An old Pool comrade of his, a loner, never very successful, had been among those thought to have disappeared in that wretched hole.
She shuddered. "I'll be content if it's just all over."
"Everything but the trials and executions," he assured her.
"One question, Rael," Rip Shannon put in. "Would you have been so quick to go to the Patrol if those two agents hadn't cornered us?"
The Medic looked surprised. "Naturally. I had to report my suspicions to someone. Surplanetary police are usually all right, but an off-worlder can never be sure in a situation like this. On the other hand, corruption's almost nonexistent in the Stellar Patrol, and some of its agents know how to think. Besides," she concluded practically, "Teague says it doesn't hurt any ship to gain the reputation of cooperating with them, as long as she doesn't play the fool about it, that is."
"I wonder if you'd be speaking in such glowing terms about the folks in black and silver if you'd shared our recent experience with them," Alt observed lazily.
"They were only doing their job! Those Company sons who framed you should've been sent to the Lunar mines for attempted murder, but to the Patrol, you were suspected pestilence carriers. They had no choice but to act strongly against you."
"Very magnanimous of you," Kamil commented with the same sleepy sarcasm, "especially when you can do your judging after the fact from a nice, safe distance."
Rael placed her hands palm down on the table. She fixed her attention on them. "It's true that I've never had to go through what you did, but I was part of the real thing."
Her eyes rose once more to briefly meet his before dropping again. Their expression was as somber as the memories she was recalling. "I was still a child at the time. Father had planeted on a pre-mech world and was treating with the inhabitants of one of her chief trading centers when we discovered that some sort of sickness had broken out in the community, in the very section where we were operating, and was slowly but steadily gaining ominous force. We'd been on-world for several days at that point, in daily contact with the inhabitants of the infected region, and our Medic could make no more headway against the disease than could his primitive counterparts. Only one course of action was possible for us, and we took it, even as other-spacers trapped in similar situations have in the past. We couldn't risk carrying an unidentified and as yet incurable, highly contagious, deadly illness back with us into space, so we chose to stay where we were. We couldn't even remove ourselves from the stricken city for fear of bringing the infection to uncontaminated areas of the planet."
Her fingers whitened where they met the table. "What ever our fears at that stage, they paled before the reality that followed. About three hundred thousand people lived and worked in that community when we arrived. Ten months later, one hundred thousand of them were dead, more than eight thousand in a single, awful week. Seven of our crew, including my father, were among them.
"So was our Medic, but he had identified the causative organism, and before he died he gave those people both a cure and a vaccine that stopped the plague as if it had hit a high security wall. The on-worlders realized what we had done for them and recognized that we had chosen both to remain and to work among them despite the proven danger to ourselves. They were grateful, and when Teague took our survivors off-world, it was with the means to buy a fine new ship outright, re-crew with top-rate hands, and fill the holds with prime trade stock."
Her eyes suddenly locked with Kamil's, then moved to fix each of her shipmates sitting or standing opposite her.
"That fact neither softened the horror of those ten months nor clouded the memory of it, no more than any on- worlder living through that time is likely to forget it. The dying and the sickness itself were only part of it. The misery and want were everywhere, the fear, the ever-growing, crushing despair, and with all that, too much, far too much human-nastiness. I was young and a stranger, but even I was aware of rampant filth and evil.
"Never, ever, can a similar scourge be permitted to strike any planet, not while the power or the possibility of preventing it exists. That need holds true and must hold despite the danger of occasionally serving individuals or starships with the gravest injustice."
"I don't think any of us will argue that. Doctor," Miceal Jellico said quietly after several seconds of grim silence. "If our lads had believed us to be plague-stricken in fact, the Solar Queen would've met her end in a star's heart. Spirit of Space! Had I imagined them capable of any other course, that's where I would've sent the Queen myself before I passed out."
Rael smiled. "I know. If I'd doubted that, I'd never have come on board at all."
Jellico shook his head as he watched the woman leave the cabin several minutes later. She would have been young, he thought, probably not much more than eleven, when she had gone through that plague. It would have been a hard experience at any age and explained both her basic gravity and her fascination with mass illness and other disaster situations.
That was no condemnation of her. Every human being reaching adulthood had his defenses and his own way of viewing the universe around him. Those who experienced massive trauma, physical or mental, and who were not shattered by it had made some pretty powerful adaptations to accommodate it, especially when it had been suffered in their vulnerable formative years. The awesome slaughter of the Crater War had shredded Ali's childhood. Somehow, he had lived through that carnage, but it had left him one of life's observers. He would allow nothing to penetrate the armor he had carefully constructed around himself. Rael Cofort had been somewhat older and the deadly situation in which she found herself had been of considerably shorter duration, but even so, she, too, had her facade and, her scars ...
He saw the Cargo-Master start to push out into the corridor. "Van, hold up."
The other waited for him and fell into step beside him. "Quite a story," he remarked.
"Aye."
"You believe it?" Van Rycke asked. "She never mentioned a ship's name or a planet's."
"That can all be checked. The timing'd be right. Cofort appeared as a force on the scene suddenly and very young out of a spacer clan who should never under normal circumstances have been able to finance the setup he created for himself." The rest of his history, of course, was the result of a lot of luck and even more hard work and shrewd dealing, but that early start had often been a source of speculation among the ranks of the Free Traders.
Jellico shrugged, dismissing the question for the time being. "It's Rael herself who interests me at the moment.
You and Thorson'll be checking out the market soon. Take her with you and give her as free a hand as seems prudent.
I want to see what she can do."
"Her brother never or only rarely used her in that capacity," Van Rycke reminded him doubtfully. "From what I saw, she'd choose the goods, but Cofort would trade for them."
"Put it to the test anyway."
Van gave him a curious look. "Why bother?"
He shrugged. "A xenobiologist looking for more data, maybe. Cofort's a puzzle however you try to look at her."
His eyes narrowed. "You and I're both old foxes, but given .all the information she had, would you have reached the same conclusion or come to it as quickly as she did?"
"Not in a star's life span," he admitted.
"That kind of deductive power might prove very handy to a Free Trader—if she can use it for more mundane purposes than uncovering bizarre murder plots."
"It wouldn't do to make a career of that," his companion agreed dryly.