ever supposed to see was an epidemic of whatever new influenza was going around. He was not supposed to have to be dealing with a plague, at least, not by his way of thinking. Traffic control was supposed to be keeping plague ships from ever coming near the station.
'Thanks for your cooperation, Doctor,' Alex said genially. 'Get that link set up for us, if you would, and we'll leave you to your work.'
The doctor signed off, still without identifying himself, not that Tia was worried. Her recordings were enough for any legal purposes, and at this point, now that he had passed authority on to them, he was a nonentity. They didn't need to talk to him anymore. What they needed was currently incarcerated in an isolation room on that station, and they were going to have to figure out how to get him to talk to them.
'Okay, Alex,' she said when the screen was safely blank. 'You're a lot closer to being an expert on this than I am. How do we get a rock-rat to tell us what we want to know?'
'Hank, my name's Alex,' the brawn said, watching the screen and all the patient-status readouts alongside. 'I'm a brawn from CS, on loan to MedServices; you'll hear another voice in a moment, and that's my brainship, Tia.'
'Hello, Hank,' she said, very glad that she was safely encased in her column with no reactions for Hank to read. Alex was doing a good job of acting; one she knew she would never be able to match. Just looking at Hank made her feel twitchy, shivery, and quite uncomfortable; sensations she hadn't known she could still have. 'I don't know if anyone bothered to tell you, but we were sent out here because there's someone else with what you've got; it's very contagious, and we're trying to keep it from turning into a plague. Will you help us?'
'Give him the straight story,' Alex had said; Kenny had agreed to that when they got hold of him, right after the company doctor had called him. 'There's no point in trying to trick him. If he knows how bad off he is, he just might be willing to cooperate.'
The sores only grew worse when you bandaged them, so Hank was lying in a gel-bed, a big pan full of goo, really, with a waterbed mattress beneath the goo. Right now only the opaque green gel covering him was keeping him from outraging modesty. The gel was a burn-treatment, and something Kenny had come up with for the other man. He was still alive, but no better than when they had left. They still had no idea who or what he was, besides horribly unlucky.
Hank peered up at the screen in the corner of his room, through a face grotesquely swollen and broken out. 'These company goons won't give me any kind of a straight story,' he said hoarsely. 'All they do is try an’ brush me off. How bad off am I?'
'There's no cure,' Alex said, flatly. 'There's one other known victim. The other man is worse than you, and they haven't found anything to reverse his condition. That's the truth.'
Hank cursed helplessly for about four or five minutes straight before he ran out of breath and words. Then he lay back in the gel-bed for another couple of minutes with his eyes closed.
Tia decided to break the silence. 'I don't know how you feel about the rest of the universe, Hank, but, we need to know where you came down with this. If this got loose in any kind of population,'
''S'all right, lady,' he interrupted, eyes still closed. 'You're preachin' to the choir. Ain't no percentage in keeping my mouth shut now.' He sighed, a sound that sounded perilously close to a sob. 'I run across this place by accident, and I ain't sure how I'd find it again, but you guys might be able to. I give you what data I got. I'd surely hate t' see a kid in the shape I'm in right now.'
'Thanks, Hank,' Alex said, with quiet gratitude. 'I wish there was something we could do for you. Can you think of anything you'd like?'
Hank shook his head just a little. 'Tell you what; I got some serious hurt here, an' what they're given me ain't doin' much, 'cause they're 'fraid I'm gonna get hooked. You make these bozos give me all the pain meds I ask for, if I ever get cured up, I'll dry out then. You think you can do that for me?'
'I'll authorize it,' Tia said firmly. At Alex's raised eyebrow, she printed: Kenny's authorizations include patient treatments. We've got that power, and it seems cruel not to give him that much relief.
Alex nodded. 'Okay, Hank, my partner says she can boss the docs here. So, fire away; we're recording. Unless you want something now.'
'Naw. I wanta stay on this planet long enough t' give you what little info I got.' Hank coughed. 'First off, my boat's an old wreck; falls outa hyper all the time, and the recorder don't always work when she takes a dive. Basically, what happened was she fell out, and there was a Terra-type planet not too far from where she dropped. My holds was pretty empty, so I figured I'd see if there was anything around. Registered somethin' that looked like wrecked buildings in one spot, went down t' take a look-see.'
'That was where you caught this thing?' Alex asked.
'I'm gettin' to that. Weren't no signs of life, okay. But there was some buildings there, old and kinda' busted up, round, like them flyin' saucers people used to see. I figgered maybe I'd hit some place where the archies hadn't got to, mebbe I could pick up something I could peddle. I went ahead an' landed, okay? Only I found somethin' that looked like somebody else had been there first. Looked like, I dunno, like somebody'd been collectin' and hoardin' for a long long time, buryin' the stuff in caves by the building, stashin' it in the buildings that wasn't busted up. Some of it was dug up already, some of it somebody'd just started t'dig up.'
