did autopsies on the six thatyou brought up here and made slides of every different kind of tissue Icould find. The anatomy is perfectly clear cut, no objections there.These people are very similar to Earth-type monkeys in structure, withheart and lungs and vocal cords and all. But I can't find any reason whythey should be dying. Any luck with the cultures?"
Jack shook his head glumly. "No growth on any of the plates. At first Ithought I had something going, but if I did, it died, and I can't findany sign of it in the filtrates."
"But we've got to have _something_ to work on," Tiger said desperately."Look, there are some things that always measure out the same in _any_intelligent creature no matter where he comes from. That's the wholebasis of galactic medicine. Creatures may develop and adapt in differentways, but the basic biochemical reactions are the same."
"Not here, they aren't," Dal said. "Take a look at these tests!"
They carried the heap of notes they had collected out into the controlroom and began sifting and organizing the data, just as a survey teamwould do, trying to match it with the pattern of a thousand otherliving creatures that had previously been studied. Hours passed, andthey were farther from an answer than when they began.
Because this data did not fit a pattern. It was _different_. No twoindividuals showed the same reactions. In every test the results wereeither flatly impossible or completely the opposite of what wasexpected.
Carefully they retraced their steps, trying to pinpoint what could begoing wrong.
"There's _got_ to be a laboratory error," Dal said wearily. "We musthave slipped up somewhere."
"But I don't see where," Jack said. "Let's see those culture tubesagain. And put on a pot of coffee. I can't even think straight anymore."
Of the three of them, Jack was beginning to show the strain the most.This was his special field, the place where he was supposed to excel,and nothing was happening. Reports coming up from the planet werediscouraging; the isolation techniques they had tried to institute didnot seem to be working, and the spread of the plague was accelerating.The communiques from the Bruckians were taking on a note of desperation.
Jack watched each report with growing apprehension. He moved restlesslyfrom lab to control room, checking and rechecking things, trying to findsome sign of order in the chaos.
"Try to get some sleep," Dal urged him. "A couple of hours will freshenyou up a hundred per cent."
"I can't, I've already tried it," Jack said.
"Go ahead. Tiger and I can keep working on these things for a while."
"No, no, it's not that," Jack said. "Without a diagnosis, we can't do athing. Until we have that, our hands are tied, and we aren't evengetting close to it. We don't even know whether this is a bacteria, or avirus, or what. Maybe the Bruckians are right. Maybe it's a curse."
"I don't think the Black Service of Pathology would buy that for adiagnosis," Tiger said sourly.
"The Black Service would choke on it--but what other answer do we have?You two have been doing
all you can, but diagnosis is _my_ job. I'msupposed to be good at it, but the more we dig into this, the fartheraway we seem to get."
"Do you want to call for help?" Tiger said.
Jack shook his head helplessly. "I'm beginning to think we should havecalled for help a long time ago," he said. "We're into this over ourheads now and we're still going down. At the rate those people are dyingdown there, we don't have time to call for help now." He stared at thepiles of notes on the desk and his face was very white. "I don't know, Ijust don't know," he said. "The diagnosis on this thing should have beenduck soup. I thought it was going to be a real feather in my cap, justwalking in and nailing it down in a few hours. Well, I'm whipped. Idon't know what to do. If either of you can think of an answer, it's allyours, and I'll admit it to Black Doctor Tanner himself."
* * * * *
It was bitter medicine for Blue Doctor Jack Alvarez to swallow, but thatfact gave no pleasure to Dal or Tiger now. They were as baffled as Jackwas, and would have welcomed help from anyone who could offer it.
And, ironically, the first glimpse of the truth came from the directionthey least expected.
From the very beginning Fuzzy had been watching the proceedings from hisperch on the swinging platform in the control room. If he sensed thatDal Timgar was ignoring him and leaving him to his own devices much ofthe time, he showed no sign of resentment. The tiny creature seemed torealize that something important was consuming his master's energy andattention, and contented himself with an affectionate pat now and thenas Dal went through the control room. Everyone assumed without muchthought that Fuzzy was merely being tolerant of the situation. It wasnot until they had finally given up in desperation and Tiger was tryingto contact a Hospital Ship for help, that Dal stared up at his littlepink friend with a puzzled frown.
Tiger put the transmitter down for a moment. "What's wrong?" he said toDal. "You look as though you just bit into a rotten apple."
"I just remembered that I haven't fed him for twenty-four hours," Dalsaid.
"Who? Fuzzy?" Tiger shrugged. "He could see you were busy."
Dal shook his head. "That wouldn't make any difference to Fuzzy. When hegets hungry, he gets hungry, and he's pretty self-centered. It wouldn'tmatter what I was doing, he should have been screaming for food hoursago."
Dal walked over to the platform and peered down at his pink friend inalarm. He took him up and rested him on his shoulder, a move thatinvariably sent Fuzzy into raptures of delight. Now the little creaturejust sat there, trembling and rubbing half-heartedly against Dal's neck.
Dal held him out at arm's length. "Fuzzy, _what's the matter with you?_"
"Do you think something's wrong with him?" Jack said, looking upsuddenly. "Looks like he's having trouble keeping his eyes open."
"His color isn't right, either," Tiger said. "He looks kind of blue."
Quite suddenly the little black eyes closed and Fuzzy began to trembleviolently. He drew himself up into a tight pink globule as the fuzz-likehair disappeared from view.
Something was unmistakably wrong. As he held the shivering creature, Dalwas suddenly aware that something had been nibbling at the back of hismind for hours. Not a clear-cut thought, merely an impression of painand anguish and sickness, and now as he looked at Fuzzy the impressiongrew so strong it almost made him cry out.
Abruptly, Dal knew what he had to do. Where the thought came from hedidn't know, but it was crystal clear in his mind. "Jack, where is ourbiggest virus filter?" he asked quietly.
Jack stared at him. "Virus filter? I just took it out of the autoclavean hour ago."
"Get it," Dal said, "and the suction machine too. _Quickly!_"
Jack went down the corridor like a shot, and reappeared a moment laterwith the big porcelain virus filter and the suction tubing attached toit. Swiftly Dal dumped the limp little creature in his hand into the topof the filter jar, poured in some sterile saline, and started thesuction.
Tiger and Jack watched him in amazement. "What are you doing?" Tigersaid.
"Filtering him," Dal said. "He's infected. He must have been exposed tothe plague somehow, maybe when our little Bruckian visitor came on boardthe other day. And if it's a virus that's causing this plague, the virusfilter ought to hold it back and still let Fuzzy's molecular structurethrough."
They watched and sure enough a bluish-pink fluid began moving downthrough the porcelain filter, and dripping through the funnel into thebeaker below. Each drop coalesced in the beaker as it fell until Fuzzy'swhole body had been sucked through the filter and into the jar below. Hewas still not quite his normal pink color, but as the filter went dry,a pair of frightened shoe-button eyes appeared and he poked up a pair ofears. Presently the fuzz began appearing on his body again.
And on the top of the filter lay a faint gray film. "Don't touch it!"Dal said. "That's real poison." He slipped on a mask and gloves, andscraped a bit of the film from the filter with a spatula. "I think wehave it," he said. "The virus that's causing the plague on thisplanet."