[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Sick and helpless, he was very lucky to have a
faithful native woman to nurse him. Or was he?
He rolled over to look at the plants. They were crinkled and dead and
useless in the narrow flower box across the hut. He tried to draw his
arm under his body to force himself erect. The reserve oxygen began to
hiss in sleepily. He tried to signal Hertha to help him, but she was
across the room with her back to him, her hands fumbling with a bowl of
dark, syrupy medicine. His lips moved, but the words died in his throat.
He wanted to explain to her that scientists in huge laboratories with
many helpers and millions of dollars had been unable to find a cure
for liguna fever. He wanted to explain that no brown liquid, made
like cake batter, would cure the disease that had decimated the crews
of two expeditions to Sitari and somehow gotten back to cut down the
population of Wiblanihaven.
But, watching her, he could understand what she thought she was doing.
At one time she must have seen a pharmacist put chemicals into a mortar
and grind them with a pestle. This, she must have remembered, was what
people did to make medicine, and now she put what chemical-appearing
substances she could locate--flour, powdered coffee, lemon extract,
salt--into a bowl and mashed them together. She was very intent on her
work and it probably made her feel almost helpful.
Finally she moved out of his field of vision; he found that he could
not turn his head to follow her with his eyes. He lay conscious but
inert, like waterlogged wood on a river bottom. He heard sounds of her
movement. At last he slept.
* * * * *
He awakened with a start. His head was clearer than it had been for
hours. He listened to the oxygen hissing in again. He tried to read the
dial on the far wall, but it blurred before his eyes.
"Hertha," he said.
She came quickly to his cot.
"What does the oxygen register say?"
"Oxygen register?"
He gritted his teeth against the fever which began to shake his body
mercilessly until he wanted to scream to make it stop. He became angry
even as the fever shook him: angry not really at the doctors; not
really at any one thing. Angry because the mountains did not care if
he saw them; angry that the air did not care if he breathed it. Angry
because, between planets, between suns, the coldness of space merely
waited, not giving a damn.
Several years ago--ten, twenty, perhaps more--some doctor had finally
isolated a strain of the filterable virus of liguna fever that could
be used as a vaccine: too weak to kill, but strong enough to produce
immunity against its more virulent brother strains. That opened up the
Sitari System for colonization and exploration and meant that the men
who got there first would make fortunes.
So he went to the base at Ke, first selling his strip mine property and
disposing of his tools and equipping his spaceship for the intersolar
trip; and at Ke they shot him full of the disease. But his bloodstream
built no antibodies. The weakened virus settled in his nervous system
and there was no way of getting it out. The doctors were very sorry
for him, and they assured him it was a one-in-ten-thousand phenomenon.
Thereafter, he suffered recurrent paralytic attacks.
If it had not been for the advance warning--a pain at the base of
his spine, a moment of violent trembling in his knees--he would have
been forced to give up solitary strip mining altogether. As it was,
whenever he felt the warning, he had to hurry to the nearest colony and
be hospitalized for the duration of the attack. He had had four such
warnings on this satellite, and three times he had gone to Pastiville
on Helio and been cared for and come away with less money than he had
gone with.
His bank credit, once large, had slowly dribbled away, and now he
made just about enough from his mining to care for himself during
illness. He could not afford to hunt for less dangerous, less isolated
work. It would not pay enough, for he knew how to do very little that
civilization needed done. He was finally trapped; no longer could he
afford a pilot for the long flight from Helio to a newer frontier, and
he could not risk the trip alone.
He lay waiting for the new spasm of fever and stared at Hertha who,
this time, would care for him here and he would not need to go to a
hospital. Perhaps, after a little while, he would be able to save
enough to push on, through the awful indifference of space, to some new
world where, with luck, there would be a sudden fortune.
Then he could go back to civilization.
He realized bitterly that he was merely telling himself he would go
back. He knew there was only one direction he could go, and that
direction was not back.
Hertha waited, hurt-eyed, moving her pudgy hands helplessly.
When the shaking subsided, he explained through chattering teeth about
the oxygen register across the room, and she went away.
* * * * *
The fever vanished completely, leaving him listless. His hand, lying on
the rough blanket, was abnormally white. He wiggled the fingers, but he
could not feel the wool.
His mouth was dry and he wanted a drink of water.
Hertha moved out of his range of vision. He shifted his head on the
damp pillow and watched her out of the corner of his eye.
He had never heard her real name, but she did not seem to object to his
name for her.
I am that which began;
Out of me the years roll;
Out of me God and man;
I am equal and whole;
God changes, and man,
And the form of them bodily;
I am the soul.
He tried to sit up again, but he was very weak. He wanted to quote
it to her and tell her what he had never told her: that the name of
it was _Hertha_ and that it had been written long ago by a man named
Swinburne, and he wanted to explain why he had named her after a poem,
because it was very funny.
The harsh light hurt his eyes and made him feel dizzy. He lay watching
her as she bent toward the oxygen dial, wrinkling her face in animal
concentration, trying to read it for him. Her puzzled expression was
pathetic; it reminded him of the first time he had seen her.
The walls began to spin crazily, for the hut had been intended for only
one person.
He remembered the first time he saw her, cowering in a filthy alleyway
in the Miramus. At first he thought she had taken some food from a
garbage pail and was trying to conceal it by holding it to her breast.
But when the flare of a rocket leaving the field two blocks away lit
the area for a moment, he saw that she was holding a tiny welikin,
terribly mangled, looking as if it had just been run over by a heavy
transport truck. He took it away from her and threw it into the
darkness, shuddering.
"It was dead," he said.
She continued to stare at him, starting to cry silently, big, round,
salt tears that she brushed at with reddened hands.
"My--my--" she stammered.
He had an eerie feeling that she was trying to say, "My baby," and he
felt a little chill of pity creep up his spine.
"What do you do?" he asked kindly.
"Sweep floors. I work a little for the Commander's wife. Around her
home."
"How did you get here?"