"You're Van Goghian?" Theoda demanded.
"By chance, and one of the immunes."
"You heard what I was saying? You agree?"
"I've heard. I neither agree nor disagree. I'll try anything that sounds even remotely feasible. Your idea is reasonable and the computer has only the one positive suggestion, therapy. I'll bring my son."
He turned when he reached the lock, shook his fist back at Helva. "You drugged me, you silver-plated sorceress."
"An inaccurate analysis, but the insult is accepted," Helva said as he disappeared, scowling, down the lift.
Elated, Theoda snatched out her viewer and carefully restudied the films of the technique she would try.
"They used steroids as medications," she mumbled. "Have you any?"
"No medication was indicated on the report," Helva reminded her, "but you can get Onro to steal what you require from the synthesizer in the hospital. He is a Senior MedOfficer."
"Yes, yes, that helps," and Theoda lapsed again into fierce concentration. "Why did they use. . . oh, yes, of course. They didn't have any conglomerates, did they?"
Fascinated, Helva watched as Theoda scanned the film, winding and rewinding, rechecking, making notations, muttering to herself, pausing to gaze off into space in abstracted thought.
When Theoda had been through her notes the fourth time, Helva insisted with authority that she eat something. Theoda had just finished the stew when Onro returned with the limp body of a redheaded child in his arms. Onro's rough face was impassive, almost rigid in its lack of expression as the child was tenderly laid down on the bunk. Helva noticed the almost universal trait of the victims, the half-closed eyes, as if the lids were too heavy to keep open.
Kneeling down beside the bunk, Theoda turned the boy's face so that her eyes were directly on a level with his.
"Child, I know you can hear. We are going to work your body to help you remember what your body could do. Soon we will have you running under the sun again."
Without more ado and disregarding Onro's guttural protest, she placed the boy on his stomach on the deck, seized one arm and one leg and signaled to Onro to do likewise.
"We are taking you back to the time when you were a baby and first tried to creep. We are making your body crawl forward on your belly like a snake."
In a patient monotone, she droned her instructions. Helva timed the performance at 15 minutes. They waited a full hour and repeated the drill. Another hour passed and Theoda, equally patient, droned instructions to pattern the child's body in a walking, upright position, alternating the left hand with right foot, and right hand with left foot. Another hour and she repeated the walking. Then back to the crawling, again and again in double repetition. The two therapists caught naps when they could. Surreptitiously, Helva closed her lock, cut the cabin audio on her relays and ignored the insistent radio demands from the hospital that she put Theoda or Onro on the radio. After 24 hours, Theoda alternated the two patterns, and included basic muscular therapy on the lax body, patiently, patiently manipulating the limbs in the various attitudes and postures, down to the young toes and fingers.
By the 27th hour, Onro, worn by previous exhaustion, frustration and increasing hopelessness, dropped into a sleep from which violent shaking could not rouse him. Theoda, looking more and more gray, continued, making each repetition of every motion as carefully and fully as she had the first time she started the intensive repatterning.
Helva ignored the crowd outside. She paid no attention to the muted demands, threats, and entreaties,
"Theoda," Helva said softly in the 30th hour, "have you noticed, as I have, the tendency of the neck muscles to contort?"
"Yes, I have. And this child was once so far gone that a tracheotomy was necessary. Notice the scar here," and she pointed to the thin mark. "I see, too, that the eyelids describe a slightly larger arc than when we began the therapy. The child knows we are helping him. See, his eyes open. . . ever so slightly, but it is enough. I was right! I knew I was right!"
"You won't have much more tune," Helva said. "The authorities of Annigoni have called in a Service Craft and it is due to land beside me in half an hour. I will be forced to open or risk damage to the ship, which I am conditioned to avoid."
Theoda looked up, startled.
"What do you mean?"
"Look in my screen," and Helva turned on the picture at the pilot's console so that Theoda could see the crowd of people and vehicles clustered at the base of the ship. "They are getting a bit insistent."
"I had no idea."
"You needed quiet. I could at least supply that," Helva replied. "But to all intents and purposes, their Senior Medical Officer, his son, and their visiting technical adviser are imprisoned inside me and they suspect that my recent. . . that I am turning rogue."
"But didn't you tell them we were conducting therapy. . ."
"Naturally."
"Of all the ridiculous. . ."
"It's time for therapy. Every minute is necessary now."
"First he must be fed."
Theoda carefully inserted the concentrated solution in the thin vein, smoothing down the lump that formed as the nutritive spray entered.
"A sweet child, I imagine, Helva, from his face," she said.
"A young hellion, with all those freckles," snorted Helva.
"They are usually the sweetest inside," Theoda said firmly.
Helva noticed the eyelids droop down on the cheek and then raise again. She decided she was right, not the therapist. Imagine calling red hair and freckles sweet!
Again the patient routine, the assisted patterning. Then a loud thud startled Theoda. It shook the sleeping form of the doctor where he lay on the deck. Helva, with one eye outside, had expected the blow. Onto roused himself garrulously, unaware at first of his surroundings.
"Whassa matter?"
A second dull thud.
"What in Hell's happening? Who's knocking?"
"Half the planet," remarked Helva drily and tuned up the exterior visual and aural. She immediately cut down the nearly deafening noise.
"All right, all right," she said loudly to the audience, her voice amplifying easily over their angry roars.
"Demand permission to enter, XH-834," squalled someone at her base. She meekly activated the lift and opened the lock. Onro stamped to the opening and leaned down, shouting.
" What in Hell's the matter here? Go 'way, all of you. Have you no decency? What's the bloody fuss about? Can't a man get some sleep around here? Only quiet place on the whole lousy planet."
The lift had by then come abreast of him with the brawn from the service ship and the stuffy hospital official of Theoda's tour.
"MedOfficer Onro, we feared for you, particularly when your son was discovered missing from his bed."
"Administrator Carif, did you expect that the lady therapist had kidnapped me and my son and was holding us hostage on a rogue ship? Romanticists all. Hey, what are you doing. . . you young squirt," he demanded as the brawn made a pass at the protected panel of Helva's shaft.
"I am following orders from Central Control."
"You warm up that tight beam and tell Central Control to mind its own damned business. Weren't for Helva here and the peace and quiet she maintained for us, don't know where we'd be at."
He stalked into the cabin, where his son again lay on the floor, with Theoda painstakingly applying her Doman-Delacato therapy.