Collected Short Fiction, page 482
And then, the next day, the fever began.
Hannebrink was the first to report it. Doc Wesley and I were sitting in the medic’s office playing our umpteenth hand of gin rummy when the skinny biochemist entered. At first I thought that he had finally broken down and taken a few drinks, because he was walking unsteadily. But then I saw that his face was flushed and puffy-looking.
He said, “Doc, I don’t feel so good.”
And then he fell forward flat on his face.
We hauled him up on the examining table and peeled his rain-soaked clothes off him, and Wesley gave him a good look-see. He discovered a fever of 103 and still rising, along with local inflammation of the digestive tract, facial swellings, and a mild skin rash covering most of his body. We got him off to bed in the infirmary. Wesley guessed that the fever was some side effect of the muggy weather and the rain and the gnats.
Fine, I thought. Now we’ll all come down with some alien kind of malaria.
“We’d better check the men,” Doc suggested. “Find out if we have an epidemic on our hands.”
He packed up his medical kit and we slogged across the mucky compound to the dormitories. The sound of raucous singing greeted us. We entered Dormitory A and found Crawford, McGuire, Romayne, and a couple of others waving bottles around lustily and singing space-ballads. A few of the others lay on their cots, eyes closed. The place reeked. Evidently the Berangii had paid a recent visit.
None of them seemed to have the external symptoms, but they all felt feverish. Doc did some temperature-taking and found that the boys who were asleep all had fevers ranging from 100 to a torrid 103.8.
“Maybe the rash and swellings come later,” I said.
“Could be.” Doc had corralled McGuire and was taking his temperature. “106.6,” he reported. “On its way up. You’d better get off your feet, McGuire.”
McGuire nodded drunkenly and tottered off to a vacant cot. Doc and I exchanged worried glances. It was an epidemic, all right. We were in trouble.
I made a head-count and discovered that there were just fifteen sober men in camp, including the Doc and myself. Three of the fifteen had some medical training. Doc dug out his entire supply of fever thermometers and we made the rounds, taking temperatures. The rain continued to thump down. The humidity hovered stickily at 99 or so.
The job took almost an hour, and we met later in the Doc’s office to compare notes. We ran down the entire roster. There wasn’t a man in the dorms whose temperature was normal. Most of them were running two or three degrees of fever.
But nobody but Hannebrink had the swellings and rash. I wondered if Hannebrink had caught something special.
“We’d better take our own temperatures,” the Doc said.
We did. The results were not surprising. We all had some fever, the Doc and myself included. Top man was Martell, the geologist, who had 101. The rest of us were still under 100, but above 98.6.
Doc Wesley squinted at Martell. “Come over here, Sam,” he said to the pudgy geologist. Martell walked over, and the Doc looked closely and nodded. “Okay, Sam, get to bed. You’ve got it, whatever it is.”
I peered and saw the beginnings of a rash on Martell’s neck. His eyes looked puffy, too.
During the next four hours the epidemic spread. Doc was trying his whole repertoire of antibiotics, but nothing was taking effect, and one by one the fifteen of us were falling victim to the thing Hannebrink had contracted. I had my hands full, trying to keep things running smoothly with the maddening rain cascading down and with a hundred and fiftyodd sick men in camp.
Strangely, none of the drunks were developing the rash and the swellings. They all had some fever, but nothing more. While the rest of us were catching it one at a time. After Martell it was Kennedy, and after him Michaelson. High fever, blotchy spots on the skin, facial swellings.
Doc Wesley kept me so full of drugs I felt like a pin-cushion, but I knew my turn was coming despite his care. I was developing the chills, which meant my temperature was going up.
The situation was critical. A hundred and thirty men with low fever, all of them groggy from a three-week binge, and a handful of sober men coming down with some unknown alien plague. We needed help. We couldn’t carry on any longer. I stared at Doc Wesley and thought I saw the telltale blotches at last popping out on his skin.
“Have to call Earth,” I said. I realised vaguely that my words were coming out as an indistinct mumble. “Send for a pickup ship. This damned planet has us beat.”
It was a hundred yards from the medic shack to the signal hut. I got as far as the front door of Doc Wesley’s office. A sudden wave of dizziness swept over me and my feet tried to drift to the ceiling. “Got. to call Earth,” I muttered, as somebody bent over me. Then everything blurred. Miles away, I heard a voice say, “Now the Chiefs got it too!”
Later, a voice said, “He’s waking up,” and I realised I was. I opened my eyes after a considerable struggle; the lids seemed pasted down.
My room was crowded. Romayne was there, and Crawford, and an assistant medic named Donovan. All three looked fairly sober, which surprised me. They had been three of the heaviest drinkers in the camp.
I smelled liquor fumes. There was an odd taste in my mouth. The rain was still beating drumtaps on the roof of my hut, which told me I hadn’t been asleep as long as it seemed.
“How long was I out?” I asked.
“Ten days,” Donovan said. “But your fever seems to be broken now. You’ll be okay.”
I tried to sit up, and realised I was weaker than I thought. “Where’s Doc Wesley?”
“Still in sick bay,” said Romayne. “He came down with the disease the day after you did. But he’s responding pretty well to treatment. He’ll recover.”
“Treatment?” I said, bewildered. “What kind of treatment? What’s been going on around here, anyway?”
“You had a rough case of Berangii dysentery, Chief,” Crawford explained. “You and fourteen others.”
My head was beginning to clear a little. “How about the pickup ship from Earth? When does it get here?”
They looked blank. “What pickup ship?” Crawford asked.
I propped myself up on my elbows. “The last thing I ordered before I passed out was a message to be sent to Earth. We can’t stay here any more. This planet obviously isn’t suitable for colonisation.”
“Why not?” Romayne asked innocently.
“Because,” I said, “this dysentery, or whatever you called it, damn near killed us all. And there’s also the matter of the native whiskey.”
“Do you see anyone drunk now?” Romayne asked. “Am I drunk? I’ve been drinking, but am I drunk?”
“No,” I admitted grudgingly. “But——”
“And nobody died of the epidemic, either,” Donovan added. “We almost lost Hannebrink, but that was only because he kept up-chucking the medicine. We had the same trouble with you, Chief, for a while. But you’ve been taking it like a lamb for the last five days.”
“What medicine?”
Donovan smiled and picked up a half-empty flask of Berangii whiskey. He held it out. “This,” he said. “This is your medicine.”
“This?” I repeated. “Medicine?”
Donovan nodded. “We’ve been working out the answer all week, ever since we sobered up. Romayne and I have just about figured it out by now.”
My voice was bitter. “Suppose you let me in on it.”
Donovan poured himself a goodly shot of the native whiskey before he spoke. “You see, Chief, about a day after we all started getting feverish, we sobered up. That’s when we found you and Doc and all the other teetotallers in sick-bay, with 103-degree fevers and skin rashes. The rest of us, those who’d been drinking the stuff, only had a light fever lasting overnight, and after that we felt fine.”
“We started to work things out,” Romayne said. “Hansen helped us when he told us that in the Berangii language happy and healthy are synonymous. When the aliens were telling us they wanted us to be happy, they really meant they were worried about our health.”
“You mean,” I said in a tight voice, “that this godawful rot-gut has curative powers?”
“I’m afraid it has,” Donovan said. “The way it works is this: during the rainy season on Berang, the gnats breed. The gnats carry protozoans which they transmit to other beings when they bite them. When the protozoans get into a mammalian digestive tract, they insist on being fed. And their food is largely alcohol plus the congeners of the Berangii whiskey.”
“Go on,” I said cavernously.
“These protozoans take up residence in your body and proceed to decompose alcohol into short-chain fatty acids with a high energy yield. The Berangii know all about this, because they have these critters living in them all the time. So they keep them fed. They gulp the whiskey down, the protozoans go to work on it, and the Berangii gain energy from the digestive process. It’s really a symbiotic relationship. But when the protozoans don’t get fed properly, they foul up the body’s metabolism, resulting in the sort of thing you and Doc and the other non-drinkers had. The rest of us had a mild fever caused by the entry of the protozoans into our systems. Overnight they burned up our excess alcohol accumulation and we sobered up. Now, provided we keep the little beasties stoked with their favourite fuel, we don’t have to worry any more.”
I coughed. “Provided—you mean—that is, you have to keep on drinking the stuff?”
“About a litre a day,” Romayne said cheerfully. “But the energy output is really tremendous. We can’t get drunk, because our. symbiotes absorb the alcohol as fast as we pour it into ourselves. We just get pleasantly un-tense. And we have so much pep that we’ve been at work on the colony, rain and all, and we’ve caught up to the schedule while you were sick.”
“Tell me,” I said slowly. “One last thing. Just how did you—uh—cure me?”
“By opening your mouth and pouring the stuff down your throat,” Donovan said. “It was the only way. And don’t think it was easy to get you to keep it down, either.”
I sank back limply and closed my eyes, and listened to the rhythmic thudding of the rain.
Funny, I thought. The aliens had been trying to help us, after all. They hadn’t wanted us to get drunk; they just wanted us to have some of their medicine handy when the rainy season began and the fever struck. It wasn’t their fault that humans didn’t have the proper metabolic tolerance for a drink as potent as that.
But the metabolism of my men had altered. We could go ahead with our colony. But—
“There doesn’t happen to be a cure for this protozoa thing, does there?” I asked hesitantly. I saw their faces, and I knew what the answer was. If we got rid of our symbiotes, the men would no longer have any defence against the Berangii whiskey. And next year, when the rainy season came again, the teetotallers would get fever, the others would be hopelessly drunk. It was plain: no protozoa, no colony.
But the protozoa had to be kept nourished. And there was only one form of nourishment they liked.
Donovan said: “You’ll just have to learn how to drink, Chief. It’s the only way to survive on Berang. A dose every four hours is the recommended prescription.” He looked at his watch. “And the next dose is due right now.”
I waited while the foul-smelling fluid gurgled into a glass. Reluctantly, I accepted the glass, stared bleakly into its depths, moistened my lips. Donovan, Crawford, and Romayne waited with folded hands.
Maybe the protozoa within me loved this stuff, but I doubted if I ever would. I sighed. Thirty-six years of staunch teetotalling was about to go by the board in the name of Terran extraterrestrial colonisation. I had worked too hard to give up this colony now. Berang was my world, for better or for worse.
“Cheers,” I said in a dismal voice, and raised the glass to my lips.
Waters of Forgetfulness
The unexplored planet was not a bad place for shipwreck. The air was breathable, the food was eatable. Everything was normal except the water.—The water was different!
HALDERSON had just about given up the search for survivors of the missing space-liner James P. Drew when his detectors picked up the faint, sputtering S.O.S. signal.
He sprang to his phones and tried to boost the signal; just in case coordinates were coming over as well as the bare, unadorned S.O.S. But the dim piping faded away and died within seconds. Halderson moistened his lips. The input tape had recorded the signal; he activated the playback switch, cut in the noise filters; and listened.
Yes. It was unmistakable; for all its indistinctness. It had only lasted a few seconds; but that was long enough for his detectors to pick it up. There were survivors of the James P. Drew! They were calling for help!
The super-luxury liner James P. Drew had disappeared somewhere in the thickly-populated Second Octant area of the galaxy about ten days before. It had been bound for Darrinoor out of Earth, and it had carried eight hundred wealthy first-class passengers plus a crew of nearly sixty. Just what had happened to the Drew was highly uncertain. Its messages had grown increasingly fragmentary and incoherent, and they were practically impossible to understand in the final minutes of the giant ship’s fire. It appeared that there had been a series of explosions aboard ship, beginning in the drive compartment and culminating with a grand outburst that split the liner apart.
Like all superliners of the Earth Line, the James P. Drew had been fully equipped with lifeships. It carried thirty ships, each built to hold ten or twelve people but each capable of holding as many as thirty if necessary. And there were hundreds of planets in the Second Octant to which survivors might have gone. Some of the planets were heavily settled; others were still utterly unexplored. But there were numerous Earthtype planets for the escaping survivors.
For ten days since the disappearance, over a hundred Disaster Patrol scouts had been combing the entire Second Octant area, hoping to pick up a message transmission from a group of survivors or, perhaps, to find one of the lifeships adrift in space. The scouts had drawn blanks so far. Not one had come upon a trace of the survivors of the James P. Drew disaster.
Disaster Scout Halderson had been on the verge of giving up and returning to home base. His small ship only carried two weeks’ supplies, anyway, and he saw no point in continuing the fruitless search for the missing millionaires. It was too bad about them, of course; but space travel was not completely safe, and accidents did happen.
He had been about to notify home base of his decision to return when his ultra-sensitive detectors picked up the feeble impulses of the call, coming in on the special wavelength that had been reserved for James P. Drew lifeships.
He played it back on his recording tapes. Yes, there was no doubt about it. The brief message had said, “S.O.S. . . . S.O.S. . . . James P. Drew survivors. . . . S.O.S. . . . S.O.S. . . .”
HALDERSON integrated the signal and fed it to his computing tapes to get a directional fix. Perhaps the computer could give him an exact location; if not, it could at least pinpoint a general area which could be subjected to an exhaustive search.
He waited. He was in no hurry now. The computer took its own sweet time, checking probabilities and directional quadrations before beeping out a string of linked coordinates.
Halderson studied the sheet of paper that had issued from the computer. It gave a fairly precise orientation for the signal-source. Halderson nibbled on his writing stylus for a moment, then jabbed at the button that activated his chartscreen.
The screen lit up, glowing green with dark flecks in it. Quickly Halderson tapped out the directional coordinates the computer had given him, and the screen obligingly shifted to show him a view of the heavens in the area he had called for.
One small dark fleck stood alone on the field of green. Halderson grinned in satisfaction. There was only one planet from which that signal
could have emanated, then! It made his job that much simpler. The James P. Drew lifeship that had signalled him had come to rest in a relatively uncrowded sector of the galaxy’s Second Octant.
Nodding, Halderson jotted down the planetary data-and shut off the chart-screen. He jacked in the contact for subradio communication with his home base on the planet Skaldek. Moments later came the crackling response from headquarters: “Disaster Patrol HQ. Come in, scoutship. Come in. Major Lang speaking.”
“Lieutenant Halderson calling, sir. Are you getting me? Halderson calling.”
“We read you,” came the reply from HQ. “Proceed, Halderson.”
“My detectors have picked up an S.O.S. message from survivors of the James P. Drew, I’ve made a directional estimate on the signal and I’ve come up with a possible planet of origin for it.”
“Let’s have the coordinates,” Lang said. “We’ll check them for you and advise.”
Halderson said, “It’s a Second Octant planet with Absolute Coordinates DY1164/AD23O6. Repeat: Absolute Coordinates DY1164/AD2306.”
“DY1164/AD2306. Okay, Halderson. I’ll check them on the master planetary chart and let you know what to do next.”
Halderson waited patiently. It was impossible to install a complete galactic data-chart in every small scoutship; for any detailed information on a given planet, it was necessary for the scout to refer back to his home headquarters.
In a few moments Lang’s voice said, “I’ve checked that planet of yours, Halderson. So far as our records show, it’s a good potential harbor for castaways. It’s an Earthtype planet to three places, surveyed twenty years ago but never settled.”
Halderson nodded. Earthtype to three places meant that Earthmen could live there indefinitely without need of artificial protection. The air was breathable, the natural life edible, the water drinkable. . . .
He said, “Very well, sir. In that case I’ll run a direct check on the planet immediately. If I find the Drew survivors there I’ll notify HQ.”
