And suddenly he found it. The symptoms were given as rough, discolored patches on the tegument with severe itching due to unabsorbed food particles. Treatment was to cleanse the irritated patches after each feed so as to kill the itching and let nature take care of the rest. The disease was a very rare one on Hudlar these days, the symptoms appeared with dramatic suddenness and it ran its course and disappeared equally quickly. Provided ordinary care was taken of the patient, the book stated, the disease was not dangerous.
O’Mara began converting the figures into his own time and size scale. As accurately as he could come to it the colored patches should grow t about eighteen inches across and he could expect anything up to twelve of them before they began to fade. This would occur, calculating from the time he had noticed the first spot, in approximately six hours.
He hadn’t a thing to worry about.
IV
At the conclusion of the next feeding O’Mara carefully sprayed the blue patches clean, but still the young FROB kept slapping furiously at itself and quivering ponderously. Like a kneeling elephant with six angrily waving trunks, he thought. O’Mara had another look at the book, but it still maintained that under ordinary conditions the disease was mild and short-lived, and that the only palliative treatment possible was rest and seeing that the affected areas were kept clean.
Kids, thought O’Mara distractedly, were a blasted worrisome thing …! All that quivering and slapping looked wrong, common sense told him, and should be stopped. Maybe the infant was scratching through sheer force of habit, though the violence of the process made this seem doubtful, and a distraction of some kind would make it stop. Quickly O’Mara chose a fifty-pound weight and used his lifting tackle to swing it to the ceiling. He began raising and dropping it rhythmically over the spot which he had discovered gave the infant the most pleasure — an area two feet back of the hard, transparent membrane which protected its eyes. Fifty pounds dropping from a height of eight feet was a nice gentle pat to a Hudlarian.
Under the patting the FROB grew less violent in its movements. But as soon as O’Mara stopped it began lashing at itself worse than ever, and even running full tilt into walls and what was left of the furniture. During one frenzied charge it nearly escaped into the living room, and the only thing which stopped it was the fact that it was too big to go through the door. Up to that moment O’Mara did not realize how much weight the FROB had put on in five weeks.
Finally sheer fatigue made him give up. He left the FROB threshing and blundering about in the bedroom and threw himself onto the couch outside to try to think.
According to the book it was now time for the blue patches to begin to fade. But they weren’t fading — they had reached the maximum number of twelve and instead of being eighteen or less inches across they were nearly double that size. They were so large that at the next feeding the absorption area of the infant would have shrunk by a half, which meant that it would be further weakened by not getting enough food. And everyone knew that itchy spots should not be scratched if the condition was not to spread and become more serious …
A raucous foghorn note interrupted his thoughts. O’Mara had experience enough to know by the sound that the infant was badly frightened, and by the relative decrease in volume that it was growing weak as well.
He needed help badly, but O’Mara doubted very much if there was anyone available who could furnish it. Telling Caxton about it would be useless — the section chief would only call in Pelling and Pelling was much less informed on the subject of Hudlarian children than was O’Mara, who had been specializing in the subject for the past five weeks. That course would only waste time and not help the kid at all, and there was a strong possibility that — despite the presence of a Monitor investigator — Caxton would see to it that something pretty violent happened to O’Mara for allowing the infant to take sick, for that was the way the section chief would look at it.
Caxton didn’t like O’Mara. Nobody liked O’Mara.
If he had been well-liked on the project nobody would have thought of blaming him for the infant’s sickness, or immediately and unanimously assuming that he was the one responsible for the death of its parents. But he had made the decision to appear a pretty lousy character, and he had been too damned successful.
Maybe he really was a despicable person and that was why the role had come so easy to him. Perhaps the constant frustration of never having the chance to really use the brain which was buried in his ugly, muscle-bound body had gradually soured him, and the part he thought he was playing was the real O’Mara.
If only he had stayed clear of the Waring business. That was what had them really mad at him.
But this sort of thinking was getting him nowhere. The solution of his own problems lay-in part, at least-in showing that he was responsible, patient, kind and possessed the various other attributes which his fellow men looked on with respect. To do that he must first show that he could be trusted with the care of a baby.
He wondered suddenly if the Monitor could help. Not personally; a Corps psychologist officer could hardly be expected to know about obscure diseases of Hudlar children, but through his organization. As the Galaxy’s police, maid-of-all-work and supreme authority generally, the Monitor Corps would be able to find at short notice a being who would know the necessary answers. But again, that being would almost certainly be found on Hudlar itself, and the authorities there already knew of the orphaned infant’s position and help had probably been on the way for weeks. It would certainly arrive sooner than the Monitor could bring it. Help might arrive in time to save the infant. But again maybe it might not.
The problem was still O’Mara’s.
About as serious as a dose of measles.
But measles, in a human baby, could be very serious if the patient was kept in a cold room or in some other environment which, although not deadly in itself, could become lethal to an organism whose resistance was lowered by disease or lack of food. The handbook had prescribed rest, cleansing and nothing else. Or had it? There might be a large and well hidden assumption there. The kicker was that the patient under discussion was residing on its home world at the time of the illness. Under ordinary conditions like that the disease probably was mild and short-lived.
But O’Mara’s bedroom was not, for a Hudlarian baby with the disease, anything like normal conditions.
With that thought came the answer, if only he wasn’t too late to apply it. Abruptly O’Mara pushed himself out of the couch and hurried to the spacesuit locker. He was climbing into the heavy duty model when the communicator beeped at him.
“O’Mara,” Caxton’s voice brayed at him when he had acknowledged, “the Monitor wants to talk to you. It wasn’t supposed to be until tomorrow but—”
“Thank you, Mr. Caxton,” broke in a quiet, firmer voice. There was a pause, then, “My name is Craythorne, Mr. O’Mara. I had planned to see you tomorrow as you know, but I managed to clear up some other work which left me time for a preliminary chat..
What, thought O’Mara fulminatingly, a damned awkward time you had to pick! He finished putting on the suit but left the gauntlets and helmet off. He began tearing into the panel which covered the air-supply controls.