Dalla’s face was tear-stained, her expression agonized, but she did not hesitate. She said calmly, “Yes. Please.”
Talitha swung the injector over Dabbi’s leg, radiated it, punched the code for .55 of the specified dosages of the two antibiotics, mixed them, and threw the switch. She examined Dabbi’s leg immediately to make certain that the injection had not filtered improperly; but the puffy flesh was unbroken, and she could not even find the usual upwelling of fluid. She radiated the leg again and pushed the medical kit aside.
“Now all we can do is try to control the fever and wait,” she announced.
“Is there anything I can do?” Dalla asked.
“I’ll fix a vol solution. We’ll have to keep spraying her to get the fever down. Otherwise, if your religion has any gods that are well disposed, you might try praying. That’s what I’m going to do.”
She mixed the solution and set Dalla and Hort to spraying the patient. Then she stripped off her gloves, returned the mask to the sterilizer, and went to stand at the window. She’d thought her medical career long since washed out; unexpectedly she’d drawn her first and probably her last patient, and she was forced to search her mind for deliberately forgotten data and dicta while frantically reviewing her performance for fatal errors committed and crucial procedures overlooked.
Outside the building, the natives who had brought Dabbi, Fornri with them, sat on the ground in a circle in prayerlike meditation. None of them moved a muscle. It was dusk now, and her uncle, walking from his office to the commissary, had to circle them. He paid no attention to the natives, and their attention was fixed on the infinite.
She returned to her patient, took Dabbi’s hand, and watched the small, flushed face. The sprayers hissed continuously, but the fever was not dropping. The child’s breathing seemed more labored. Certainly they were too late, and yet—and yet—
With all of the fervor her mind could command she willed the child to live. It came to her as a revelation that this small creature was not a semihuman animal from the most uncivilized of worlds. She belonged to the universe of children, and no sick child, anywhere, was significantly different from any other sick child.
Looking at Dalla’s agonized face, Talitha suddenly wondered if there was also a universe of people.
The room was growing dark, and Hort got up and adjusted the illumination to a subdued glow. As the night wore on, Dalla finally succumbed to sleep and huddled on the floor by the bed. Eventually Hort followed her. With Dabbi’s fever finally in check, Talitha stopped the spraying and covered her lightly. She continued to watch, leaving her patient only when she moved quietly about the room in an attempt to keep herself awake. And whenever she looked from the window, the natives, dimly visible in the pale light that seeped from the sickroom, sat unmoving in their circle.
At dawn, dozing in her chair, she snapped to instant wakefulness and bent over Dabbi in alarm. The child’s eyes were open. She was looking about the room bewilderedly and attempting to sit up.
Dalla awakened with a cry. Hort sprang up, and as he did so the door dropped open and Fornri bounded into the room. All watched tensely while Talitha examined her patient.
The swelling in the leg and foot was miraculously reduced, and she no longer was feverish. Hort exclaimed incredulously, “Then—she’s going to be all right!”
Talitha was anxiously watching the cardiograph. Finally she pushed the medical kit aside. Dabbi sat up, smiling, and Dalla leaned over and embraced her. Fornri stood beaming down on them.
Talitha said quietly to Hort, “Her heart action is very erratic. I should have studied the literature before I administered the medicine. Combinations of medications can be terribly dangerous. Do you have a medical referencer?”
“In the office,” Hort said. “But it’s a small one, and it hasn’t a thing about pairing antibiotics. Believe me, I checked every shred of information available. I thought I might as well gamble, because the patients were going to die anyway. What’s the matter with her heart?”
“I don’t know,” Talitha said. She felt so weary, so indescribably weary. She had been fighting for a child’s life, and now she did not know what to do, and her fight was merely to hold back her tears. “I’ll have a look at the referencer anyway,” she said. “No, I’ll go. If I don’t move around a bit I’ll collapse.” She said to Dalla, “Keep her covered. She might catch a chill—though what that means in terms of Langri’s viruses I have no idea.”
“Nor does anyone else,” Hort growled.
The natives no longer were sitting in their circle. They were excitedly peering through the windows. Talitha plodded slowly to the office building, found the medical referencer, and began to punch out questions. Finally she slumped back in the chair, eyes closed. Perhaps the question was too complex for this machine’s programming, or perhaps the pairing of antibiotics was such a medical blunder that the programmer thought it unnecessary to mention it.
She buried her face in her hands and wept fearlessly—wept from exhaustion and frustration. Then, with a wrench of determination, she stonily got to her feet and started back to the sick-room. She was almost there when she heard Dalla’s scream.
Dalla was on her knees by the bed, face buried in the blankets, sobbing. Fornri stood with head bowed. Hort turned toward her as she entered, an expression of stunned grief on his face.
Talitha rushed to the bed and bent over Dabbi. Then she straightened up, shaking her head.
“It was her heart,” she said bitterly. “The medicine killed her.”
10
Talitha and Aric Hort despondently faced each other across a table in the embassy’s dining room. The autoserver loomed nearby, but nothing it could offer on this morning tempted either of them.
Finally Talitha burst out angrily, “A biological research laboratory could develop a specific for that disease in a couple of hours.”
Hort’s response matched her bitterness. “I don’t happen to have one with me.”
“Any competent doctor with training in bioanalysis—”
“If you run into one on the beach, send him up here and I’ll put him to work.”
“Does it cause many deaths?”
“Dabbi’s is the third this month. The last two months there weren’t any; the month before that, eight. Not many in terms of the total population. The bacteria has to be present, and there has to be a fairly deep flesh wound. When the two happen together, the mortality is a hundred per cent.”
Wembling entered. He nodded pleasantly, and when they did not respond, he suddenly remembered. “The child died?” Neither of them answered. “Pity,” he said. “Too bad they’ve no conception of medical science.”
He strode to the autoserver, consulted the breakfast list, punched buttons, and accepted a steaming tray. He carried it to their table and seated himself, and he was taking his first mouthful of food when he noticed that they weren’t eating. He asked, “Finished breakfast already?”
“I may never eat again,” Talitha said.
The rest of the staff strolled in, gave them a chorus of greetings, and gathered about the autoserver.
“Isn’t it time you reprogrammed this thing?” Sela Thillow asked Renold. “Everything is starting to taste the same, and it was a lousy menu to begin with.”
“See if you can coax it into putting out some of that native koluf,” Hirus Ayns said.
They took their trays to another table. Talitha said to her uncle, “Did you ever have the agony of watching a child die?” He stared at her. “A death like that is absolutely unnecessary,” she went on.
Wembling nodded. “Of course. Health always is a problem where medical facilities are primitive. Living on such a world is dangerous—something like that could happen to any of us.” He shrugged to show how oblivious he was to danger and went on spooning his breakfast.