Final Diagnosis sg-10

by James White

  His parents had made two further wrong assumptions: that he would not climb out of the window because he had never done so before; and that their garden, when eventually he grew bored with it, too, had a childproof fence.

  Beyond the garden fence the world was a very exciting and, although he did not know it at the time, a dangerous place. The whole area had been devastated by a major battle in the civil war that had resulted when the planetary population had risen to overthrow an interstellar government that had fought and lost an interstellar war that the deliberately misguided population had never wanted, even though a great many of them had suffered and died to support it. A few of the ruined houses had been repaired and occupied by off-planet advisors and reconstruction specialists like his parents after the area had been sensor-scanned and any live ordnance or vehicle power packs removed. The broken and rusting remains had been left where they were. Like the ruined houses, they were being overrun by the wild vegetation that was the ultimate winner of every battle and, on this occasion, by one small boy.

  He waded through the long grass that seemed to be everywhere, and wandered happily between the trees and bushes, climbed over broken sections of road paving, and explored one of the ruined buildings. Inside were small, furry animals that ran away from him, and one with a long, thick tail that climbed into the roof beams and scolded him until he went away. He was careful to avoid the occupied houses, because they might not contain people like himself. On the single occasion that his parents had taken him for a walk beyond the garden, they had told him that there were otherspecies families in the neighborhood, and that while they would not deliberately harm him, their young could do unpredictable and possibly dangerous things while playing with other-species children.

  There had been no need to remind him of the time when he was learning to swim in the communal pooi and a Melfan kid of his own age, thinking that he was an amphibian too, had pulled him to the bottom to play. Since then he had been scared of extraterrestrials, regardless of their shape, size, or age, and tried not to go anywhere near them.

  But there were much better places to explore than other people’s gardens, which might have nasty, other-species kids playing in them. Everywhere he looked there were the scattered shapes of armored vehicles showing dark rust amid the sunlit greenery. Some of them looked as if they were not broken and were ready to move any minute; others were lying on their sides, and one had been knocked upside down. Most of them had their doors hanging open, and a few had holes in them that were bigger than the doors, but the edges were sharp and tore his shirt when he tried to crawl inside. He found one that had a gun barrel hanging low enough for him to swing on it. One of its tracks had come off and was lying along the ground like a narrow, rusting carpet with grass and flowers pushing through it. Small animals were hiding in some of the vehicles, but they ran away whenever he climbed in. One of them was filled with the sound of insects, and he knew that he might be stung if he tried to explore that one.

  Then he found one that had no insects or animals inside, and with enough sunlight shining through the open hatches to show a bucket seat facing the vehicle’s control console and screens. The seat was soft and dirty and so big that he had to sit on the edge to reach the control keys. Everything was rusty except for the plastic bits, which were covered with thick, sticky dust. He had to rub the keys with his fingers to see what color they were. Neither the dust nor the rust, which was all over his shirt and trousers by then, nor the dead master screen facing him, made any difference to the battles he was fighting.

  This had been a real fighting machine with a real soldier in it, and in his imagination the screen was filled with bright images of enemy tanks and aircraft that exploded even more brightly as soon as they attacked him, because his was a very special, secret tank and he was invincible. He had heard his father and mother talking about the times when such battles had really happened, but they never thought them exciting or interesting and they acted as if everyone concerned in them were sick or something.

  But now he was shooting at anything he wanted to imagine- dive bombers, attacking spaceships, horrible other-species soldiers coming at him through the trees-and shouting out loud with excitement when he blew them out of the sky or wiped them out as he always did at the last moment. His parents were not there to stop him yelling, or to remind him that the pretend targets he was shooting down had imaginary people inside them, and that it did not matter what kind of horrible monsters he was pretending to shoot at because they were still people.

  Some of their other-species neighbors really were horrible monsters, at least to him, and if any of them had visited the house and found him shooting down things that looked like the visitors, his parents had said, they might take offense and consider the whole Hewlitt family to be less than civilized and not call again. Big peopie never seemed to have any fun.

  Gradually he was running out of imaginary enemies to destroy. The sun was no longer shining into the vehicle, and the rusty metal looked almost black instead of red. It was silly, but he started thinking about the being who had driven the tank, and what would happen to him if it came back and found him playing inside. He climbed out so quickly that he tore his trousers again.

  The sun had gone down below the trees, but the sky was blue and clear and there was still plenty of light. He could not see anything nearby that he wanted to explore, and he was beginning to feel hungry. It was time to go home, sneak back through the window, and ask his mother for something to eat. But he could see nothing but trees and long grass in every direction.

  When he climbed onto the top of the largest vehicle he could find, the view was better. Not far away there was a tall tree standing on the edge of a deep ravine. It had lots of thick, twisting, leafy branches growing close to the ground and nearly all the way to the top, where there was a cluster of bare, thinner branches with fruit hanging from them. From the top he should be able to see his house.

  It was another adventure, he told himself as he began to climb, but this time it was real instead of a pretend one. He was not feeling scared, just hungry and all alone, and he wanted to see where his house was so that he could return and eat and end this game. As he climbed higher he could look down through the branches onto the floor of the ravine, where there were more rusting shapes, including a fat, round one directly below him. Then he climbed up into sunlight and was dazzled so that the inside of the ravine became dark and blurred.

  Still he could not see any houses, because smaller trees instead of long grass were in the way, so he climbed higher. Then two things happened at once: he reached the top of the tree where the clusters of fruit were and he saw his house. The house was closer than he had expected, and between him and it there was a signpost in the shape of a small tree with funny branches on it. But his arms and legs were very tired, he felt hot and thirsty as well as hungry, and the clusters of fruit were hanging just above him, bobbing gently in the wind that was beginning to blow through the high branches.

  At the end of a great adventure, he thought, there should be a reward. The fruit had to be it.

  The branch he was sitting on was thick and strong, and one of its twists took it within reach of a fruit cluster. No longer feeling tired, he crawled along it, gripping the twigs growing from it to hold himself steady. The sun was beginning to go down behind the trees, and below him the lower branches were getting harder to see and the ravine was just a dark green blur. He stopped looking down, because the cluster of fruit above him was almost touching his head.

  When he tried to pull off the first one, it squashed in his hand. With the second one he was more careful and it came away in one piece.

  It looked like a big pear, but none of the pears he had seen in the Earth vegetation tapes had dark green-and-yellow stripes running vertically from the stem to the heavy end. He already knew from the way the first one had squashed that it was full of juice, and this one was so heavy and squishy that it felt like a small balloon filled with water. The juice tha
t had spilled over his hand was drying already and was making it feel nice and cool. He watched the last damp patch on his wrist steaming as it dried off.

  He still felt hungry and wanted to eat something solid, but he was hot as well after his climb and a drink of cold juice would be nice, too, so he held on to the branch with only his legs and took the fruit in both cupped hands.

  The juice had a funny taste, not nice but not nasty, either. Not wanting to make a mess, he bit out a tiny hole with his teeth and sucked the fruit empty. When he used his fingers to widen the hole, the skin split open along one of the green-and-yellow lines and he discovered that it was not empty. As well as the juice there was a soft, yellow spongy mass with black seeds in the center. He spat out the seeds because they burned his tongue, and the rest of it had the same taste as the juice but it helped fill his stomach better.

  He was still not sure whether he liked the fruit or not. While he was trying to make up his mind about eating another one, he felt a pain in his stomach that came and went and grew steadily worse every time.

  For the first time since leaving the house he felt scared and wanted to go home. He began bumping himself backward along the branch toward the main trunk, where he could climb down again, but the stomach pains were so bad that they made him yell out loud, and tears were making it hard for him to see what he was doing. Then one very bad pain made him grab his stomach with both hands, and he felt himself falling sideways. For a moment he hung upside down with his legs still wrapped tightly around the branch, but when he tried to pull himself upright again the pains got so bad that he could think about nothing else. He felt himself falling.

  He saw sunlit leaves whipping past him, then others that were in shadow, and felt branches hitting his back, arms, and legs; then it was dark for a moment and nothing was hitting him. He knew where he was when he hit the steep slope of the ravine and began rolling to the bottom, then all at once his arms, legs, and back were feeling as sore as his stomach. The side of his head and body hit something that broke under his weight, and the pain in his stomach and everything else faded away.

  He wakened to the sound of many voices, two of them belonging to his parents, and with a spotlight shining down onto the floor of the ravine around him. In the beam he could see an adult wearing Monitor Corps uniform and an antigravity belt floating down to him. His parents and some other-species people were scrambling down the slopes using their hands, feet, or whatever. The monitor landed beside him and knelt down.

  “So you’re awake, young man,” he said. “What have you been doing to yourself. But first, where does it hurt?”

  “It doesn’t hurt now,” he replied, pushing a hand against his stomach and then feeling the side of his head. “It doesn’t hurt anywhere.”

  “Good,” said the man. From a satchel hanging from his shoulder he produced a flat instrument with a tiny lighted screen on one side and began moving it slowly across the surface of Hewlitt’s head, limbs, and body.

  “I ate some fruit from that tree up there,” he went on. “It gave me a bad tummy ache and I fell off.”

  “That is a very tall tree,” said the other, in the same tone of voice Hewlitt’s father used when he thought he was being told a very tall story. “Put your hand down again and don’t move until I’ve finished scanning you. Did you fall asleep at any time since the fall?”

  “Yes,” he replied, “but I don’t know how long. The sun was going down when I fell. You woke me up.

  “Out for four, maybe five hours,” said the man in a quiet, worried voice. “When I help you to sit up, tell me if anything hurts, right? I want to do a head scan.”

  This time the scanner was moved very slowly over the front, top, and sides of his head and down to the back of his neck; then the monitor put the instrument back in his satchel and stood up. Before he could speak, Hewlitt’s parents arrived. His mother knelt down and grabbed him so tightly in both arms that he could hardly breathe, and she cried while his dad asked questions.

  “He is a very fortunate young man,” he heard the medic say in a quiet voice. “As you can see, his clothes are cut to ribbons, probably from playing among the war relics and from a long slide down into the ravine, but there isn’t a scratch on him. He told me that he had eaten some fruit from that Pessinith tree up there. He says it gave him stomach cramps and that he fell from it and has been unconscious since before sunset. Now it isn’t my job to argue with an overimaginative child, but look at the facts. The stomach disorder has disappeared; a fall from the top of that tree should have resulted in cuts, abrasions, fractures, and concussion, but his skin isn’t even broken. A four-hour period of unconsciousness should be accompanied by some form of traumatic wounding that I could not have missed.

  “From the state of his clothing,” the monitor went on, “I would guess that he overtired himself playing among the wreckage, and when he climbed down here he simply fell asleep. The stomach ache and his alleged fall could be an appeal for sympathy and an attempt to divert parental wrath.”

  His mother had stopped crying and was asking him if he was really all right, but between her words he could hear his father saying that the wrath would be minimal because they were so glad to find him safe and sound.

  “Children wander off and get lost sometimes,” said the monitor, “and sometimes it doesn’t end so well. We’ll give him a ride home in our gravity sled, but only because he may still be overtired. I’ll call in and check on him again tomorrow, although it really isn’t necessary-he is in fine shape. You have a very healthy young man there, and there isn’t a thing wrong with him…

  The warm feeling of his mother’s arms around him and the sight of the floodlit ravine and the overtalkative monitor medic faded, to be replaced by the familiar surroundings of Ward Seven and another monitor officer who was watching him and saying nothing.

  CHAPTER 8

  He thought I was lying,” said Hewlitt, trying to hide his anger. So did my parents, the few times I tried to tell them about it, and so do you.

  Lieutenant Braithwaite studied him in silence for a moment before he said, “The way you have just told it, I can understand why. He had good medical and anatomical reasons for thinking you were lying and, because most people trust the members of the medical profession, your parents believed him rather than their, well, imaginative four-year-old son. I don’t know what or who to believe, because I wasn’t there and the truth can be a very subjective thing. I believe that you believe you are telling the truth, but that is not the same as me believing you are a liar.”

  “You’re confusing me,” said Hewlitt. “Do you think I’m a liar but don’t want to come straight out and say it?”

  Braithwaite ignored the question and said. “Did you tell your other doctors about the ravine incident?”

  “Yes,” he replied, “but I stopped doing so. None of them were interested in hearing about my lucky escapes. The psychologists thought that it was all my imagination, just like you.”

  “I suppose,” said Braithwaite, smiling, “they asked you whether or not you disliked your parents, and if so, how much? Sorry, but I have to ask, too.”

  “You suppose right,” said Hewlitt, “and you’re wasting your time. Sure there were times when I disliked my parents, when they didn’t do or give me what I wanted or they were too busy to play with me and made me work on school stuff instead. This didn’t happen very often, only when something urgent came up and they were both busy. They were attached to the cultural-contact department in the nearby base, and both of them were in the Monitor Corps but didn’t wear the uniform often because they worked mostly from home. But I wasn’t neglected. My mother was nice and could be coaxed into doing things for me, and my father was harder to fool but was more fun. One or the other was usually at home, and they spent plenty of time with me once I’d done the schoolwork. But I always wanted more time with them. Maybe that was because I knew, somehow, that I was going to lose them and there wasn’t much time left. I really missed them. I stil
l do.

  “Anyway,” he went on, shaking his head in a vain attempt to lose those memories, “your psychological colleagues decided that I had been behaving like a selfish, scheming, and normal four-yearold.”

  Braithwaite nodded and said, “The psychological trauma of losing both parents at the age of four can have long-lasting emotional effects. They were killed in a flyer crash and you survived it. How much can you remember about the accident, and your feelings about it then and now?”

  “I can remember everything,” he replied, wishing that the other would change to a less painful subject. “At the time I didn’t know what was happening, but I found out later that we were flying over a forested area on the way to a weeklong conference in a city on the other side of Etla when there was a major malfunction. We were using the small aircraft flight level, five thousand feet, and there must have been a few minutes before we hit the trees. My mother climbed into the backseat where I was strapped and wrapped herself around me while my father tried to regain control. We hit hard and tree branches pushed through the floor and one side of the fuselage and I passed out. When they found us next day my parents were dead and I was completely unhurt.”

  “You were very lucky,” said the psychologist quietly. “That is, if a kid who had just lost both parents could be considered lucky.”

  Hewlitt did not reply, and after a moment Braithwaite went on, “Let’s go back to the tree you climbed, or believed that you climbed, and the fruit you are supposed to have eaten that gave you the severe stomach cramps. Was there ever a recurrence of those symptoms later, before or after the flyer accident?”

  “Why should I tell you,” said Hewlitt, “when you are thinking that I imagined everything?”