Asimov’s Future History Volume 6

by Isaac Asimov

  “Here!”

  She half carried Ariel past three rooms full of still more waiting Earthers, to a room with a wheeled, knee-high cart in it.

  “Lie down, baby!”

  The gurney stood up, she strapped Ariel on, and an older woman entered. “Dr. Li —”

  “Mmm. I see.” She began to check over Ariel, not bothering with instruments — she took Ariel’s temperature by placing her hand on Ariel’s head!

  A harassed-looking man entered. He wore a curious ornament in the form of a frame holding glass panes in front of his eyes. Derec had noticed some of these on the ways. It gave his face a dashing, futuristic look. “What is it, Dr. Li?”

  “Don’t know yet, Dr. Powell. Elevated temperature, febrile heartbeat, hectic flush, exhaustion. I want to measure everything first, of course.” She reached to the bottom of the gurney and started pulling out instruments, to Derec’s considerable relief. Ariel had closed her eyes, and seemed to be asleep.

  The doctors bent over her, shaking their heads and measuring everything about Ariel. Tense as he was, Derec looked about for a place to sit, content for the moment to leave it in their hands. Abruptly the nurse said. “How long has it been since she’s eaten?”

  The doctors ignored this till Derec said, “Uh — yesterday afternoon. Not long after noon.”

  Dr. Li grunted, and Dr. Powell said, “Inanition!”

  “Young as she is, that shouldn’t have brought on this collapse. Feel that arm. She’s practically starving.”

  The three of them looked at each other, plainly shocked.

  “Why hasn’t she been eating, young man?” Dr. Li demanded.

  “She hasn’t felt like it, Ma’am,” said Derec, and all three of them frowned at his accent.

  “Settler prospects, eh?” Powell removed his frame and wiped the panes with a tissue. “You’ll not have much need of Spacer talk on a frontier planet. Better to learn some good medieval jargon: brush, creek, log cabin. Not to mention ‘sweat.’ What’s wrong with her?”

  “I don’t know, Doctor. She said,” he gulped, “it could be fatal if it crossed the blood-brain barrier. It’s — it’s affecting her mind. She’s had th-this low-level fever and lethargy, with occasional muscular aches and pains, for a long time.”

  “Vomiting? Night sweats?” asked Dr. Li tensely.

  “I don’t know. She — she didn’t want to worry me.”

  They looked outraged; he should know.

  “There’s a number of things it could be,” said Dr. Li unhappily. “I have a few ideas, though —”

  “So do I!” said Dr. Powell sourly. “Look here, young fella, I don’t doubt that accent caused you many a pain, but you’d better doff it in here. It antagonizes too many people.”

  “He can’t,” said Dr. Li expressionlessly. “He’s a real Spacer.”

  Dr. Powell and the nurse goggled. “Impossible! A Spacer running around on Earth? He’d drop down dead of —”

  The doctors whirled to look at Ariel. Frowning, the nurse stepped out. “It could be any of a hundred common and harmless diseases!” said Dr. Powell.

  “Yes! Harmless to Earth people!”

  “How about yourself, young man? Do you feel all right?”

  Derec nodded. “Never better.”

  “Why, then?” Dr. Powell exploded. “You should be sick a dozen times over!”

  “I’ve been given a prophylactic regimen — so has Ariel,” said Derec, hoping they wouldn’t ask too many questions. “I don’t know too much about it.”

  “Apparently it didn’t take in her case,” said Dr. Li somberly. “You let us know the moment you feel unwell, young man.”

  “They can’t be Spacers,” said the nurse grimly, holding Ariel’s ID tag in her hand. “How could they be, and travel around Earth? Without ration cards, ID, and so on? This is perfectly ordinary Earth ID, City of St. Louis —”

  They looked at him, frowning harder, and Derec felt himself hot … not to mention sweating. “That’s all arranged, sir. It’s part of a trade agreement … we’re doing sociological research …”

  “So young?”

  “Who notices a kid?” he countered swiftly, feeling the hair clammy against his forehead. “Young eyes see more sharply … and so on.”

  “Hummph! No child of mine would take such a risk —”

  “Maybe we’d better query the Terries,” said Dr. Li reluctantly.

  They all looked concerned.

  Derec questioned them with his eyes, but finally had to break down and ask. “The who?”

  “The Terries-Terrestrial Bureau of Investigation,” said Dr. Powell. He polished his panes unhappily.

  “They cause more trouble than —” muttered the nurse.

  “Still, best to take no chances. If the girl is in a bad way, it could cause trouble with the Spacers — there’s enough bad blood between us already.”

  Derec thought swiftly, appalled. The “Terries” would find no record of them, would query whatever Spacer representation there might be on Earth, find no record there, and the reactor would flash over.

  But he couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  “Look —”

  Ariel moaned and turned partly on her side; only the straps kept her from falling. If she’d been listening, she couldn’t have timed it better. All three Earthers leaped to her, and Derec pocketed the ID tag the nurse had put down.

  He thought quickly. The doctors were concerned and totally focused on Ariel. Derec looked around. As he recalled R. David’s work, the ID tag merely gave name and ID workup. Not address. Medical care was on an as-needed basis, not rationed, so nobody cared about place of residence, and in fact they hadn’t been required to enter that. (Or was that because Ariel’s tag gave her rating as Transient? He needed to know a lot more about Earth.)

  In any case, he thought, the only thing they knew about Ariel was what the computer recorded from the ID tag.

  Leaving them working over her, he slipped out and strolled around, speaking to no one, trying to look like a worried, expectant father pretending to be nonchalant. A couple of people looked at him sympathetically, but most didn’t seem to notice him at all, for which he was grateful.

  There it was. An office. He slipped in, looked at the terminal. It was probably dedicated to a single function, but he could try. He had watched R. David coding ID tags of a dozen kinds, and had a good grasp of what was implied. And frankly, these computers were simple after programming positronic brains and restructuring the programming of the central computer of Robot City. It took him a mere half hour to get through the programming, retrieve the record on Ariel, and erase it.

  Now let’s hope there isn’t a backup memory somewhere, he thought gloomily.

  They caught up with him in the interior waiting room, standing aimlessly about and unobtrusively slipping toward the outer waiting room, where he supposed he belonged.

  “There you are,” said the nurse. For the first time, he noted that her jacket had a name label imprinted Korolenko, J. “Why didn’t you wait in the Friends’ Lounge?”

  He didn’t bother to tell her they hadn’t shown him to it. “Had to go to the Personal,” he said, not knowing if Earthers could mention the Personal so openly.

  She got ideas, frowned, put something warm from her pocket against his head. Apparently his temperature was all right. “Very well. But come in here. The doctors will need to speak to you.”

  Within ten minutes Dr. Li entered the room briskly, sat down, exhaled heavily. “She had us worried, but it was mostly exhaustion of the body’s resources. Starvation, to put it crudely. She must have been going on nerves and caffeine for weeks.”

  “She hasn’t been eating well,” Derec admitted. He’d been blind not to see how little she’d been eating.

  “What does she have?”

  “We’ll know for sure in a day; we’ve done a culture. But our best guess is amnemonic plague.”

  “Ay … nuhmonic …?”

  “From mediev
al mnemonic, meaning memory. Amnemonic means no memory. It’s a mutation of an old influenza virus, first reported on one of the Settler worlds — sometimes called Burundi’s Fever, after the discoverer.” She looked at him sharply, but clearly that name meant no more to Derec than the first.

  “Will she — get better?”

  Dr Li sighed. “When Burundi crosses the blood-brain barrier, it isn’t good. We’re giving her support — nourishment and so on — and antibiotics that eventually will cure the disease. Our anti-virals are fairly effective, except where the virus has crossed the blood-brain barrier. Antibodies will help a little, and we’re administering them. We’ll be able to stop the infection in all but her brain within a day or two.”

  Derec had the illusion that his chest had turned into a block of wood. His heart pushed once, hard, against its unyielding surroundings, and gave up. He felt it stop moving. “Her … brain?”

  Dr. Li sighed and looked four hundred years old. “There’s hope. It’s by no means over. I do wish we’d gotten at her sooner …. Well, try not to feel guilty; and I’m sorry if I made you feel worse. You couldn’t have known. All kids are heedless, think they’ll live forever ….” She brooded on her capable hands for a moment. “Then you think she’ll live?”

  “Let’s say, I have a good hope of it. Saul — Dr. Morovan — is a specialist on viruses and has treated amnemonic plague three times, twice successfully — and the third time was a patient whose disease had advanced much farther than your wife’s.”

  Derec suspected that the symptoms of the other two had been much less advanced than Ariel’s, but said nothing. It was something, he acknowledged, that they knew the disease, had a cure for it, and had hope for her. Of course, he thought, we were fools — chauvinistic fools — to assume that the Spacer worlds were the only ones that knew anything about medicine. Who but Earth, incubator of virtually every disease known to mankind, would know more about medicine? Among the Spacer worlds, he supposed, amnemonic plague was invariably fatal when it crossed the blood-brain barrier ….

  Derec felt his knees shaking and was glad he wasn’t standing.

  “What?” He’d missed some of what she’d been saying.

  “Need a sample,” she repeated. “We can’t give you the vaccine if you have the disease, at least in its later stages.”

  The Key to Perihelion affected the stomach like this: a sudden drop as one went from gravity to free-fall instantly. Derec nearly threw up. Gulping, he said, “Y-yes, Ma’am,” and held out his arm.

  Disease!

  The possibility had always been there, associating with Ariel. But it was obvious that what she had wasn’t easily contagious. She had only mentioned once, more or less directly, how she had contracted her illness, as a warning to him. But that was the only time they had come close to more than accidental physical contact. Now that he thought about it, she had kept her distance, even when she had clearly wanted and needed to be hugged. His Spacer’s horror of disease had not been as greatly allayed as he had thought, he realized, shaky. The prophylactic treatment R. David had given them had reassured him, Ariel’s attitude and his worry over her had reassured him, and the heedlessness of youth ….

  His eyes must have mirrored some of his horror, for Dr. Li looked at him sharply and said, “Don’t worry! You’re obviously in a very early stage, if you have it at all. And we’re going to give you a thorough going-over, to make sure you aren’t coming down with something else.”

  They did that for the next half hour. The Human Medical Team would have been faster. but no less thorough. he thought.

  “Good, you’re totally free of disease, so far as we can tell,” said Dr. Powell. “Fortunately, your intestinal microorganisms are not markedly different from the Terrestrial strains, and there’s as yet nothing else to worry about. Dr. Li, the vaccine ….”

  “Incidentally, we detected antitoxins to Burundi’s in your system,” said Dr. Li. “You may have had a mild case of the fever earlier; it may even still be latent in your system. However, the vaccine will immunize you totally.”

  “Uh —” said Derec, as a thought took him. “Have I been a carrier all this time?”

  Uneasily, he visualized Ariel and himself spreading disease all over Rockliffe Station, where they had crash landed after escaping the pirate Aranimas. Any human who subsequently entered the station might contract the disease

  “Perhaps, but don’t worry about it. Amnemonic plague is misnamed; it isn’t a true plague. It’s not infectious at all, and only minimally contagious. You have to exchange actual body fluids; it’s commonly passed in sexual intercourse, or in contaminated blood supplies. And occasionally by poorly sterilized hypodermics, out on the Settler worlds where they have to reuse their needles.”

  That was a relief. But it left a puzzle: how had Derec been exposed to the disease, if not from breathing the air around Ariel? Had he had it before he’d met her on Aranimas’s ship?

  He must have. How else had he lost his memory? But how, then, had he survived? If amnemonic plague only affected the memory after passing the blood-brain barrier, and among Spacers was invariably fatal when it did

  Again he had missed something.

  “I said, your wife is almost certainly going to live. Here, catch him!”

  Derec didn’t know who did what; his vision had momentarily blanked. When the light came back, he was sitting and there was a tingle in his arm; a stimulant spray. he thought vaguely. They were proffering a glass of orange juice to him — perfectly normal orange juice, just like the oranges of Aurora. He wondered how much it had cost to ship it here, then realized that they must have bought orange tree seedlings sometime in the past, and raised their own.

  “Thank you,” he whispered.

  They stood around and watched him intently.

  “Is there something?”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Li reluctantly. “I hope you’re up to this. It … may upset you.”

  Derec took another swallow of the juice, marveling again that it could be so exactly like Auroran juice.

  “I’m braced,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  “Amnemonic plague is well-named, though it’s no plague. Your wife is losing her memory, and at a progressive rate. By the time we’ve cured her, there won’t be much of it left.”

  Chapter 10

  THE KEY TO MEMORY

  DEREC LAY ON the hard, narrow bed and wondered what Wolruf and Mandelbrot were doing. Probably still sitting out around Kappa Whale in the Star Seeker, waiting, waiting. Of course, they could not readily get space charts without a human to front for them, though Mandelbrot might try. It would not be unusual for a robot to open communications. But if the other ship insisted on speaking to the owner-captain — Star Seekers were small ships; he couldn’t very well be far from the controls. For that matter, Derec was uncertain how well Mandelbrot could lie in such circumstances.

  Well, there was nothing he could do for them. He couldn’t leave Earth, and if he could, he couldn’t leave Ariel here. And Ariel was now raving in delirium in the section hospital in Webster Groves Sector, City of Saint Louis. A long way, he gathered, from the nearest spaceport, near New York.

  Derec wished for a drink. He wished for a light snack, cookies at least, and fresh hot coffee, even synthetic coffee. In the next room was a robot, ready to spring into action at his slightest word — almost.

  It was an Earthly robot, in an Earthly City. Derec could send R. David out, but there was no assurance it would return — and it would not be with food, for Derec didn’t rate meals in his own apartment. Damn Dr. Avery for not arranging for higher ratings.

  But that would have been more conspicuous, he supposed.

  Light from the door shone across the bed. “Time to arise, Mr. Avery,” said R. David.

  “Yes, thank you, R. David.”

  Derec groaned silently and sat up to sit for a moment with his elbows on his knees, chin in hands. In the short life that he could remember, it had been one crisis after anoth
er. All I want, he decided, is peace and quiet, a little establishment on some mountain brook in the boondocks of Aurora or Nexon, maybe, with just a couple of robots and a landing field only big enough for my own machine and one other.

  Maybe the Solarians had the right idea; they never saw anybody, and lived totally surrounded by robots.

  No, he had decided. That wasn’t such a good idea, after all.

  Earth turned inside out, he thought vaguely. No better than —

  “Mr. Avery, are you well?”

  “Yes, R. David. Merely depressed. I worry about Ariel.”

  That, the robot could well understand.

  “Yes, Mr. Avery. I — also worry about her. But the doctors report her condition good, do they not?”

  “Yes, they did last night, R. David. What she’s like today —” He left it, somber, dressed carelessly, and tucked some equipment into the little bath satchel he had bought the day before.

  Admonishing R. David rather hollowly not to worry, he set off for the Personal, returned to drop off the satchel when he had showered and washed his extra clothing, and departed for the section kitchen. This part of the trip was so routine now that he neither saw nor was seen by the policemen in the corridors and junctions; he no longer stood out like a stranger.

  Breakfast was, as usual, good, but to him, tasteless. Listlessly, Derec ate it, not even interested in a fact he had finally deduced: it was neither synthetic nor natural, but both. It was made of living things and was therefore natural, but was made by an artificial process and was therefore synthetic. The basis of three-quarters of it was yeast.

  He suspected that there might be a steady, if small, market for Earthly food yeasts in the Spacer worlds, if Spacers could overcome their sense of superiority long enough to try it. Granted, Spacer high cuisine had no equal on Earth that Derec had tasted, but Spacer ships were usually furnished with synthesizers.