Calhoun held him close. There was confusion. And Calhoun found the
Minister of Health at hand. He looked most harried of all the
officials gathered to question Calhoun. He proposed that he get a look
at the hospital situation right away.
It wasn't practical. With all the population on half rations or less,
when night came people needed to sleep. Most people, indeed, slept as
many hours out of the traditional twenty-four as they could manage. It
was much more pleasant to sleep than to be awake and constantly nagged
at by continued hunger.
And there was the matter of simple decency. Continuous gnawing hunger
had an embittering effect upon everyone. Quarrelsomeness was a common
experience. And people who would normally be the leaders of opinion
felt shame because they were obsessed by thoughts of food. It was best
when people slept.
Still, Calhoun was in the hospitals by daybreak. What he found moved
him to savage anger. There were too many sick children. In every case
undernourishment contributed to their sickness. And there was not
enough food to make them well. Doctors and nurses denied themselves
food to spare it for their patients. And most of that self-denial was
doubtless voluntary, but it would not be discreet for anybody on Dara
to look conspicuously better fed than his fellows.
Calhoun brought out hormones and enzymes and medicaments from the Med
Ship while the guard in the ship looked on. He demonstrated the
processes of synthesis and auto-catalysis that enabled such small
samples to be multiplied indefinitely. He was annoyed by a clamorous
appetite. There were some doctors who ignored the irony of medical
techniques being taught to cure nonnutritional disease, when everybody
was half-fed, or less. They approved of Calhoun. They even approved of
Murgatroyd when Calhoun explained his function.
He was, of course, a Med Service _tormal_, and _tormals_ were
creatures of talent. They'd originally been found on a planet in the
Deneb area, and they were engaging and friendly small animals. But the
remarkable fact about them was that they couldn't contract any
disease. Not any.
They had a built-in, explosive reaction to bacterial and viral toxins,
and there hadn't yet been any pathogenic organism discovered to which
a _tormal_ could not more or less immediately develop antibody
resistance. So that in interstellar medicine _tormals_ were priceless.
Let Murgatroyd be infected with however localized, however specialized
an inimical organism, and presently some highly valuable defensive
substance could be isolated from his blood and he'd remain in his
usual exuberant good health.
When the antibody was analyzed by those techniques of microanalysis
the Service had developed, that was that. The antibody could be
synthesized and one could attack any epidemic with confidence.
The tragedy for Dara was, of course, that no Med Ship had come to Dara
three generations ago, when the Dara plague raged. Worse, after the
plague Weald was able to exert pressure which only a criminally
incompetent Med Service director would have permitted. But criminal
incompetence and its consequences was what Calhoun had been loaned to
Sector Twelve to help remedy. He was not at ease, though. No ship
arrived from Orede to bear out his account of an attempt to get that
lonely world evacuated before Weald discovered it had blueskins on it.
Maril had vanished, to visit or return to her family, or perhaps to
consult with the mysterious Korvan who'd arranged for her to leave
Dara to be a spy, and had advised her simply to make a new life
somewhere else, abandoning a famine-ridden, despised, and out-caste
world.
Calhoun had learned of two achievements the same Korvan had made for
his world. Neither was remarkably constructive. He'd offered to prove
the value of the second by dying of it. Which might make him a very
admirable character, or he could have a passion for martyrdom, which
is much more common than most people think. In two days Calhoun was
irritable enough from unaccustomed hunger to suspect the worst of him.
Meanwhile Calhoun worked doggedly; in the hospitals while the patients
were awake and in the Med Ship, under guard, afterward. He had hunger
cramps now, but he tested a plastic cube with a thriving biological
culture in it.
He worked at increasing his store of it. He'd snipped samples of
pigmented skin from dead patients in the hospitals, and examined the
pigmented areas, and very, very painstakingly verified a theory. It
took an electron microscope to do it, but he found a virus in the blue
patches which matched the type discovered on Tralee.
The Tralee viruses had effects which were passed on from mother to
child, and heredity had been charged with the observed results of
quasi-living viral particles. And then Calhoun very, very carefully
introduced into a virus culture the material he had been growing in a
plastic cube. He watched what happened.
He was satisfied, so much so that immediately afterward he yawned and
yawned and barely managed to stagger off to bed. The watching guard in
the Med Ship watched him in amazement.
That night the ship from Orede came in, packed with frozen bloody
carcasses of cattle. Calhoun knew nothing of it. But next morning
Maril came back. There were shadows under her eyes and her expression
was of someone who has lost everything that had meaning in her life.
"I'm all right," she insisted, when Calhoun commented. "I've been
visiting my family. I've seen Korvan. I'm quite all right."
"You haven't eaten any better than I have," Calhoun observed.
"I couldn't!" admitted Maril. "My sisters, my little sisters so
thin.... There's rationing for everybody and it's all efficiently
arranged. They even had rations for me. But I couldn't eat! I gave
most of my food to my sisters and they--they squabbled over it!"
Calhoun said nothing. There was nothing to say. Then she said, in a no
less desolate tone, "Korvan said I was foolish to come back."
"He could be right," said Calhoun.
"But I had to!" protested Maril. "And now I--I've been eating all I
wanted to, in Weald and in the ship, and I'm ashamed because they're
half-starved and I'm not. And when you see what hunger does to
them.... It's terrible to be half-starved and not able to think of
anything but food!"
"I hope," said Calhoun, "to do something about that. If I can get hold
of an astrogator or two--"
"The ship that was on Orede came in during the night," Maril told him
shakily. "It was loaded with frozen meat, but one load's not enough to
make a difference on a whole planet! And if Weald hunts for us on
Orede, we daren't go back for more meat."
She said abruptly, "There are some prisoners. They were miners. They
were crowded out of the ship. The Darians who'd stampeded the cattle
took them prisoners. They had to!"
"True," said Calhoun. "It wouldn't have been wise to leave Wealdians
around on Orede with their throats cut. Or living, either, to tell
about a rumor of blueskins. Even if their throats will be cut now. Is
that the program?"
Maril shivered.
"No. They'll be put on short rations like everybody else. And people
will watch them. The Wealdians expect to die of plague any minute
because they've been with Darians. So people look at them and laugh.
But it's not very funny."
"It's natural," said Calhoun, "but perhaps lacking in charity. Look
there! How about those astrogators? I need them for a job I have in
mind."
Maril wrung her hands.
"C--come here," she said in a low tone.
There was an armed guard in the control room of the ship. He'd watched
Calhoun a good part of the previous day as Calhoun performed his
mysterious work. He'd been off-duty and now was on duty again. He was
bored. So long as Calhoun did not touch the control board, though, he
was uninterested. He didn't even turn his head when Maril led the way
into the other cabin and slid the door shut.
"The astrogators are coming," she said swiftly. "They'll bring some
boxes with them. They'll ask you to instruct them so they can handle
our ship better. They lost themselves coming back from Orede. No,
they didn't lose themselves, but they lost time, enough time almost to
make an extra trip for meat. They need to be experts. I'm to come
along, so they can be sure that what you teach them is what you've
been doing right along."