“I am familiar with the Lonvellin case,” Prilicla broke in. “It was the then Senior Physician Conway’s patient and I assisted with the emotional radiation readings while it was unconscious… I’m sorry. Friend Stillman, please go on.
Following its discharge from Sector General, Lonvellin had boarded its private starship and resumed the interrupted search for a world, said to be in a hitherto unexplored section of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, about which it had heard some very disquieting rumors. In spite of its physiological classification of EPLH, its massive body and fearsome natural weaponry, Lonvellin was a highly intelligent, compulsively altruistic, extremely long-lived, and intensely independent being who made it very plain that it did not and probably never would need help from anyone in rectifying any nasty situation it might find because it had been curing ailing planetary cultures for the greater part of its very long life.
It had come as a great surprise to the Monitor Corps when Lonvellin contacted them with the news that it had found the world it had been seeking and asked them for specialized assistance.
Conditions on the world Lonvellin had found were both sociologically complex and medically barbaric. It needed advice in the medical area before it could take effective action against the many social ills afflicting this truly distressed planet. It also asked that beings of physiological classification DBDG, and specifically Earthhuman entities, should be sent to act as information gatherers. It explained that the natives were of that classification and were violently hostile to all off-wonders who did not closely resemble themselves, a fact that was seriously hampering Lonvellin’s activities.
From the mass of evidence gathered over many months’ observation and monitoring of communications channels from orbit, Lonvellin judged the planet, called Etla by the inhabitants, to have been a thriving colony world that had regressed because of the effect of a wide variety of diseases affecting more than sixty-five percent of the population. But the presence of a small and still functioning spaceport meant that Lonvellin’s first and usually most difficult problem, that of making the natives trust an alien and perhaps visually horrifying being who had dropped out of their sky, should have been simplified, because the inhabitants were already used to the idea of off-planet visitors.
Lonvellin’s intention had been to play the role of a not very bright off-wonder who had been forced to land in order to make repairs to its ship. For this it would require various odd and completely worthless pieces of metal or plastic, and it would pretend great difficulty in making the Etlans understand what it needed. But for this worthless material it would exchange artifacts of great value, and soon the more enterprising inhabitants would begin to take advantage of the situation.
At that stage Lonvellin did not mind being exploited, because the situation was going to change. Rather than give items of value, it would offer to perform even more valuable services, including that of a teacher. Then it would tell them that it considered its ship to be beyond the technical resources of Etla to repair, and as had happened on many previous occasions, gradually it would be accepted as a permanent resident. After that it would have been just a matter of time before it was able to begin changing the Etlan situation for the better, and time was something with which Lonvelun was well supplied.
“To an immensely long-lived and highly intelligent being like Lonvellin,” Stillman went on, “it was all an elaborate and intricate game that it had played successfully many times in its past. It was a good game in that the populations of the worlds concerned benefited as well as rewarding the player with the satisfaction of a job well done. But this time Lonvellin’s game went disastrously wrong. From the moment it landed on the outskirts of a small town and revealed itself, it was kept too busy with the ship’s defenses to begin to play…
Unable to proceed without discovering why a race with experience of space travel should be so violently xenophobic, and not being in a position to ask questions itself, Lonvellin had called for Earth-human assistance. Because of the incredibly high incidence of disease among the population, it had also asked that the senior physician who had been in charge of its case at Sector General advise and assist as well. Shortly afterward, cultural-contact specialists of the Monitor Corps accompanied by Conway had arrived, sized up the situation for themselves, and gone in.
The Etlans were contacted simultaneously at two levels. The first was by a few trained linguists and medics who were landed covertly and concealed their translators under native dress, no other disguise being necessary because the physiological resemblance was so close. Problems with accent and pronunciation were disguised by the pretense of having a speech impediment, it being difficult to identify an accent when the speaker had a stutter or a disease affecting the mouth and tongue, a medical condition that was very common on Etla.
On the second level, a large Monitor vessel landed openly at the spaceport; the Corpsmen admitted their off-world origin and conversed normally by translator. Their story was that they had heard of the plight of the native population and had come to give what medical assistance they could. The Etlans accepted this story, revealing the fact that every ten years an imperial vessel was sent to them loaded with the newest drugs and with healers on board familiar with their use, but in spite of this their medical condition continued to deteriorate. The strangers were welcome to do what they could, but the impression given was that if the medical efforts of an empire covering nearly fifty worlds was powerless to help them then the Monitor Corps was wasting its time.
The majority of Etlans were friendly, trusting people who talked freely about themselves and their empire. The Corps’ contactors were also friendly, but more reticent.
When the subject of the strange and frightful entity called Lonvellin came up, the Corps pretended complete ignorance and their opinions about it leaned heavily toward the middle of the road.
But the really important information had come from the covert investigators. They discovered that the natives were terrified of Lonvellin because they had been taught that all extraterrestrials were disease carriers. The first medical lesson that all star-traveling cultures learned, that pathogens evolved on one planet could not affect the beings of another, had been withheld from them.
Deliberately.
“At least their intense and continuing fear of contracting new infections was understandable,” Stillman continued, “because Etla was a very sick planet. It was a seventh-generation colony world, widely settled but not heavily populated, that had been dogged with ill health for more than a century. At the time an incredible sixty-five percent of its men, women, and children were affected by a wide variety of diseases, most of which were accompanied by a large degree of physical disablement. Very few of the conditions were life-threatening but a high proportion were disfiguring. Many of the contagious diseases would have responded to isolation and simple medical treatment, but their medical science was primitive and there were no research facilities because the empire did all their medical thinking for them.
“The situation was driving us out of our medical minds,” he went on, “because so far as we could see all of the conditions we had seen were curable. If we could have declared the planet a disaster area and moved in massive medical support, the problem would have been solved within a few years at most. But we had a delicate first-contact situation on our hands: the people were proud and independent and, at that time, still loyal and grateful to their emperor on Imperial Etla and to the people of all the other worlds called Etla that made up the empire for their continuing support. The arrival of massive medical aid from strangers would have been demeaning to them and might even have been mistaken by the onplanet imperial representative, who so far had avoided contact with the Monitor Corps, and the large military establishment he maintained, as a hostile invasion from space…”