Badge of Infamy by Lester del Rey (easy novels to read txt) 📕

hospital at Southport, so Einstein comes under

the original charter provisions. Dr. Feldman was forced by charter

provisions to protect the good name of his Lobby by undertaking any

necessary surgery in Einstein."

 

He waited until Matthews had scanned that book, then took it back and

began packing a big bag. Doc saw that his possessions and the microscope

were already in the bag. The old man paid no attention to the arguments

of Matthews before the bench.

 

Abruptly Wilson pounded his gavel. "This court finds that Dr. Daniel

Feldman is qualified to practice all the arts and skills of the medical

profession on Mars and that he acted ethically in the performance of his

duties in the case of the deceased Harriet Lynn," he ruled. "The costs

of the case shall be billed to Medical Lobby of Southport."

 

He took off his robe and moved rapidly toward his private quarters.

Court was closed.

 

Doc got up shakily, not daring to believe fully what he had heard. He

started toward Jake, trying to avoid bumping into Chris. But she would

not be avoided. She stood in front of him, screaming accusations and

threats that reminded him of the only fight they'd ever had during their

brief marriage.

 

When she ran down, he finally met her eyes. "You're a helluva doctor,"

he told her harshly. "You spend all your time fighting me when there's a

plague out there that may be worse than any disease we've ever known.

Take a look at what lies under the black specks on your corpses. You'll

find the first Martian disease. And maybe if you begin working on that

now, you can learn to be a real doctor in time to do something about it.

But I doubt it."

 

She fell back from him then. "Research! You've been doing unauthorized

research!"

 

"Prove it," he suggested. "But you'd be a lot smarter to try some

yourself, and to hell with your precious rules."

 

He followed Jake out to the tractor.

 

Surprisingly, the old man was sweating now. He shook his head at Doc's

look, and his grin was uncertain.

 

"Matthews is an incompetent," he said. "They could have had you, Doc.

That charter is so sloppy a man can prove anything by it, and building a

hospital here did bring in Earth rules. Wilson went out on a limb in

letting you go. But I guess we got away with it. Let's get out of here."

 

Doc climbed into the tractor more soberly. They had escaped this time.

But there would be another time, and he was pretty sure that would be

Chris' round. He had no intention of giving up his research.

 

VII (Plague)

 

Dr. Feldman leaned back from his microscope and lighted another bracky

weed. He glanced about the room and sighed wearily. Maybe he'd been

better off when he had no friends and couldn't risk the safety of others

in an effort to do research that was the highest crime on two worlds.

 

The evidence of his work was hidden thirty feet beyond his former

laboratory in Jake's village, with a tunnel that led from another

root-cellar. The theory was the old one that the best place to avoid

discovery was where you had already been discovered. If their spies had

identified his former hangout, they'd never expect to have him set up

research nearby. It was a nice theory, but he wasn't sure of it.

 

Jake looked up from a cot where he'd been watching the improvised

culture incubator. "Stop tearing yourself to bits, Doc. We know the

danger and we're still darned glad to have you here working on this."

 

"I'm trying to put myself together into a whole man," Doc told him. "But

I seem to come out wholly a fool."

 

"Yeah, sure. Sometimes it takes a fool to get things done; wise men wait

too long for the right time. How's the bug hunt?"

 

Doc grunted in disgust and swung back to the microscope. Then he gave up

as his tired eyes refused to focus. "Why don't you people revolt?"

 

"They tried it twice. But they were just a bunch of pariahs shipped here

to live in peonage. They couldn't do much. The first time Earth cut off

shipments and starved them. Next time the villages had the answer to

that but the cities had to fight for Earth or starve, so they whipped

And there's always the threat that Earth could send over unmanned

war rockets loaded with fissionables."

 

"So it's hopeless?"

 

"So nothing! The Lobbies are poisoning themselves, like cutting off

Medical service until they cut themselves out of a job. It's just a

matter of time. Go back to the bugs, Doc."

 

Doc sighed and reached for his notes. "I wish I knew more Martian

history. I've been wondering whether this bug may not have been what

killed off the old Martians. Something had to do it, the way they

disappeared. I wish I knew enough to make an investigation of those

ruins out there."

 

"Durwood!" Jake had propped himself on an elbow, staring at Doc in

surprise.

 

Doc scowled. "Clive Durwood, you mean? The archeologist who dug up what

little we know about the ruins?"

 

"Yeah, before he went back to Earth and started living off his lectures.

He came here again three years ago and dropped dead in Edison on the way

to some other ruins. Heart failure, they called it, though it was more

like the two old farmers who ran themselves to death last month. I saw

him when they buried him. His face looked funny, and I think he had

those little specks, though I may remember wrong." He grimaced. "Mars is

tough, Doc; it has to be. Some of the plant seeds Durwood found in the

ruins grew! Maybe your bugs waited a million years till we came along."

 

"What about the farmers? Did they meet Durwood?"

 

Jake nodded. "Must have. He lived in their village most of the time."

 

Doc went through his notes. He'd asked for reports on all deaths, and he

finally found the account. The two old men had been nervous and fidgety

for weeks. They were twins, living by themselves, and nobody paid much

attention. Then one morning both were seen running wildly in circles.

The village managed to tie them up, but they died of exhaustion shortly

after.

 

It wasn't a pretty picture. The disease might have an incubation period

of nearly fifteen years, judging by the length of time it had taken to

hit Durwood. It must spread from person to person during an early

contagious stage, leaving widening circles behind Durwood and those

first infected. When matured, any other sickness would set it off, with

few symptoms of its own. But without help, it still killed its victims,

apparently driving them madly toward frenzied physical effort.

 

He studied the culture on a slide again. He'd tried Koch's method to get

a pure strain, splattering the bugs onto a native starchy root and

plucking off individual colonies. About twenty specimens had been

treated with every chemical he could find. So far he'd found a few

things that seemed to stop their growth, but nothing that killed them,

except stuff far too harsh to use in living tissue.

 

He had nearly forty cases of deaths that showed symptoms now, and he

went back over them, looking for anything in common that went back ten

to twenty years before death. There were no rashes nor blisters. A few

had had apparent colds, but such were too common to mean anything.

 

Only one thing appeared, about fourteen years before their deaths. The

people interviewed about the victims might be vague about most things,

but they remembered the time when "Jim had the jumping headache."

 

"Jake," Doc called, "what's jumping headache? Most people seem to have

it some time or other, but I haven't run across a case of it."

 

"Sure you have, Doc. Mamie Brander's little girl a few weeks ago. Feels

like your pulse is going to rip your skull off, right here. Can't eat

because chewing drives you crazy. Back of your head, neck and shoulders

swell up for about a week. Then it goes away."

 

Then it goes away--for fourteen years, until it comes back to kill!

 

Doc stared at his charts in sudden horror. It was a new disease--thought

to be some virus, but not considered dangerous. Selznik's migraine,

according to medical usage; you treated it with hot pads and anodyne,

and it went away easily enough.

 

He'd seen hundreds of such cases on Earth. There must be millions who

had been hit by it. The patent-medicine branch of the Lobby had even

brought out something called Nograine to use for self-treatment.

 

"Something important?" Jake wanted to know.

 

Feldman nodded. "How much weight do you swing in other villages, Jake?"

 

"People sort of do me favors when I ask," Jake admitted. "Like swiping

those medical journals from Northport for you, or like Molly Badger

getting that job as maid to spy on Chris Ryan. Name it and I'll do my

best."

 

Doc had a vague idea of village politics, but he had more important

things to think of. Most of his foul mood had disappeared with the clue

he'd stumbled on, and his chief worry now was to clinch the facts.

 

Feldman considered the problem. "I want a report on every case of

jumping headache in every village--who had it, when, and how old they

were. This place first, but every village you can reach. And I'll want

someone to take a letter to Chris Ryan."

 

Jake frowned at that, but went out to issue instructions. Doc sat down

at a battered old typewriter. Writing Chris might do no good, but some

warning had to be gotten through to Earth, where the vast resources of

Medical Lobby could be thrown into the task of finding the cause and

cure of the disease. The connection with Selznik's migraine had to be

reported. If something could blast the Lobby into action, it wouldn't

matter quite so much what they did to him. He wasn't foolish enough to

expect gratitude from them, but he was getting used to the idea that his

days were numbered. The plague was more important than what happened to

him.

 

The letter had been dispatched by the time Jake returned. "Here's the

dope for this village. Everybody accounted for except you."

 

"Never had it, Jake." Feldman went down the list. "Most of it fourteen

years ago. That fits. About the only exceptions are the kids who seem to

get it between the ages of two and three. Eighty-seven out of

ninety-one!"

 

He stared at the figures sickly. Most of the village not only had the

plague but must be near the end of the incubation period. It looked as

if most of the village would be dead before another year passed.

 

"Bad?" Jake asked.

 

"The first symptom of Martian fever."

 

The old man whistled, the lines around his eyes tightening. "Must be

me," he decided. "I'm the guy who must have brought it here, then. I

used to spend a lot of time with Durwood at his diggings!"

 

There was a constant commotion all that day and the next as runners went

out to the villages and came back with reports. The variation from

village to village was only slight. Most of Mars seemed to have advanced

cases of Martian fever.

 

Without animals for investigation and study, real research was

difficult. Doc also needed an electron microscope. He was reasonably

sure that the disease must travel through the nerves, but he had found

no proof beyond the hard lump at the base of the neck. There it was a

fair-sized organism. Elsewhere he could find nothing, until the black

specks developed.

 

His eyes ached from trying to see more than was visible in the

microscope. The tantalizing suggestions of filaments around the nuclei

might be the form of plague that was contagious. They might even be the

true form of the bug, with the bigger cell only a transition stage.

There were a number of diseases that involved complicated changes in the

organisms that caused them. But he couldn't be sure.

 

He finally buried his head in his hands, trying to do by pure thought

what he couldn't