At the time his father had been too busy to even to look at him, but his mother had smiled and told him not to be afraid as she climbed over the backrest of the copilot’s position to squeeze down beside him. She had held him very tightly in her lap with one arm while her free hand redeployed the safety harness around both of them. Outside the canopy, the sky and the tree-covered mountains were spinning around them, with the trees coming so close that he could see individual branches. Then she had pushed his head forward, folding him in two on her lap with the back of his head pressed between her breasts. There had been a sudden shock that flung them sideways and apart, a loud, tearing crash, and the feeling of rain on his face and cold air rushing past as he fell.
He remembered an explosion of pain as he hit the ground, but nothing else until one of the rescue party that had responded to the flyer’s automatic distress beacon asked him where he was hurt.
According to the report, the flyer’s canopy had been speared by one of the treetops and was found still lodged in the upper branches, while the rest of the ship crashed to the ground and rolled down the mountain for a distance of forty-five meters before breaking up and catching fire. Because the local vegetation was sodden after a day of heavy rain, the flames did not travel up the slope to the point where the sole survivor, the seven-year-old Hewlitt boy, was lying. The report went on to discuss at length the technical evidence gathered by the investigators, which Prilicla passed over for later study by Captain Fletcher, and ended with brief details of the autopsy, disposal, and treatment of the victims.
His parents had sustained massive trauma, and the indications were that they had probably died, and were certainly unconscious, before the fire engulfed them. Hewlitt had been found in a state of shock and confusion but otherwise unharmed, and it was assumed that the small patches of blood on his clothing belonged to his mother. Although unhurt, he had been kept under observation in hospital for the nine days it took the next-of-kin, his grandmother, to arrive and collect him and arrange for the disposal of his parents’ remains.
His grandmother had not allowed Hewlitt to see the bodies because, he now realized, the cremation had simply completed the process already started by the fire.
For a moment the old but never quite forgotten pain of loss and grief returned like a great, dark vacuum filling his chest, and he tried hard to control his feelings because Prilicla was watching him and becoming unsteady in its flight. He pushed the remembered pain out of his mind and tried to concentrate on the next report that was coming up on the screen.
“Thank you, friend Hewlitt,” said the empath, and went on, “As we can see, this report relates to the medical condition, treatment, and behavior of the survivor during its nine-day stay in hospital. Even then the younger Hewlitt was presenting its doctor with problems.
“They began,” Prilicla went on, “when the base medical officer, Surgeon-Captain Telford, prescribed oral sedation. Although uninjured, the patient was close to physical exhaustion and emotionally distressed by the loss of its parents and was unable to sleep. The result was a violent but nonspecific reaction that included abdominal discomfort, respiratory difficulty, and a rash covering the skin of the lower chest and back. While the surgeon-captain was still trying to discover what was happening, the symptoms subsided. A different type of sedation was prescribed and, as a precaution, only a minute initial dose was administered, by subcutaneous injection. This time the result was a cardiac arrest which lasted for two-pointsix minutes, accompanied by a brief recurrence of respiratory impairment, both of which passed without any detectable aftereffects.
“As you can see,” Prilicla continued, indicating the treatment summary at the bottom of the screen, “Dr. Telford diagnosed a hyperallergenic reaction, cause unknown, and forbade further medication. Instead, the emotional problems were treated with verbal tranquilization and reassurance provided by a same-species nurse who was nearing retirement age, and by allowing the child, who was apparently neither ill nor injured, to tire himself out and forget some of his grief by allowing him to visit and talk to other patients, who included serving space officers with many interesting stories to tell…
“That nurse was very nice to me,” Hewlitt broke in, his voice quiet with remembered sadness that he had not felt for many years, “and I realize now that some of those stories might not have been true. But the treatment worked and… I’m sorry for interrupting, Doctor, I didn’t mean to remember out loud.”
“Don’t apologize, friend Hewlitt, your memories of the time are valuable to us,” said Prilicla. A moment later it went on, “There is an entry here to the effecrthat the then Surgeon-Lieutenant Telford was completely mystified by your atypical reaction to two simple and well-tried types of sedative medication. But it had no opportunity to discover, identify, and list what he assumed to be the allergenic substances that were causing the reaction before your relative arrived to take you to Earth. Dr. Telford had no reason, other than its unsatisfied curiosity, for keeping an otherwise healthy child in hospital.
“And now,” it ended, “has anyone anything they would like to say about this report?”
There were a few things Hewlitt would have liked to say, but he knew the question was not directed at him. It was Pathologist Murchison who spoke first.
She said, “Even though the condition was atypical in that the symptoms appeared and receded with unusual rapidity, Telford’s diagnosis of what appeared to be a wide-ranging and nonspecific allergy was sensible in the circumstances, as was his decision not to attempt further medical treatment until he knew exactly what was going on. Essentially, that is what the patient’s medics did on Earth and later in Sector General. In a word, nothing…
“Pathologist,” Naydrad broke in, its fur spiking with impatience. “You are restating the problem, not offering a solution.”
“Perhaps,” said Murchison, who knew her Kelgians well enough not to be irritated by the interruption. “But the point I’m trying to make is that the allergy symptoms appeared at a very early age and were repeated, with minor variations, here, on Earth, and in Sector General. This makes me wonder if the patient was born with the condition and we should be looking for a genetic rift of some kind. There are no recorded instances of anyone being allergic to the food produced by the synthesizers, which is the kind most off-planet visitors favor, and certainly not baby-formula varieties. And there would be no allergic response if… Hewlitt, were you breast-fed as an infant?”
“If I was,” he replied after a quick search of his earliest memories, “I was too young to remember.”
Murchison smiled. “Too bad, but it may not be important. If you were breast-fed and weaned onto synthesized food, that might explain why the first recorded allergic reaction was to medication. There is another possibility. The symptoms first appeared in the base hospital a few hours after the flyer crash. You were not hurt, but it is reasonable to assume that the fall through the branches onto the soft, wet ground rendered you temporarily unconscious. Certainly, your shocked and confused condition when found is symptomatic of a recent concussion. But it is possible that you sustained minor lacerations or abrasions, too minor in the circumstances for the rescuers to bother recording them, and that something was introduced into your system which caused the later allergic reaction. It might have been something living in the tree or on the ground, a spore or an insect or even a small animal that bit you, or a toxic substance with unknown properties that gained entry though a scratch from the foliage itself. I suggest a search of the crash site. If the suspect organism or material is native to Etla, it will still be there.