So he sat and waited for nearly an hour before the nurse, a young man he'd never seen before, ushered him into an examination room.
“Sit down, please,” the nurse instructed. They were very firmly polite here, apparently quite accustomed to impatient patients.
Conrad leaned his rump against the edge of the examination table—which fortunately was made of wellstone, smooth and supple beneath his touch—and at once the white walls of the room came alive with sensors and displays, shining lights and bursts of sound just beyond the edges of Conrad's hearing.
“Hmm,” the nurse said, studying the walls and ceiling, paying no attention to Conrad himself. “Oxidation, telomere shortening, apoptosis, intracellular lipofuscin buildup . . . Sir, you're suffering from a condition known as geriatry.”
Conrad nearly laughed out loud at that. “Old age? I'm familiar with the concept, yes.”
“How long has it been since your last fax?”
“About five years, I think,” Conrad answered. “Give or take a few.”
Now the nurse did look at him, and he was scowling. “You mustn't go that long, sir. That's more than enough time for tumors to develop and metastasize. Or you could suffer arterial blockage—calcium or simple dietary fat—and, you know, drop dead. Losing five years of accumulated memory!”
“I'm familiar with the concept,” Conrad repeated, less amused this time.
“Well then, shame on you twice as much. Do you have trouble hearing, or tasting your food? Aren't you tired? Don't you feel run-down in the evenings?”
“Sometimes,” Conrad admitted. “But I don't need a lecture about it. How old are you, son?”
“That hardly matters, sir,” the nurse told him firmly and politely. “The doctor will see you in a few minutes. If you like, you can watch TV in the meantime.”
“Ah. Thank you, no. I'll just enjoy the quiet.” There was little enough of that in his life these days.
As promised, fortunately, the doctor only made him wait a few minutes before appearing in the doorway with a gentle knock. He had on the obligatory white coat—who could trust a doctor without one?—and he had some sort of auxiliary sensory apparatus strapped to his head, like a pair of Old Modern spectacles with cones of rigid black wellstone projecting out from the lenses.
“Conrad Mursk. Conrad Ethel Mursk, first mate of Newhope, executive officer on the pirate fetu'ula Viridity. How the fuff are you, old man?”
Only then did Conrad realize he was looking at Martin Liss, Newhope's nominal (though symbolic) medical officer and one of Conrad's old camp buddies from way too long ago.
“Martin! Wow, raw, it's . . . well, it's great to see you. You look . . .”
“Like a bug-eyed monster, I know.” Martin took the spectacles off, grinning broadly. “But I can see right through you with these things, in more senses than one. It saves a lot of time.”
“Time for what? I'm just here to step through a fax machine, if it's all the same to you. So they've made you a doctor, have they? How long has that been going on?”
“Quite some time now,” Martin answered seriously. “The need was clear, so I did the studying and put five copies through five years of simulation each. Believe it or not, I'm qualified to treat most ailments with no fax machine at all. Not that people generally find this reassuring.
“To answer your question, this examination becomes part of your medical record, which gives us an idea how your body ages, how it changes over time, what sorts of breakdown it's prone to. Our fax filters have gotten pretty good, and in theory, the fresh copy we print will include corrections for the worst of these. People aren't faxing as often as they used to, so it behooves us in the medical profession to ensure that they get the most out of it when they do.”
Conrad chuckled. “Sounds complicated, my friend. I'd rather just remember to fax more often.”
Martin's smile looked a little bit forced. “We'd all like that, Conrad. We all remember those days. Someday it'll be like that again, but right now this is the way we do things. Now, all things considered, you're in pretty good shape, what with the time scales involved and the high radiation flux. In my medical opinion, you'll hold together for another thousand hours. Can you come back then? Two days from now?”
Puzzled, Conrad asked, “Why? What happens in two days?”
“Your fax appointment,” Martin said. “If you were freshly dead but still salvageable, or in the middle of a heart attack or something, I'd stick you in the machine right away. But as I say, you're in reasonably good shape, which gives you a lower triage rating.”
“The machine is that busy? For Barnardean days at a time? What the heck is it doing?”
Martin shrugged. “Oh, you know. Clonings, childbirth, repairing fractures, and amputations . . . the usual routine. Plus downtime for maintenance, of course. But listen, if you lose a limb between now and March, I'll promise to move you to the head of the queue. How's that?”
“I see. It does help to have a friend in the business,” Conrad said, forcing a smile. But this, too, sounded like a problem. Maybe he was just paranoid, maybe the King and Queen of Sol had just put him on edge, but suddenly he could see problems all around him. And in all the world, in all the universe, there was only really one person he could talk to about that.
“I'll say hi to Bascal for you,” he told Martin. “I've given myself the day off, and if you don't have time to fix me, I believe I owe that man a visit. Socially, you understand.”
The encounter was as disturbing for Martin as it was for Conrad. Afterward, he sat in his office for a while, thinking about it. The state of medicine on Planet Two had declined slowly—so slowly that he almost hadn't noticed—but every now and then a refugee from the past would walk in thinking it was still the old days, and Martin would be forced to look around him and really see things as they were. To ponder, yes.
He didn't know precisely what he was pondering, what the causes were, what if anything he could do about it. If he demanded an audience with King Bascal, he would probably get it sooner or later, if only because they'd gone to Camp Friendly together as boys. But what could he ask for? What would he say?
Medicine was a perfect profession for Martin, because when you got right down to it, he didn't have much in the way of initiative. It was a job for clever reactionaries; the sensors told him what was wrong, and the hypercomputers told him what to do about it, while he served mainly in a supervisory capacity, keeping things focused and moving. In a pinch he could set a fractured bone, or even synthesize an RNA blocker to, for example, shut down a tumor or a bacterial infection. He had never done these things outside of a neural sensorium, but he understood how they would be done, or was pretty sure he did. But presented with an unknown problem whose solution had not been rotely memorized, would he know what to do?
And the concern raised by Conrad Mursk was a problem like that: unfocused, apparently sourceless. If it was a problem with the world itself, then for Martin's purposes it was undoctorable.
But then again, it wasn't Martin's job to worry about these things. It wasn't Conrad's job either—he was just supposed to put up buildings, right? But Conrad had always had a nose for problems and a pushy way of making them his business. Even as a boy, he'd had a funny knack for getting to the heart of things, for patching something together that would at least keep life from getting any worse.
And this thought went a long way toward quelling Martin's unease, because Conrad did have the ear of King Bascal, far more than Martin himself ever would. And if Martin had inspired Conrad to go and have that chat with the king, well, perhaps Martin had done his part after all.