The Tarlan leaned over his bed and opened its mouth. For the first time he saw its very large teeth and felt its breath on his face as it spoke. He felt pleased with himself that he was able to stay in bed and not run terror-stricken up the ward. One could become used to anything in this place.
“I don’t know,” the Padre said. “Anything. Everything. Something that will enable me, as you Earth-humans say, to get my teeth into this problem.”
“Teeth?” said Hewlitt, his eyes still on the other’s open mouth. He forced a laugh and went on, “As a matter of fact I did have some trouble with my teeth. It was when I was a child, on Etla, but it was a minor problem. I was seven years old and the first two of my second set of teeth were beginning to grow and the old ones were refusing to come out. My mouth was painful, but I was more worried about not getting money from the tooth fairy in exchange for the loosened teeth when I left them on my pillow during the night. Do you know about the Earth tooth fairy? I’ll tell you about it later. When the third new tooth pushed up and the old one stayed in place, our dentist lost patience and pulled out all three of the old ones. After that my teeth behaved normally and the money was waiting on the pillow as expected. But I don’t think the tooth business is important.”
“Who knows what is important in your case,” said the Padre, “but in this instance I agree with you. Are there any other unrecorded and possibly unimportant incidents you can remember?”
The longer Hewlitt talked the more he remembered. A few of the minor incidents, he was surprised to discover, had been included in his case history. The rest was a boring catalogue of the usual childhood and teenage skin eruptions and rashes, none of them serious or long-lasting, and the accidentally cut fingers, bumps on the head, and skinned knees sustained at home or in school. His cuts and abrasions had always healed quickly, even when they had looked at first to be serious enough to require sutures.
“I didn’t like doctors when I was young,” he went on, “because they insisted on prescribing medication that made me feel worse instead of better. At first I thought Medalont was going to do the same, but instead it took me off all medication and, apart from the arrest on the first night, there has been no trouble. Shall I go on, Padre? Is this the kind of information you’re looking for?”
“I don’t know what I’m looking for, Patient Hewlitt,” said the Tarlan, “or if I’d recognize it if I found it. But if all you and your many doctors say is true, and taking into account the two inexplicable clinical episodes that have involved you since you came here, there is only one obvious explanation that remains. Naturally it is more obvious to me than to you even though I myself am most reluctant to accept it.”
The Tarlan was leaning so far over the bed that Hewlitt wondered if its bottom-heavy, inherently stable body would overbalance and fall on him. The features were unreadable but its tension could almost be felt.
“Patient Hewlitt,” it said, “are you a member of a religious sect?”
“No,” he said.
“Before they died in the flyer accident,” it went on, leaning even closer, “were your parents or subsequently your grandparents members of such a sect? It may have been very small, probably restricted in numbers because of its inability to proselytize among a largely materialistic population, but it would have been highly moral, intensely devout, and utterly certain in its beliefs. Even though you were very young at the time, did your parents or grandparents, or perhaps a teacher at school, instruct you in the beliefs and disciplines of such a faith?”
“No,” he said again.
“You have not taken enough time to search your memory, said Lioren. “Please do so now.
Its body swayed backward until it was upright again, and Hewlitt was not sure whether the movement signified a relaxation of tension or disappointment.
“I’m sorry, Padre,” he said. “When you mentioned religion to me earlier, and I refused your offer of spiritual consolation, I assumed that you would know that I was not a religious person. Why are you asking so many religious questions? I have never been a believer.”
When it replied, Hewlitt was glad that a hush field was around his bed, because the Padre’s voice would have carried to the other end of the ward. It said, “I am asking them because they must be asked, and because religious beliefs can often have a strong effect on a psychological or medical condition. Mostly I am asking them because of what you did last night.
“As a result of you speaking to Patient Morredeth,” it continued without lowering its voice, “and even though its clinical condition was giving no cause for concern at the time, the patient became emotionally distressed, culminating in severe convulsions. You assisted the duty nurse by restraining the patient while a sedative shot was administered, but by then both of its hearts had arrested. While the activity could never be described as dignified, much less solemn, the process that is called ‘the laying on of hands’ took place.
“When the resuscitation team arrived they were very irritated,” it went on, its voice quieter but not quiet, “because they had been called to the same ward twice in two days on emergencies that had turned out to be false alarms. Thornnastor is completely baffled, a condition rare indeed in the diagnostician-in-charge of Pathology, and has transferred Morredeth to its lab for closer investigation into an incident that is completely without precedent. And Patient Morredeth is happy because its missing and damaged areas of fur have regrown good as new.”
Lioren paused, and an almost plaintive note entered its voice as it said, “To a hospital with the reputation of performing medical miracles routinely, a real one is a major embarrassment. A miraculous cure is, well, disquieting even to me.
“Do you have any other explanation, Patient Hewlitt?”
CHAPTER 15
During the week following Morredeth’s transfer to Pathology, Hewlitt noticed a change in everyone’s behavior toward him, but there was nothing so definite or unpleasant that it warranted a complaint. Senior Physician Medalont’s words to him were few and had nothing to do with his case, Charge Nurse Leethveeschi was almost polite, his Hudlar nurse was friendly but less talkative, and, when he tried to play three-handed scremman with Patients Horrantor and Bowab, it seemed that they had both developed a speech impediment. Everyone around him, to use a phrase much favored by his grandmother, was walking on eggs.
The only being who was willing to talk to him at length was Lioren, whose visits seemed always to end in long, unresolved, and often heated religious arguments that the other, because of his often stated lack of beliefs, preferred to call philosophical debates. Whatever they were, they shortened his days and kept his mind busy far into the intervening nights, and for that he was grateful. Even so, the Padre would not have been his first choice as the most amusing of companions, especially, as now, when it was trying to steer the conversation once again onto the increasingly tiresome subject of what could have happened to Morredeth’s fur.
“When I spoke to Morredeth earlier today,” said the Tarlan, “it told me that Pathology could find nothing wrong with it. There were no signs of a deterioration in its newly regenerated fur and, in its opinion, Thornnastor is running out of reasons for keeping it under observation and must soon allow it to go home. In case it doesn’t see you again, it sends good wishes and thanks for whatever it was you did to cure it…