He would be seeing, Lioren told himself with mixed feelings of pleasure, pride, and self-congratulation, the final stages of the cure of Cromsag.
Before he was due to board his flier next morning he visited
sick bay to check on the condition of his patients, only to find the deck and walls splattered with Cromsaggar blood and all of the adults dead. The entrance guard, after succumbing to a violent attack of nausea, reported hearing quiet voices and chanting that had continued far into the night, followed by a period of unbroken silence which it had attributed to them being asleep. But from the condition of the bodies it was clear now that they had instead been fighting and silently kicking, biting, and tearing the lives out of each other until only two of the female infants survived.
Lioren was still trying to recover from the shock, and make himself believe that he was not asleep and having a particularly horrendous dream, when the wall speaker beside him came to sudden, noisy life. It said that he should go at once to the communications center and that the bloody, self-inflicted massacre in sick bay had been repeated all over Cromsag.
Very soon it became clear that Surgeon-Captain Lioren was responsible not for curing but for killing a planetary population.
CHAPTER 5
WHEN Lioren finished speaking there was complete stillness in the room. Even though all present were already aware of every harrowing detail of the Cromsag Incident and his responsibility for it, the mere repetition was enough to shock any civilized being into silence.
“The guilt in this matter is entirely mine,” Lioren resumed, “and lest there be any doubt about this in anyone’s mind, I ask Thornnastor, the Diagnostician-in-Charge of Pathology, to give its evidence.”
The Tralthan lumbered forward on its six elephantine feet to take the witnesses position, and, fixing one eye each on the president of the court, Lioren, O’Mara, and its printed notes, it began to speak. Within a tew minutes Meet commander uer-mod was holding up one hand for silence.
“The witness is not obliged,” it said, “to relate its evidence in such clinical detail. No doubt its medical colleagues would find it interesting but it is not understandable by the court. Please simplify your language, Diagnostician Thornnastor, and go to the explanation of why the Cromsaggar acted as they did.”
Thornnastor stamped its two medial feet in a gesture which suggested impatience, but whose exact significance would have been clear only to another Tralthan, and said, “Very well, sir …”
Because of the more cautious approach to the trial program at Sector General and the consequently slower progress toward a complete cure, Thornnastor explained, the hypersignal from Vespasian was received in time to prevent a repetition of the catastrophe that had occurred on Cromsag. All of the Cromsaggar had been dispersed and confined to single quarters, and the Department of Other-species Psychology had intensified its efforts to overcome the fanatical noncooperation of the patients so that they would answer questions about themselves.
It was only when the decision had been made, very reluctantly and only after lengthy consideration of possible psychological damage, to tell the patients the whole truth of what had happened on their home planet, including the fact that they were the sole surviving adult members of their race, that they began to talk about themselves. There was much anger and recrimination, understandably, but enough information was provided to make possible the formation of a theory which was supported by the archeological evidence.
The best estimate was that the plague had made its first appearance just under one thousand years ago, when the Cromsaggar level of technological and philosophical advancement included atmospheric flight and a culture that no longer practiced war. No information was available regarding the origin and evolution of the disease other than that it was transmitted by either parent during sexual coupling and, in the beginning, its effects had been mild and embarrassing rather than life-threatening. The majority of the Cromsaggar did not travel widely, and they took their sexual bondings, once formed, very seriously and did not stray in this respect, either. A number of the more farsighted Cromsaggar formed communities that were piaguc-ncc, uui me mauiig pruucss ucpcnucu on einuiiunai rather than medical factors and eventually the disease broached this immaterial defense. Another three centuries were to pass before the plague spread unchecked across all of Cromsag to infect every member of the population, adult and child alike. By that time it had increased in virulence, and deaths in middle age were becoming common.
The continuing efforts of the medical scientists were of no avail, and by the end of the following century their civilization had receded to pretechnology levels with no hope of a revival, and it was rare for anyone to live more than a decade past maturity. As a race, the Cromsaggar were facing extinction, a very early extinction because of the effect of the plague on the birth rate.
“The complete symptomology of the disease,” Thornnastor said, “including the endocrinological involvement with its effect on the sufferers’ rate of growth and maturation, has already been studied and can be discussed at length, but I shall summarize and simplify for the benefit of the court.
“Among the adults of both sexes,” it went on, “the visually and tactually unpleasant skin condition was one factor in the reducing birth rate, but it was a minor one. Even if the tegument of both partners was flawless and aesthetically pleasing, the greatly reduced performance of the endocrine system is such that the act of sexual coupling and conception is impossible without an abnormal level of prior emotional stimulation.”
Thornnastor paused. It did not possess the kind of features which could change expression, but it was as if the mind-pictures it was seeing inside its great, immobile dome of a head had made further speech impossible for a moment. Then it went on. “Efforts were made to circumvent this difficulty by medical means, and by the use of substances derived from naturally occurring vegetation which heightened the senses or had hallucinatory effects. These methods proved ineffective and were discarded because of problems of irreversible addiction, death from overdose, and seriously deformed and nonviable offspring. The solution that was ultimately found was nonmedical and involved a deliberate regression in social behavior to the dark ages of their history.
“The Cromsaggar went to war …”
It was not a war fought for reasons of territorial expansion or trade advantage, and neither was it fought at a distance from fortified positions or by warriors acting in concert or protected by armored machines or equipment, and it was a war not waged to the death because there was no intention on either side of killing an opponent who might very well be a family member or a friend. In fact, there were no sides because it was fought hand to hand between pairs of unarmed individuals, and it was a war whose sole purpose was to cause the maximum of fear, pain, and danger, but if possible, not death to the combatants. There was no threat or danger from a beaten and seriously wounded opponent and, even though they had been trying desperately to kill each other moments before, the vanquished were left where they lay, hopefully to recover from their wounds to fight and instill fear in an opponent another day.
Life was rare and precious to the Cromsaggar, rarer and more precious with every dwindling generation that passed; otherwise they would not have tried so hard to keep their race alive.