CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE – THE SICK MAN

When peoples from two environments meet there will be the possibility of cross-contamination...

Melvin led the way and, with a little firm help from Umbaga on Gornley’s painfully broken arm, the little group skirted the shining spacecraft that belonged to the newcomers and guided them to his own. When he had been fighting the controls trying to land safely he had aimed his crippled craft for a landing in the clearing but had missed it by a small margin. Once down he had heaven a sigh of relief when he saw that they had been fortunate not to crash into any trees at the clearing’s perimeter. And he’d been probably more successful than he deserved with malfunctioning controls, only causing minimal damage. On such small slices of good fortune are whole histories sometimes based. His was, anyway, for he had been able to effect repairs to the damaged propulsion unit and the machine should be able to take off, even at a moment’s notice.

There were three steps leading up to the entrance, an air-lock that Melvin had left open because the inner door was sufficient to keep out anything native to a planet that seemed, at best, primitive, and the whole idea of circulating as much fresh air as possible appealed to both himself and Aurora.

Umbaga was confused and feeling queasy. His stomach seemed to want to turn somersaults, but he looked around him with more than mere curiosity. This was a place created by man, and he was embarrassingly aware that neither he nor his people had ever actually created much. They had no knowledge of metals and only made the crudest use of stone and wood. Pottery and the moulding of vessels from clay was also in the future because pottery, in order to be made resistant to moisture, needs to be fired, and that demands fire and fire was one of the things left for the future to discover, though he had at the back of his mind the knowledge that they had been shown how to produce it from two dry sticks..

Once on board their craft Aurora set about tending to Gornley’s injuries, telling him in no uncertain terms that he was fortunate that it was only his arm that was broken. She had long been frustrated by the shallow egos of young men and here was proof of just how wrong it could go. Stardust, the beautiful and clever partner to Gornley, was dead, and when (or if) they ever got back home, Gornley would have to pay, possibly even with his life.

“Whole vids have been produced about youths like you,” she told him irritably, “and wars have been fought because of your absurd notions of false superiority. You see, there is very little about you that is average let alone superior...”

“How dared a woman talk to me like this!” he snapped, and she tweaked his arm in order to underline her message with additional pain.

Melvin put one hand on the youth’s shoulder. “She’s right,” he advised him, “even I can see that, and like you I’m a man. But as you know there’s something about maleness, something they say evolved quite recently, that makes the need for self-control imperative. Have you any idea how many planets have been blasted to obscurity because of some misguided sense of masculine power and rightness? And did you not realise that this is why punishments for crimes like the one you have committed are so heavy?” This was the first time that Melvin found himself seeing reality from a new perspective and his very words shocked even him.

Umbaga couldn’t understand a word of what was being said but he got the message that Melvin was angrily advising Gornley to calm down and see sense. But what he did know, what he could understand, was the feeling he had that all was not well within his own body. The queasiness he’d started experiencing was getting to be more pronounced and he felt hot and sweaty when the weather was relatively cool. In fact, he was beginning to feel quite ill and the more he thought about it the worse he felt. It had come on rapidly after he had released Gornley and he would probably never have been so vicious as to break the man’s arm had he been feeling his usual self. But wave after wave of nauseous weakness swept through him with heavy perspiration running down his face and he only just had the strength and foresight to stagger to the entrance of the spacecraft and lean out before he vomited.

He’d been sick before. There were all sorts f things that trial-and-error had taught him that he shouldn’t eat because they caused titanic eruptions from his stomach, but this was worse than all of them put together. He groaned and fell to the metal floor of the craft’s air-lock before slowly rolling down the two or three steps that led from the entrance to the outside world and settling on the scorched grass which was already showing new green shoots. But he didn’t see them. He closed his eyes, and his world spun and he shivered spasmodically.

“Look to him!” gasped Aurora, and Melvin leapt into action.

Sickness wasn’t totally unknown on their home world of Terra but many diseases had been conquered centuries earlier and life was lived with flesh at ease with its environment, and therefore he had never seen anything like this before.

“He’s not dead, but he is in a bad way,” he muttered. “It looks like one of the maladies we were taught about before take-off.”

“Yes,” said Aurora slowly, “we were warned to keep well clear of any native life-forms until we knew they didn’t harbour diseases we hadn’t been immunised against or others that are totally unknown on Terra. It’s a pity that events were so complicated that I forgot that basic message.”

“But we don’t carry illness!” objected Melvin.

“Not that we know of,” agreed Aurora, “but we may carry goodness-knows how many micro-organisms in our bodies that we have immunity to and that primitive folk on primitive worlds have not, and we may well have passed them on to this poor man here. And the wise and wonderful Juju … she may have succumbed to whatever it is that Umbaga is suffering from. And her child. But we have no time to worry about them. Let’s see what we can do for this fellow here.”

There was equipment on board the vessel that was capable of doing most of the things that had been anticipated before their original launch from Terra, and one of the diagnostic tools had to do with the automatic identification of most recorded illnesses, even those that had been conquered generations earlier by medical science. Then the machine would search its complex memory banks until it found a cure and the operator would be advised as to what he or she should do.

“It’s something called influenza...” said Aurora. “We have chemicals that should cure the man, and I will administer them straight away. Apparently in the dim past there were outbreaks of the illness that killed millions! It must have been dreadful to live back then.”

“What if the cure is worse than the illness?” asked Melvin. “After all, these primitives are different from us and what may cure the people of Terra may well not cure the people of another world. The cure may even prove to be fatal!”

“There is only a small chance of that,” whispered Aurora.

“You hope!” sneered Gornley, feeling left out of the conversation.

Aurora turned to him, scowling, an expression that was a strange visitor to her normally placid face. “I know!” she told him, “and if you’d think a bit you’d know too! Remember you said you played games flipping an orbit round a black hole? Remember you said that you broke all speed limits suspected by humanity?”

“It was fun,” grinned Gornley, tenderly resting his arm on his own chest. “Stardust didn’t like it, though!”

Aurora ignored that last jibe. “Then you must realise that you interfered with space-time, which is an acceleration into the unknown we must never do for fear of something dreadful happening. Inadvertently, we did the same, but we were in sleep-time and the computer thought it could cope, and failed us. We, too, accelerated to well past the ultimate speed, and that’s how we ended here, on this planet.”

“I know how fast we went!” muttered Gornley scornfully, “It’ll be put in the records when we get back, and all will praise us!”

“And you interfered with space-time and came here, nincompoop,” said Aurora evenly. “And here is the home planet, the one we were sent in search of, and here is the very, very beginnings of human life, and here in this sick man who I am about to inject with medicine from our own century, is a very, very early ancestor of all of us. For Umbaga, this wonderful, sick and hopefully not dying man, is what our records call Neanderthal and without him none of us would be as we are!”

And with that she plunged a hypodermic syringe into Umbaga’s arm and waited to see what would happen.

© Peter Rogerson 05.11.16